Author Topic: NATION OF BRATS  (Read 2675 times)

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Offline Anonymous

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NATION OF BRATS
« on: February 08, 2004, 05:07:00 PM »
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepubli ... w0208.html

NATION OF BRATS
 
Robert Shaw with Stephanie Wood
Feb. 8, 2004 12:00 AM


What is happening to our children?

Only four years after the massacre at Columbine High School sent a chill through our nation, Time magazine ran a feature story on violent behavior at American schools among 3- to 6-year-olds.

The emergence of such behavior makes it imperative that we recognize that we are in the midst of an ever-worsening crisis in parenting, a crisis that is leading to a plague of uncontrollable, joyless, alienated, disaffected and even violent children.

Children, including those who are considered privileged, are no longer developing empathy, moral commitment and the ability to love. These emotionally stunted children constitute an epidemic that is permeating American life.

Can you go into stores, restaurants or libraries without seeing depressed-looking children sulking, resisting their parents, pulling packages or books off shelves?

Do you notice all the tantrums, all the whining, bickering and pouting going on while parents, in turn, nag, complain or, even worse, try desperately to ignore their unruly, surly child?

As they progress through grade school and into the preteen years, these "epidemic" children often become sullen, disrespectful automatons, staring with deadpan faces at the adults they encounter - teachers, their parents and their parents' friends.

As preteens, many of these children become media-addicted mall habitués, disassociated from their families. Later, many become addicts of promiscuous sex, drugs and alcohol. At the extreme end of these behaviors we have seen the school shooters, the highly destructive hackers, even bands of wildly destructive suburban teenagers vandalizing houses, stealing, setting fires and sexually assaulting their own schoolmates.

This epidemic is the result of both diminished parental involvement in children's lives, and the overly permissive attitudes that have become the trend in families today. Parents have not only forgotten what their children need, but what should be expected from their children.

We have lost the idea that we can and should expect to have children who are engaged, loving, caring, able to learn, play and work. The rejection of parental practices of previous generations has left many parents with little knowledge of the level of social development they can or should expect from their children at various ages.

Parents have been encouraged to think that they are no longer central to their child's emotional development. They are reassured that it's sufficient to place young infants and toddlers in group day care situations, despite research indicating that long periods of early group day care are associated with increased aggressive behavior disorders.

Parents are just too busy to eat family meals, play with their child and engage in intimate chats, quiet times or amiable outings. This deprivation of parental connection interferes with bonding and attachment. Without a strong bonding experience, children do not learn to love or have empathy for others; without this, they have no reason to want to please anyone.

An entire arena of clinical diagnoses has been invented (without any clear neurological evidence for their existence) to explain why our children are without impulse control, are untrained and not socialized. This has led to preposterously large numbers of children with diagnoses of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and bombarded with psychoactive drugs. We pretend we are treating disorders, but in fact we are substituting drug control for parental control.

How could it have happened that so much of the joy of parenting has disappeared? The fun is gone; only duty and effort remain. Parents are frightened of their children, and so afraid of alienating them that in many instances they become peers instead of parents.

Parents have become hesitant in the face of any filial opposition; it is as if it were wrong to expect their children to follow rules and adapt to the family's way of being. Parents are finding it difficult to demand civility and respect. How can they do their job if children make the rules, become the arbiters of what goes and what doesn't? They cannot.

Parents want success for their children at school, in careers, in love and marriage, and with their future families. Humans, however, do not come with built-in directions for adjusting to society. "Humanity" is a learned skill. Our culture has evolved much more rapidly than our nervous system.

Children need to be taught how to function in their particular culture and era, and it is parents who are that instruction manual for their children. Instruction begins at birth, and children are formed by parents in every interaction or non-interaction. When parents are too busy or too inhibited by fear, or fail to give instruction through their suggestions, encouragement, expectations and limits, children will not turn out as most parents would hope. Those children may well be trained instead by peers, gangs or cults.

