We seem to have strayed from the topic at hand which was:
Why Are Struggling Parents Such An Easy Mark?
I want to return to it. I decided to ask some other experts in the field of teen development and queried my bowling buddies. These guys have all been married since I was wearing diapers and have grown children and/or teens of their own. It took me a long time to convince them that teen escorts actually existed. They were aghast and said things like, "No way can that be legal!" and "Not in this country!" One suggested he'd like to find a program for his wife.
After getting through this initial astonishment, I turned to the topic above and asked them the same question. The result was interesting and amusing.
Dual income families are to blame. Yup. That is what the group concluded. Here was their reasoning:
It used to be that families raised their own children. When the economy went south and women were liberated (funny how this happened at the same time), people had to find childcare outside the home. Since the extended family had long been in decline and the grandparents were in nursing homes instead of the traditional extended family farmhouse, the dual income couple had to buy their childcare from businesses. They needed the dual income to pay for both the nursing home and the day care.
This set up a situation where kids are now raised by institutions instead of families.
As the economy got worse and the workday became longer, after school programs stepped in further removing the parents from the kids. We are now at a point where parents pick up their children, drive them home, give them a bath and put them to bed. Sometimes they forget their kids names. Sometimes, they accidentally take home someone else's kids and have to exchange them the following day. One father, so obsessed with work, forgot to drop his kid off at daycare and left him the car all day (this is sadly a true story). The child cooked to death.
When the institutionally raised, unempathethic child starts to rebel from the absentee parents, as all teens do, the parents simply do what they always have done. They hire an institution to take care of the child. Because they never really were parents, they do not know any other way. These wealthy, hard working, corporate ladder climbers are too busy with their portfolios and their careers to really check into what is going on in with the kids. They also get bragging rights about sending the kids to boarding school just like the wealthy, old-money New England set. And, it gets the little fuckers out of the way.
"Either that," as one 74-year-old (whose son is a policeman and daughter is serving in Iraq) said, "or they are just plain stupid!"
So I asked them the $64,000 question. "What should a struggling parent do when their teen is so out of control that the parents feel that the teen's life is in danger and so are the siblings' lives and so are the parents' lives?" I took a deep breath.
After they stopped laughing, they made remarks like; "Isn't every teenager's life in danger." and "It's amazing any of us survived the stunts we pulled as teenagers."
A 61-year-old confessed. He said his son smoked pot and drank and constantly broke curfew. I asked him, "What did you do?" He said he never gave his son keys to the car or the house, ever. So, when his son broke curfew, he would lock up the house. The boy had to ring the doorbell to wake Dad up and let him in. The father would go to the door, smell his breath, check for red eyes, and demand a convincing explanation as to why he could not make it home. If the explanation was not good enough, he told the boy, "I hope you enjoy staying at at a friend's tonight." He closed the door. Once, his son, in a fit of adolescent rage at not being allowed in, threw a rock through the living room window. The father called the police. The boy spent the night in juvenile hall. The father picked him up the next day and dropped the charges. The son never broke curfew again. He did, however, continue to smoke pot and drink once in a while. As the father said, "Didn't we all?" We raised our beers and drank.
I asked, "What if your teenager is having sex?" The quick response was, "Show me a teenager not having sex and I'll show you an ugly teenager." Some said they would assist in getting the teen started. Ooookaaay...
I asked them directly what they thought of such programs. Most shrugged. One man muttered, "So that's how they turn kids into Republicans." Another said, "It's a great scam! You run a cult and don't have to recruit. Parents pay you to take their kids and make them members! Why didn't I think of it?"
Then we thought of an even better scam. We would open our own facility. But instead of tough-love, we'd just keep the kids high and happy all the time and send letters to their parents like:
Dear Programmed Parent,
Your child has not yet progressed enough to allow us to let you speak to them or see them. They are making good progress, though, and we feel your child deserves a reward. We suggest you send an iPod or xBox to show your kid how much you really care and encourage further progress. By the way, your child needs new sneakers. In order to instill a good sense of self-esteem and enforce the requirement that our students be well dressed and behaved, we would like you to send a new pair of expensive Nike's in your child's size (or just send the money and we will buy them). If you wish to make a further donation to refurbish the basketball court, it would be greatly appreciated by the children and staff.
Keep in mind that any attempt to contact your child will harm his or her progress and almost certainly lead to death, arrest, or drug addiction. We will keep you fully informed of your little darling's progress.
Sincerely,
Your child's Therapist.
If a suspicious parent tried to get their kid back, we would meet them at the door, hand the kid over, and never let the parents come inside. If they noticed that their child was high, drunk, and perhaps pregnant, we would inform them that the little brat never worked the program and we were going to kick them out, anyway.
We would hold group therapy sessions where the kids would be required to confess every dirty secret they knew about their parents (for potential blackmail income), and everything they hate about parents, school, society, authority, Britney Spears, whatever. This would be greatly entertaining and therapeutic for everyone involved.
Once a month we would have each student pack their dirty laundry and ship it home for the parents to wash, dry and return neatly folded. We would explain to the parents that this practice is to remind them that they are ultimately responsible for the care and upbringing of their kids. Failure to comply will result in being sued for child abandonment.
We would require the parents to send an allowance to the kids so they could learn the value of managing money and gain self-esteem by taking control over their own finances. We would, of course, skim a percentage. And we would set up a store to sell the kids stuff kids want.
My bowling buddies went on like this for awhile, but then wives began calling. Eye lids began drooping and we realized it was time to go home.
