Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > CEDU / Brown Schools and derivatives / clones

For the Guys on Moose Talk

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Antigen:

--- Quote ---On 2004-09-07 12:21:00, Anonymous wrote:

You could've kept him from them with some effort.


--- End quote ---


No, a parent can't legally go to the lengths to control a kid that they do in programs like CEDU. You can make demands, threaten punishment (like grounding), withdraw allowance, cars, toys or whatever. But a parent, or anyone else for that matter, can't physically throw a kid to the ground and restrain them if they decide to not come home at curfew or to associate w/ people their parents don't like. That would be assault on a minor. You can't deprive them of sleep to make your point, either. That would be child abuse.

It's still child abuse when done inside the Program. But inside the Program, there are no objective wittnesses. All wittnesses are under threat and disabled, do a large degree, by diagnosis.


Don't sweat the
Petty Things

Don't pet the
Sweaty Things

Water what you want to grow.
--Curiosity
--- End quote ---

ottawa5:
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.

Antigen:
O5, if your son was so defiant, how did they make him stay, let alone make him follow direction, at CEDU? Do you know? Do you understand how that works?
Don't hate the media. Become the media

--Jello Biafra
--- End quote ---

Anonymous:
Good, Shanlea.  
I'm glad you made that clear.  As for straight A students and drugs -- my pot supplier when I was in my 20's got on the 98th percentile on the LSAT and went on to become a leading personal injury lawyer.  And I've smoked pot and listened to Miles Davies with a shortlisted Rhodes Scholar who later went on to become the Dean of a prominent Law School.  So much for pot's dangers to the intellect.
Aah well.

ottawa5:
Antigen: You and I have much deeper differences than the specifics of any program.

I've read your responses over the last couple of months, and I don't know exactly what you are going for, or why, but it seems to be some kind of laissez-faire, uninvolved, anarchistic, "nobody is responsible" parenting that I think is really wrong and really dangerous in the kind of a world that most kids grow up in today.

You and your "synanon this" and "cult that", it's like a mantra with you!!! Just desperately foolish and wrong-headed, you just don't even seem to have any awareness that kids, especially dangerously acting out kids need structure and rules and to be required to sit down and consider instead of acting out.  Before something worse happens.

It's your whole world view, some kind of a cartoonish, 60's hippie renaissance, it seems to have a lot of naivity to it and most especially to glorify and justify drug use.  

I have to tell you, I have a lot of problems with the drug laws in this country and I think they should be changed on a libertarian basis, why criminalize people for having a bad habit, and let's face if, that's what recreational drug use is for many, probably most, people.  But you seem to just gloss over the fact that when a kid is, say 14, 15 or 16 and starts using various substances obsessively and without the life experience to see the harm involved, somebody, like the parents for example, has an obligation to step in and say "no".

It would just be silly, these positions you take,if we weren't talking about young inexperienced kids and the idea that they should just be allowed to mess up or even destroy their lives on the basis of some kind of sham idea of freedom that you are peddling. I say it again, looking back over your posts, you seem just obsessed with playing down the harm drugs do and overstating any particular good they bring about (oh boy, if I get high, I'll enjoy Miles Davis more, or some such nonsence).

I'd say "shame on you" but I imagine that you tossed out shame along with a lot of other things when you adopted the point of view you're pushing here.

I just can't have much confidence in your judgment about what a school should or should not be, based on the positions I've seen you take.

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