Here are some of the steps parents can take to ward off this danger to their children:

1) Provide a strong early maternal bonding experience, the provision of which is too often compromised by the limitations of time and lifestyle experienced by families today.

2) Establish yourselves as the lovingly firm authority in the family, beginning in early infancy. Absent and weak parents see their children becoming more argumentative, more surly and contemptuous as they get older.

3) Develop clear rules, limits, and expectations with appropriate consequences when they are not followed.

4) Be clear, consistent, and highly communicative with regard to their emotional responses and their commitment to whatever structure of behavior they expect.

5) Encourage family practices, traditions, and rituals that help develop the feeling of being part of a larger organizational structure, family, community, and planet as well as a sense of having a future. Family meals, religious or spiritual activities, regular times for being together are more important than most of the self improvement activities and courses toward which children are now being pushed. These practices help create a healthy identity for and in children.

6) Protect children from harmful exposure to electronic media. This will require a major effort and a willingness to avoid commonly accepted practices. Advertisers, the producers of children?s TV programs, the purveyors of sleaze, all want your children. Only totally committed parents can protect their child.

Changing the pressures of society will be difficult and time consuming, but every parent can prevent this epidemic from striking their children. Yes, it takes a village to raise a child, but not a village of silent placating adults who stand for nothing. Our discourse must change.

For decades now, studies have confirmed that love, closeness, attention, lovingly-set limits, structure, education, encouragement, routines, are what produce happy, well-adjusted, successful children and, eventually, adults.

Life is frequently frustrating, and the endlessly catered-to child who grows up thinking he/she is the center of the universe is likely to be ill-prepared to function in society.

Is this what we want for our children?

Robert Shaw, a child and family psychiatrist, is the author of "The Epidemic: The Rot of American Culture, Absentee and Permissive Parenting, and the Resultant Plague of Joyless, Selfish Children," with journalist Stephanie Wood.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »

Offline Anonymous

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NATION OF BRATS
« Reply #1 on: February 08, 2004, 05:21:00 PM »
kudo's to the parents that see that they were part of the problem and are now doing something about it in a program for the family.  If it didn't begin back in infancy, the whole family needs help to learn a successful way to undo the already done.   These parents in the program are learning what it takes, big time.  Reading a book is good, but until you can really apply it, it's just knowledge.

I like his suggestions, it's the exact same thing many program parents are doing differently now.  Can you just read this article and all of a sudden change your pattern? A lifelong pattern needs practice to change.  Fantastic for the parents that can read a book and apply it without help in staying the course.
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Offline Anonymous

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NATION OF BRATS
« Reply #2 on: February 08, 2004, 06:08:00 PM »
Well, well, well.  It isn't enough for parents to seek help INDIVIDUALLY for their lousy parenting skills, they have to involve the whole family by institutionalizing one or all of the children so EVERYBODY benefits to the max.  What a crock of shit this is.  Life is not a PROGRAM and your children are not a social experiment. I pity you about as much I do terrorists who commit atrocious crimes in the name of Allah.  This is a sick, twisted excuse for abusing childern in the name of "treatment" and every one of you so-called parents should be terribly ashamed of yourselves.  Get help, but do it with a FAMILY THERAPIST, not some ill-trained, behavior modification zealot laughing all the way to the bank.
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Offline Anonymous

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« Reply #3 on: February 08, 2004, 06:31:00 PM »
If you think most, if not all, of these families haven't gone the family therapy route, think again.  Many of those family therapists have recommended this type of Program.  Psychiatrists won't because their solution is an ADD/ODD or bi-polar diagnosis and are "pill happy."  You obviously don't have first hand experience of the positive results.  

Stephen Covey wrote a wonderful book called The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Families.  Many of those parents also read, but did not apply these habits.  You've gotta have the 'buy in" of the whole family to make it work.  You've gotta have 100% commitment to make it work.  

