Shanlea, I was pretty sure that I answered other people a couple of times already, in terms of what I liked specifically about CEDU.
I checked back into my posts and found two addressing this question:
One is under the topic "How about this theory" and is a response to Antigen on 8/19/04 18:11, entitled "Antigen, do you have no sense of humor at all???". The other, longer, response (because the poster addressing me seemed more sincere) was on the topic "My Intentions" and was addressed to Cypress under the title "To Cypress, what I like about CEDU" on 7/28/04, 22:55:00.
Antigen tried a little while ago to tell me to do something with the URL to bring these two posts up and post them again currently, but I guess I am just not a computer person (there's a surprise for you) because when I attempted to follow her instructions nothing happened. However, it isn't very difficult to just search for these posts if you are at all interested.
In addition, I will try to recapitulate in this post what I liked about CEDU.
1) I liked the fact that a boarding school allows the child to be removed from the negative patterns that are controlling his/her life. By that I mean that some kids get into groups of friends, habits, interactions with parents, etc., that are fulfilling a need for the child. Even though it may be a pretty negative, self-destructive need, the habitual nature of the behaviors make them very hard to break.
It also has to said that if parents had been more attentive to the kid's emotional needs up to that point, maybe something could have been done to stop things from going down-hill--but once that point has been reached where the kid is off and running, removal to a safe environment, isolated from the various cues to the problem behaviors, seems to me to be the best alternative.
Obviously, if you can reason with the kid, and change behavior that way, you would do it--I am talking about kids who are not open to reasonable discussion and who are self-endangering.
The idea of having some kind of dress code or a certain hair-cut or no make-up is all about breaking patterns of behavior. If you are the kind of parent (Antigen, for example) who thinks that it's OK for a kid be dangerously self-destructive, of course, you are going to out-raged that a school and its procedures stood in the way of such "self-expression"--I just don't believe that and I never will.
2)I think that the isolation in Idaho was really important for us. If it had been a city, my son would surely have run away. But it was more than the isolation in geographical terms, it was about being isolated from all the negative things that he was using to hide from his own problems and ours, and to refuse to feel--the clothes, the music (which would have been completely innocuous if he had been thinking in a more self-loving way), generally the distractions from doing what he needed to be doing to face his challenges and go on.
It is true that it would have been preferable to sit down and discuss these things person-to-person, the fact was that he had absolutely no interest in that.
3) Other people reporting here may not have had the same experience, but I loved the parent reps who I dealt with at RMA--they didn't lie to me, and thier predictions about what was going on with my son were pretty much right on target. They were reasonable, flexible and intelligent. It was only after my son had graduated from RMA that I found out that my favorite parent contact person had actually lost her only child to cancer a couple of years previously--yet she could be so giving and up-beat about how my son was doing.
You can say all day long that it was all about money--these were good people doing good work and so what if they got paid, I just wish that they had been paid more. And I will always be grateful to them for their balance, their kindness, and their wisdom.
4)I really enjoyed the parent workshops and seminars. In them, I learned a lot about my son and about myself, in terms of emotion and connection with others. We are having a parent reunion next spring and I really look forward to seeing how any number of people are doing.
I was at the last advanced workshop offered by Mel Wasserman, and although he was a very tough person, he did a wonderful job. Working with him changed me as a parent and as person. I saw others who were also profoundly changed. For example, I saw one woman who had been on medication for depression for years, who was able to get off it after that workshop. I saw a couple who were about to be divorced, who re-thought their decision, and who are happily together today. After that workshop, I could suddenly draw and paint, something that I had not been able to do since I was a young child. The exercises and discussions were central to opening people up to the possibility of change and growth and they worked. But to work it was necessary to get through defenses against change--that is the reason that sometimes confrontation is necessary.
I credit the experiential nature of the workshops with the positive things that I saw and which I wemt through. I also thought that the confrontory style was helpful in the process.
