On 2004-01-15 09:48:00, Anonymous wrote:
"I have not found that to be true. I do not drink nor do I smoke pot however that didn't stop my child from doing it. So when you take your child aside at age 12 for a little sip of alcohol to teach them the lesson to not do it also says you should take them aside to smoke the forbidden or do the other forbidden things they might do. I do not believe that will teach them either. Some children are just more of a challenge than others. 2 kids raised the same in one home will not turn out the same all the time. 1 can be totally out of control and the other can be the opposite. "
I understand you didn't mean it this way, you just hit one of my pet peeves so I'm going to go off on a tangent---please don't think I'm complaining about you, because I'm not, okay? :smile:
The phrase is "out of control."
I really, really hate it when I hear a teen who may well be a screwup pain in the butt described as "out of control."
Because the issue, of course, is out of *whose* control?
The parents'? Society's? The Church's?
Teenagers whole job as human beings is to start separating from authority and being under their *own* control instead of the control of their parents or society or their church.
Very naturally, along the way in this process, most of them go overboard at least occasionally.
I'm more concerned with the ones that never rebel, because those are "Good Chermans" in the making---people who will happily walk the latest "subhuman" scapegoats to the gas chambers because some authority figure *told* them to.
Teens' developmental *job* is oppositional behavior. It's not a *disorder*---it's a positive and necessary developmental stage.
Teens learn through trial and error, and thought, and example, which things they need to oppose their parents and society about, and which things their parents and society are more or less right about.
How you keep kids from doing really stupid things is you give them very good reasons for not doing the stupid things that make sense in terms of their personal self-interest as they see it.
And if a law if really stupid, and *you* just follow it because the consequences of getting caught aren't worth it---tell the kid the truth.
Teens respect being told the unvarnished practical truth more than anything else. However, it's sometimes very necessary to distinguish between "truth" inferred from religious faith and secular truth coming from empirical evidence.
Anyway, when I hear someone describing a teen as "totally out of control" my first question is always, "Is this person upset because the teen is out of the teen's *own* internal control, or because the teen is no longer as responsive to control by external authority?"
A teen out of his own internal control has a serious problem.
A teen becoming less and less amenable to *external* controls is growing up normally. If he or she is going hog wild *under* his or her own control--is making the *decisions* to go hog wild---then inconsistent parenting, overcontrolling parenting, parenting without consistent, rational and reasonable limits and consequences is the cause.
Moving the child to a normal family home environment with consistent, reasonable, rational guardians is the solution.
My concern with these places is that they accept teens who are entirely under their own internal control but are in rebellion against external controls. The latter is an inevitable symptom of growing up, and a budding grownup reacting normally to a bad home environment. The "solution" is an institution hired by the parents to stop the growing up and separating-from-external-control process in its tracks---which is very like binding a little girl's feet to keep them from growing, or pulling a child out of school to keep him from getting an education and growing too independent.
The counter argument would be that we adults are under society's control and government's control---but it's not really *true*. A healthy, mature adult human is under his/her own internal control and obey's society or government *only* when his or her better judgement says the rule is a good idea anyway. A healthy, mature adult human's response to a rule that is *not* a good idea is to independently evaluate that rule and *either* obey out of a personal belief in the importance of rule of law *or* to disobey and either attempt not to get caught, or to stand and face the consequences boldly to make a point or legally challenge the rule.
A healthy adult human is *only* under his/her own internal control.
A teen who is *only* under his/her own internal control but *is* under his/her own internal control is just a normal, healthy teen turning into an adult.
Some parents need and deserve to be opposed or defied by their teens and everyone else.
Ginger's parents are an excellent case in point.
That's my quarrel with ODD as a diagnosis. Diagnostic criteria *never* involve an evaluation of the parents to determine if opposing or defying those particular parents is a reasonable, rational act. That question should *always* be asked, and very carefully evaluated, before a diagnosis of ODD or related disorder is made.