What's your "solution" and can it be applied in the real everyday life of families in breakdown?
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Offline Anonymous

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« Reply #4 on: February 08, 2004, 06:39:00 PM »
Stephan Covey origanially wrote his book for Mormans with jargon - then decided he could influence the world to their ideas it he wrote it in a more wordly acceptable way.
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Offline Anonymous

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« Reply #5 on: February 08, 2004, 06:44:00 PM »
Quote
On 2004-02-08 15:39:00, Anonymous wrote:

"Stephan Covey origanially wrote his book for Mormans with jargon - then decided he could influence the world to their ideas it he wrote it in a more wordly acceptable way.



"


Now there is one smart Anon!!

::bigsmilebounce::  :nworthy:
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Offline Anonymous

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NATION OF BRATS
« Reply #6 on: February 08, 2004, 06:48:00 PM »
What positive results?  Show me an independent survey/study.  I've already looked.  It does not exist.  Just hundreds of parent testimonials which are not worth the paper they are written on. Come on now, you are going to have to use better tricks than this if you want to sell the public this very expensive (and some would say toxic) brand of snake-oil.
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Offline Anonymous

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« Reply #7 on: February 08, 2004, 07:00:00 PM »
First of all, define BREAKDOWN, Anon.  Then I will respond to your question about solutions.
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Offline spots

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NATION OF BRATS
« Reply #8 on: February 08, 2004, 07:51:00 PM »
Quote

On 2004-02-08 14:21:00, Anonymous wrote:

"kudo's to the parents that see that they were part of the problem and are now doing something about it in a program for the family.  If it didn't begin back in infancy, the whole family needs help to learn a successful way to undo the already done.  
Quote


Family?  Family?  I'm pretty sick of hearing about how the Program works for the whole family.  Who do you think is family?  Is it the single parent, maybe a new step-parent, perhaps a sibling or two still living at home, and the dog?  Family is parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, siblings grown up.  If the Program were for the whole family, how come no kid gets to write or receive mail freely with family?  [And don't tell me mail is uncensored, because I know without a doubt that it is.]  How come family doesn't get to sit down and talk with the kid until the kid has performed/buckled under to a thousand inane rules like silence and direction of eye gaze?  How come the first face-to-face, where the family can finally work together after well over six months or more, requires the family (not siblings, et al) to gather at the facility site, maybe thousands of miles away, not to talk freely, but to participate in yet another canned seminar called PC1? How come, if the family is "working together", does WWASPS publish a Siblings Manual (http://www2.netdoor.com/~ssl/~ssl/Sibling%20Manual.htm) to help kids understand why their former housemate is shipped off, held incommunicado by strangers, the object of Mom's frequent trips out-of-town to seminars, the brother or sister to whom the remaining family at home points as The Problem that is wrecking our lives?

Family could be broadened to include community, church, government, but for now, don't tell me that the Program works with the whole family.  The Program works to divide the family, because that is the only way they can remove all support and speed up the indoctrination process of both children and parents.  The Program can't fool all of the people, but they sure as hell can fool some of the people...and the important ones to the Program are the fools who pay a lot of money on the promise that "the familiy's" failure to parent can be set to rights by handing over their child and attending group rah-rah parties.

Don't think for a minute that this is just about your insular little family, Parent.  You'll be amazed when your kid gets home, or spends a few years realizing what you have done to him.  You'll be a Old Geezer, working with your therapist, trying to get help because your child is distant, aloof, or totally absent, your other children distrust you, your neighbors think you're weird, and the ladies in the bridge club no longer talk to you after you spouted about your "solution" to your teen's difficult adolescent.  Christmas alone, no birthday cards, grandchildren who don't recognize you...  Ask the Program how they intend to work on that family problem together.
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Offline Anonymous

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NATION OF BRATS
« Reply #9 on: February 08, 2004, 09:27:00 PM »
Quote
On 2004-02-08 14:21:00, Anonymous wrote:

"kudo's to the parents that see that they were part of the problem and are now doing something about it in a program for the family.  If it didn't begin back in infancy, the whole family needs help to learn a successful way to undo the already done.   These parents in the program are learning what it takes, big time.  Reading a book is good, but until you can really apply it, it's just knowledge.