I am sure that someone will point out that our experience as parents was different than the kids' experiences. This is true although at least in my experience, the workshops were a lot more painful than people here seem to think--we were definitely not treated with kid-gloves, and most people were at one time or another at the point of tears or openly crying. But what seemed clear to me was that the sadness and pain was for a purpose, a purpose of growth and future happiness. This seems to parallel what the student program meant to the students I know who are grateful for having been there.
5) My son and others tell me that the Propheets paralleled a lot of what I saw in the workshops. These graduates tell me that they liked the Propheets (several have called them the best part of the program) because they used emotion to get through peoples' defenses against change and growth. It was in one of these Propheets that my son realized that the kids at home that were his drug-using buddies were not real friends, and when he faced that, real change started to happen for him.
Now, again, if the very best thing that you can think of for a 15 year-old to do is to sit around getting high, well, I suppose that you would find a program that pushed an alternative view to be just awful.
6) Based on what my son and others tell me, I liked the work details in the program, the Big Brother aspect so that younger kids have a mentor in the program. I like the structure that allows students to earn or lose privileges.
I also think that the raps are necessary in order to get at the emotional issues behind the behaviors, although I don't know of anyone who really liked them, most people I know think that they are a necessary part of the whole thing.
When I asked one graduate what he would change about the program, he thought for a while and talked about things that he hadn't liked or needed, and then he said that he wouldn't change one thing because you needed to have all the parts to have a coherent whole and because different parts of the program reached different people.
Here is how I see the program. When a kid is out of control, parents can argue and reason forever, and the kid's attitude is not likely to change. Basically, it is impossible at that point to get real sustained attention from the kid, because as part of the path of ignoring his or her pain, the kid is ignoring the parents.
Now, going into a boarding school like RMA does a number of things. First of all, it gets the kid's attention. Secondly, the program does not waste time at the beginning in doing the impossible, that is, changing the kid's attitude.
It focuses on the kid's actions, they have to dress and act a certain way. And the idea behind the program is that, over time and with emotional growth, attitude will follow actions, as the kid starts to see the value of acting a certain way. It's sort of like the Elaboration Likelihood model in social psychology and represents a multi-step, multi-path mechanism of attitude change, that really only lasts permanently when the kid comes to believe in the underlying goals of the emotional growth curriculuum.
Why is the whole program such a failure for some people, like you, for instance? I don't have the full answer to this. It sound to me as if CEDU has sometimes let in kids who have problems that are bigger than the program can deal with. For example, kids with low ego strength might be devestated by the raps. Maybe some kids were sent there who did not belong and they are still angry about it, perhaps some people take things harder than others, perhaps some people have faced a less ideal experience than others.
Also, it sounds to me as if my son's experience with caring staff was not universal. I think that a real relationship with at least one staff member is crucial. If what is reported here is true (and I believe a lot of it is) the staff has not always acted in a balanced, caring, as well as a confrontative way. Even now, when I ask some of the kids who graduated from RMA about their experiences in raps and Propheets, none of them describe the kind of unkindness or extreme remarks that are reported here, suggesting that CEDU education has not always been the same in different schools and at different times.
The way that I look at the program is that it is part behavior modification, but it is the emotional growth/ experiential learning part that brings about lasting change, when the kid comes to see why he or she was doing self-destructive things and decides to have enough love of self to stop and to hope for something better.
If you are really interested in other ideas that I have about the CEDU programs you might look at the other posts that I cited at the beginning of this post.
I don't think it's about these details though, I think that some people who post here really believe that minor children should get to use drugs and be generally self-destructive if they want to. I don't believe that and I never will.
I don't know the reason why some posters feel this way, maybe drugs play a big part in their lives, maybe they are playing out some resentment of authority because of happenings, just or unjust in their own upbringings. What I do know is that I would be a failure as a parent if I let my minor child throw away the future for the sake of various ill-considered whims and vices, without the interest or the ability to consider the consequences.
An early day tomorrow, so that is all for now, as I say, look at the earlier posts if you are interested, there may be other details that I have left out of this one.
