At least the idea that we could have done something about my son's situation if we had just put our minds to it, underestimates both his intentions to violate every limit we set. I mean, we were there, we know what we went through, and with respect, you were not there to have an opinion about it. People who know our story tell us that they have never met parents who tried harder and more ingeniously to stop a kid who was in a down-ward spiral.
We tried everything we could think of, or just about anything reasonable that others suggested, I assure you, he was just thoroughly unwilling at that time to reconsider his life-style. If we cut off his allowance he stole or sold drugs. If we set a consequence he defied it openly or undermined it. He lied constantly and tricked us for the fun of it, and being bright he was very good at it. When we sent him to another state to live with a relative when he wouldn't stay away from the crowd he was in, he found a crowd just like it in about a week.
In short, he was bent on living destructively. Even if we had wanted to use the police to try to enforce our decisions, our state laws at the time that all this happened weren't especially supportive of parents (this has changed somewhat, in part due to our efforts in working with our representative and telling our story to the legislature). We did in fact call the police more than once when things were really out of control and not until he had actually gotten very violent did they even become involved, in a very minor way.
You ask what other parents would do. Some would have let the kid work his way into the criminal justice system, even in a lax state like ours, most kids who are acting the way he was would get there eventually. You might say: why didn't we just wait and then let him be placed in a juvenile prison program. It seemed to me that he would just get in with a more lawless crowd in that kind of program and so we chose to try an emotional growth school.
Of course some kids smarten up instead of digging themselves in deeper, but we had to judge by what we were seeing, and the rapidity of the changes that we were seeing. We chose to act and not throw the dice and see if it all worked out. I am the first to admit, by the way, that we were lucky to be able to afford RMA, even though we had to make sacrifices to do it, and I think that it would be a terrible thing not to have had that option--that is one of the reasons that we still contribute to these programs to help parents keep their kids there when they run out of money,
All I can say, in spite of all the nay-sayers here, is that it was a wonderful gift to find this place he is a better person because of it, and we are better people and better parents because of it.
So believe what you like, I have heard about bad staff and abuses here, these things are terrible and something that must be corrected when they happen. But our experience was good, by and large. Of course I wish that we had had a better bond as he entered his teenaged years, maybe if we had, RMA wouldn't have been necessary. As it was, it was a life-saver.
You might ask how his old friends who didn't get sent away are doing now. Of his crowd, one is dead (a late night collision still involved in the old routines), two or maybe three are (or were) in prison last I heard. Several are reportedly underachieving pot-heads but at least they are working somewhere, so they have calmed down a bit. One is community college and becoming a cook and has just gone through some kind of drug treatment. I only know of one (besides my son) who is at university, she was sort of a hanger-on to the group so I guess she out-grew the whole thing without much damage.
Bottom line: we had a hard choice to make and we are happy with our decision. I don't want anyone to have to go through some of the abusive situations that I've heard described here, but our own experience tells us that there is also a right way to run an emotional growth program. That is what I support.