I like his suggestions, it's the exact same thing many program parents are doing differently now.  Can you just read this article and all of a sudden change your pattern? A lifelong pattern needs practice to change.  Fantastic for the parents that can read a book and apply it without help in staying the course.



"


Institutionalizing a child is no way to rebuild family attachments.  

Instead, it's a symptom of the problem, "I want it fixed, I want it fixed now, I want it fixed in the least inconvenient (for me) way, and Money's No Object!"

Family therapy can help if the parents want to change, but involuntarily institutionalizing a child for things that wouldn't justify involuntary commitment of an adult is a *FAILURE* of attachment, and yet another attempt to substitute MONEY for personal engagement in an attached, intimate relationship.

These parents are throwing away their children, and they're using money to make it legal and to add a figleaf of social acceptability and provide themselves a rationalization that lets them feel like they're not being as incredibly irresponsible as they in fact ARE.

And, of course, things like "seminars" let them get away with being Drama Queens and focus on how *awful* it is for them that their child is not perfect.  And since everybody else at the seminar has *also* gotten rid of an inconvenient child by institutionalizing it, they can commiserate and tell each other that they're all doing the right thing.

Kinda like NAMBLA, eh?
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Offline Anonymous

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NATION OF BRATS
« Reply #10 on: February 08, 2004, 09:37:00 PM »
It's too simple to blame the parents in all the cases.  I agree with the article, but what about parents that seem to be doing everything right, stay at home mom,involvement in school, sports, homework, family dinner, church, etc., and still has a teen that is not just being a normal testy teen, but on a death wish? The article is an enticer in a way.  Buy his book and get fixed.
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Offline Anonymous

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« Reply #11 on: February 08, 2004, 09:37:00 PM »
Quote
On 2004-02-08 15:31:00, Anonymous wrote:

"If you think most, if not all, of these families haven't gone the family therapy route, think again.  Many of those family therapists have recommended this type of Program.  Psychiatrists won't because their solution is an ADD/ODD or bi-polar diagnosis and are "pill happy."  You obviously don't have first hand experience of the positive results.  



Stephen Covey wrote a wonderful book called The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Families.  Many of those parents also read, but did not apply these habits.  You've gotta have the 'buy in" of the whole family to make it work.  You've gotta have 100% commitment to make it work.  



What's your "solution" and can it be applied in the real everyday life of families in breakdown? "


Bipolar disorder is genetic you frickin' MORON.  You can't fix it by talking to the person who's got it, or programizing them, or anything *but* properly medicating them, and if you are stupid enough to think you can then you should have the government step in and take your kid or make you medicate your kid just like they give kids who need them transfusions regardless of what the idiotic fruitloop Christian Science parents think.

ADD/ODD may or may not be something the patient can manage without medication.

Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are the really big major mental illnesses that are *only* responsibly treated with pills.

You fucking irresponsible IDIOT!!!  Bipolars, left unmedicated, can go psychotic and KILL PEOPLE!!!!

Not medicating a bipolar with PILLS is Fucking Dangerous to the bipolar and everyone around him or her.

You're not just a motherfucking fool, you're a DANGEROUS motherfucking fool.

