Fornits
Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform => The Troubled Teen Industry => Topic started by: Anonymous on January 26, 2006, 01:45:00 PM
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The hard, sad truth is that these troubled parents are taken in by a scam to the extreme detriment of their children.
A good family court judge would remove these children from their parents' custody and place them in foster care until they reach majority.
Most family court judges are woefully uninformed, and a partial solution might be to educate family court judges to first order the child produced in person in court, and then remove the child to foster care for his or her own protection.
In the case of children who have come to the attention of the court for juvenile offenses, an informed court acting in the best interests of the child, as is their job, would either place the child in traditional juvenile hall *or* if the offense isn't that serious, place the child in foster care and require community service and ongoing supervision.
In the case of children who have serious mental illnesses, the judge needs to tell the parent that either they use options available with the child living at home or they place the child in an RTC that uses the medical model to treat the child's mental illness.
In the case of children who, in foster care, cannot pass random drug tests of highly addictive hard drugs, the state needs to attempt to get the kid into traditional rehab of three months or less, either at state expense or allowing the parents to pay for a private traditional rehab facility. Traditional = either education model or 12-step.
I don't personally believe in 12-step, but at least substituting meeting and religious fervor for drugs doesn't appear to do harm and can put a "patch" on the problem for long enough for the kid to grow out of it.
These kids parents, however, are demonstrably not able to rationally evaluate and act in the best interests of the child. The proof is in the pudding---the best studies show the facilities are at best neutral and frequently do serious harm to the children placed in them.
Too bad we can't make an effort to educate family court judges about this issue and get them to start removing these kids.
Too bad we can't get a (good) program going of getting those of us who know what's going on in these facilities, are properly horrified, and would meet the standards for decent foster parents to work with our home states to offer foster homes to teens removed from the "care" of troubled parents.
For a lot of these kids, there are parents in the community who would gladly act as foster parents for the child if the state treated them as part of the normal foster care system and helped defray their costs.
I also think parents who have children removed from the home for abuse or neglect should have to pay child support into the system for their child.
I would class placement of a child in a BM facility as neglect rather than abuse. If you paid an incompetent or abusive babysitter, that you should have known was incompetent or abusive, $100 an hour to watch your kid, just the amount of money you paid doesn't keep you from being a neglectful parent.
If you send your kid to live with Michael Jackson and pay him $60k a year to watch your kid, you ought to lose custody---how much you pay him doesn't really matter. Whether you thought you were doing a good thing buying the kid music and dancing lessons doesn't really matter. What matters is that you should have known, and a reasonable parent would have known, that this was a very bad idea.
Reasonable parents don't put their kids, even if the kid is a very wild child, into BM facilities. All sorts of parents in my high school--their kids ran the gamut from a few super goody two shoes, to the vast majority of fair to middling kids, to the super wild child kids.
The parents of the super wild child kids did not use these facilities. We had parents who talked about sending their kid to military school, but none of them did it, even if their kid got expelled or pregnant or quit school.
A few kids died in drunk driving accidents. They weren't the uber-wild-child kids, they were fair to middling kids who screwed up that night.
The uber-wild-child kids mostly just ended up poor and in lower-paid working-class jobs. That's only a disaster if you're a super-yuppie who views driving a 1990 Buick instead of a Lexus with absolute horror.
Other than sex with a long-term boyfriend, I was a goody two shoes. I ended up "insane"---but I was already "insane" by the time I left elementary school, it's genetic, and so the hell what?
Very few ended up dead, very few ended up insane, and even the vast majority of people who spend some time in jail don't "end up" in jail. I guess some of the people from my high school class must have done time for something, but to my knowledge none of them committed murder---which is the kind of thing you have to do to "end up" in jail.
A friend of mine from rural Georgia has a brother who's a convicted felon. For what, I don't know. His brother has been out for a long time and is not rich, but is basically living his life. He hasn't been the poster child for who you want your baby to be, but he hasn't "ended up" anywhere yet. He's out, he's got a job and pays his bills and is living his life.
Most of the people I've known of whose lives really sucked were alcoholics. If you're an alcoholic, it doesn't matter a damn whether you're a drunk in high school or a drunk in your twenties or a drunk in your forties. When you're drinking, your life sucks. Getting an alcoholic kid sober in high school doesn't help. A drunk of any age is a drunk. A drunk has to decide on his or her own to stop drinking, or he'll never make it in life.
I had a good friend who was a drunk and stopped drinking. After a while, he started back occasionally having a beer, and he held it to that. He never ended up being a get-trashed-drinking drunk again. He died in a car crash that was the other driver's fault, but he ended up having a fair to middling life after he stopped drinking.
Another good friend who was a drunk didn't die from the drink, he died from the lung cancer from the cigarettes. He cut his drinking from drunk down to functional when he got his ass out of a bad marriage. He ended up with a lovely wife, raising a son any good parent would be proud of, but dying young from smoking.
Two family members with drinking problems chose on their own, as adults, to get sober and have decent lives, married, pair of great kids.
The overwhelming majority of people don't "end up" anything but poor from making bad decisions in high school. A step-down of the next generation of your family from yuppie class to working class is a very bad reason to institutionalize a teenager.
The middle class to lower upper class parents who use these facilities are a pack of snobs whose secret horror is generational downward class mobility.
Their kid might "end up" in a crappy apartment, taking public transit to work at Wal Mart. Oh, horrors!
They say they're afraid of deadinsaneorinjail. They're really afraid of Wal Mart, UPS, or a convenience store.
Buncha whiners. Wah.
Julie
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:nworthy:
Great post, spot on analysis IMHO.
PS: UPS is not a bad job at all, their waiting list is years! They pay quite well, and who doesn't like the uniform? :smile: