Hi. I'm a generic parent.
My kid does not have substance abuse problems, but is otherwise causing all kinds of trouble at home. He/she is fucking everything that walks / cutting his/herself. He/she is throwing things around the house, getting kicked out of school, flunking out of courses, otherwise generically raising hell. He/she is depressed also, has ADHD, anxiety, and a host of other things programs promise to fix.
Other than a program... What can i do?
I'm going to presume you're not trolling and it's a serious question.
Our foster daughter has some similar issues, which I am not going to list for the sake of her privacy.
What we are doing is taking her to a good psychiatrist to treat mental health issues, and a good therapist to work on day to day behavioral function and coping skills.
We have brought everybody from her bio mom to her adult friends on board to make sure that the rules are the same no matter where she goes. It matters that a kid who's going through a rough time not have a place to get away from
reasonable rules. We don't do like the Programs and put stupid rules on just to get her used to knee jerk following of rules.
It's like dealing with a toddler---just like it. Anticipate and outmaneuver.
You figure out the payoff behind the behaviors, and you make sure you keep the bad behaviors from being rewarded. Then reward what you want to see again.
You totally ignore the cutting. Tell him you know cutters do it to release anxiety and if he has to cut, to please clean up after himself. Treat the anxiety and the cutting will eventually go away. Meanwhile, ignore it unless a cut gets infected, then get it treated.
Do Not let cutting be some kind of way for him to tell you when he's upset. Be blithe about it. You don't want to add an extra payoff over and above the anxiety relief.
Ignore the schooling--he's doing it
partly to get attention and you don't want to reward it.
Give him attention for good behavior, not bad.
The worst that can happen with the schooling is that it's up to him to take his GED and make up for lost time later. If you're worried about loss of education beyond GED level that's in a high school diploma, by all accounts that happens anyway in a Program. Ignore it, he's old enough that it's his problem, not yours.
Yeah, that's what I said. You have to have healthy boundaries, you have to have
healthy patterns of control in your parenting relationship.
That means you have to know and acknowledge what's in his sphere of control and let him control it, and you have to know your sphere of control and not let him control that.
If you try to control his schooling, then it's a battle between you he can try to "win." If you recognize that--at his age--nobody can control whether he learns but him, then you can make schooling outside the realm of parent-teen battles. He can decide whether to be pig ignorant for awhile or not. They're his consequences and you really, truly can't do squat to prevent him from choosing ignorance. So if you don't try, and it's not a battleground between you, that's your best chance of him possibly choosing education over ignorance.
Throwing things is different. If he breaks a lot of stuff around the house, it's vandalism. If he throws stuff at people, it's assault. Criminal stuff? Call the cops. Full stop. Whatever they do to him is more humane than the Program and more effective. Natural life consequences---by which I mean what the adult world would inflict on him if he pulled that crap as an adult--are always preferable to artificial, manufactured consequences.
In other words, if the raising of a kid has already been thoroughly screwed up--by yourself or others, you have to apply, functional, normal, healthy parenting techniques and take whatever improvement that gets you.
If you let your rose bush fall apart with black spot, then once you start with the anti-fungal and proper plant care, it doesn't get better overnight, and it still has a whole lot of damage that doesn't get better for a long time past its next blooming season.
What, you're going to screw up by the numbers in raising the kid and then expect not only a quick fix but for
someone else to do your quick fix for you for money?
I feel sorry for the Program survivors, but the parents deserve what they get for being so shallow and stupid as to expect someone else to carry their relationship obligations, for money, and deliver an impossible, unrealistic, overnight fix.
You know those ads that show people having an "easy button"? Program Parents are looking for an easy button and ought to be bumped back to childhood themselves and turned over someone's knee! Is there any better illustration of how the kid got screwed up in the first place than to have parents who flubbed the job then expected someone else to deliver a quick fix for money?
And please, a year or two and all better is expecting a quick fix.
If you've screwed up raising your kid, you get competent, apply normal, healthy parenting techniques, and live with whatever improvement you get. You'll at least get
some improvement. Good parenting techniques have been handed down for thousands of years--good parents know what works
without going overboard and abusing the kid.
In our case, someone else messed up raising our foster daughter and we're, again, getting what improvement we can.
You work within your own healthy boundaries and take what you can get.
The depression and anxiety are the potentially life-threatening issues. Address those first. As long as you're getting the kid to the psychiatrist to deal with the life threatening part, let the rest hang fire--make it not a battleground between you and hope for the best.
Julie