YOU are the reason TBS's need government control and strict oversight.  Medicating a bipolar kid as "pill happy" indeed.  Fucking moron.
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Offline Anonymous

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« Reply #12 on: February 08, 2004, 09:41:00 PM »
Yes, bi-polar absolutely needs medication, but how many kids are misdiagnosed at the age of 8 with bi-polar.  This is moronic.  If a kid truly is bi-polar the programs do help them with the behavioral highs and lows and have regular med checks, which is extremely important.  Many kids have been mis-diagnosed as being bi-polar at a tender young age, that what that statement was about.
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Offline Anonymous

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« Reply #13 on: February 08, 2004, 09:57:00 PM »
Quote
On 2004-02-08 18:37:00, Anonymous wrote:

"It's too simple to blame the parents in all the cases.  I agree with the article, but what about parents that seem to be doing everything right, stay at home mom,involvement in school, sports, homework, family dinner, church, etc., and still has a teen that is not just being a normal testy teen, but on a death wish? The article is an enticer in a way.  Buy his book and get fixed.   "


If the home environment is sound and the teen is still loopy--beyond normal teenageness----then he/she may be mentally ill and need CBT or, if that is inappropriate to the diagnosis or doesn't fix the problem, medication.

The teen, if he/she is dangerous to self or others, may need to be hospitalized for just long enough to get him/her stabilized on medication, and outpatient treatment thereafter.

There are no controlled, independent, scientific studies indicating that programs are any better then placebos at treating serious mental health problems.

There *are* controlled, independent, scientific studies supporting a course of CBT as effective in treating depression and some anxiety-based problems.
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Offline Anonymous

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« Reply #14 on: February 08, 2004, 10:18:00 PM »
Quote
On 2004-02-08 18:41:00, Anonymous wrote:

"Yes, bi-polar absolutely needs medication, but how many kids are misdiagnosed at the age of 8 with bi-polar.  This is moronic.  If a kid truly is bi-polar the programs do help them with the behavioral highs and lows and have regular med checks, which is extremely important.  Many kids have been mis-diagnosed as being bi-polar at a tender young age, that what that statement was about.    "


I've seen a *lot* of false negatives on bipolar diagnoses---the doctor sees the patient and thinks he's looking at something other than bipolar disorder for a long time until he finally sees a manic or hypomanic episode.

I've *never* seen a false positive diagnosis of bipolar disorder.  It's genetic.  If you have it at thirty, you had it at eight---it just wasn't recognized.

The reason psychiatrists are diagnosing bipolar disorder earlier is that more and more family and long-term data is available to assist them in knowing it when they see it in younger patients.

The reason it's important to medicate even young bipolars is because a growing body of evidence indicates that manic episodes do actual brain damage and worsen the disease in the patient---medicating the disease not only suppresses the symptoms, it prevents the condition from worsening.

If a kid has bipolar disorder, he/she should be medicated properly so that there *are* no highs and lows.  If there are highs and lows, you call the doctor and he calls you back and adjusts your dose accordingly.

Inpatient treatment is NOT necessary merely to feed a bipolar patient his or her pills.

Mentally ill adults have the legal *right* to have their mental illness treated in the least restrictive setting that can provide effective treatment.

Institutionalizing a child for an illness that could be dealt with effectively in a less restrictive setting may, for now, be legal, but it's also absolutely immoral, unethical, and abusive.

There's no reason on earth to stick a bipolar who's stable on medication in an institution somewhere.  It's a waste of money, and a vile waste of the child's childhood.

I do believe in Outpatient Commitment, where a patient who won't take his or her medication is involuntarily committed and restabilized and released until and unless he/she goes off his/her medication again.  If the patient is habitually resistant to taking his/her medication, I do believe in inpatient commitment for that patient.

For bipolar teens stable on medication, institutionalization is unnecessary.

For bipolar teens who *need* inpatient treatment to stabilize them, I've seen *nothing* from the various programs to indicate their competence to be the facilities providing that treatment.

If *my* child needed inpatient care to stabilize her in such a situation, I would not trust anything but a *real* mental hospital or ward of a  *real* hospital.  

I certainly wouldn't trust any facility that also accepted kids whose problems were on the order of shoplifting, screwing around, smoking pot, skipping school, or vandalism.

Delinquents, nuts, and delinquents who are also nuts belong in separate facilities.  A facility that tries to be all things to all people is unlikely to be providing appropriate care to any of them.
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