On 2004-05-27 19:45:00, Anonymous wrote:
"I don't think it's that much of a mystery "why" so many emotional growth, behavior modification or residential treatment programs are in Utah. The State gives parents the "right" to be parents. Utah residents are family values oriented, though they don't define what those values are for each person. Too many States give children the right to dictate, control and abuse their parents. THey know if they say don't want to get help, they don't have to stop the behavior or the drugs. They can just say NO and continue to control.
Is it a Mormon thing why Utah is open to parents making decisions for their child?
Amy, look outside Utah as well and to what kinds of help are available. There's not much in the way of anything outside of a quick fix or mandated insurance guidelines.
In one of the threads I read about these programs being a multi-million a year industry. It's a much healthier way to help families, for the mostpart, than the multi-million dollar a year drug companies living fat from feeding our kids prescribed medication. The commercials show a warm and fuzzy result from telling us it's okay to give your kids new and improved ADD meds as an answer to defiant behavior. That's what I call wrong.
"
Yeah, you're the kind of nutbar that the rest of us in mainstream society want to reign in so that twenty years down the road we're not having to deal with *your* kids (or the kids of people who think like you) as perpetrators of crime and abuse as they become predators to cope with the psychological fear and pain from having been childhood victims of abuse.
See, not all of the victims of these abused children grown up to become perpetrators are *their own* kids----sometimes they go out and abuse *other* people's kids. Like, for example, the kids of those of us in mainstream society.
We in the mainstream cannot afford to allow you fringe idiots to raise up a future generation of fringe idiots and monsters---your problems and the legacy of your bad behavior are too likely to spill over onto us and our own children.
I want federal laws and federal standards for *any* boarding school that accepts out of state students.
I'd prefer that *no* children be abused, but I'd settle for having all the nutbars like you move to Utah where your future generations won't endanger *my* kids and grandkids and great-grandkids and so on.
Why do I think you're probably abusive? Because if you think the very basic protections kids in the mainstream US have from abuse and neglect amount to "dictating" and "control" over their parents, then you have *lousy* boundaries.
I hate to use psychobabble, but I really don't know of a better plain-English term for someone like yourself who doesn't know where one person ends and another begins to the point that you would describe the right not to be abused or neglected by parents as "control over" the parents.
It's not the kid controlling the parents, it's society controlling the parents by imposing the same standards of care on adult society members if they want to raise a child that most good parents would impose on a child who wants to raise a puppy.
Just like parents do for the little kid that doesn't want to take responsibility for caring for the puppy, society allows for parents who don't want to take responsibility for caring for their children to sign that care over to another consenting adult, or in some cases directly to the foster care system.
Even in states that don't provide for parents to sign their kids over to foster care just because they don't want the responsibility, it's fairly easy (if you just don't want the responsibility of not abusing or neglecting your kid) to convince Child Protective Services that you're an unfit parent and they need to remove the kids.
That you blame the kids for this control instead of seeing, rightly, that it's the rest of us in society who are controlling those parents----that tendency to blame the kids for the control we your fellow voters are exercising over you makes me concerned that you would take out your frustration with us, your fellow voters, on the kids---which is what leads me to form the opinion that you're probably a bad parent, if you're a parent at all.
My husband and I abide by society's rules on abuse and neglect, and we certainly have control over our child and not the other way around.
We have control over her because we all love each other and our approval is important to her, and we control the pocket money, and we control the TV, and she knows we will spank if necessary, and we control opportunities to do fun things she wants to do----we have the will and ability to do nice things for her, and she can rely on us for *good* advice on when she's cruising for life to spank her. She understands that parents sometimes spank because life spanks harder. She's a good kid.
If your child is out of your control, either it's a temporary illusion of adolescence, or your child is out of his/her own control (for example, mentally ill), or you're incompetent.
The tools mainstream society allows---rewards of all sorts, mild physical punishment when necessary, and that endless fount of parental control: The Good Talking-To, all applied consistently---are adequate to control any child that is not mentally ill or mentally disabled. If a child *is* mentally ill or mentally disabled, society allows, and supports, the use of doctor-prescribed medications and therapies to bring the child back under his own control--and thus under his parents'. Again, entirely adequate.
If you think those tools are *not* adequate and that you have to add the right to torture a kid or break his will (which breaks the kid--in the sense that it leaves him "broken"=permanently damaged) to get compliance, then you either aren't a parent, or shouldn't be one.
If you think a child's will needs to be broken to raise him properly, you shouldn't be entrusted with a puppy or a kitten, let alone a human child.
Get into therapy and work on your "boundary issues" and take some parenting classes. Then raise a dog before you try having a kid.
Or stick to houseplants.
