On 2005-04-09 11:55:00, Anonymous wrote:
""But one thing is for sure; once a kid decides they're all grown and don't have to take directives from their parents any more, there's no turning back. You can either try to be supportive and understanding as they test their wings or you can clip their wings and strong arm them into compliance. But you can't do that w/o risking seirous damage."
problem with that is that it isn't LEGAL! Kid screws up, has wreck while drinking, parent is sued. Kid doesn't go to school, parent goes gets fined or goes to jail! Kid destroys home and property, parent can't kick them out if they are under 17. The law is set up so that a kid can do whatever they want until they are 18 and the parent pays all the consequences. If there are other children at home, the parents have to protect the younger children still at home. Come up with an alternative or just advice parents to do lots of checking into and investigating prior to sending. Sometimes, there are no alternatives. The "serious damage" may be being done by the rebellious teenager!
"
Um...hello? One--if the kid is refusing school, you need to find out why. Usually something's wrong. Homeschool, private school, boarding school, virtual school, alternative school, homebound tutoring programs---there are a lot of options. If you've tried them all, the parents *can* report the kid to social services as an incorrigible truant and the family court system will deal with it without further legal liability to the parents. If you *are* trying and you *do* report the kid after you've tried everything else, they do *not* arrest or fine the parent.
Your child cannot drive a care without the car keys unless he knows how to hotwire the thing. There are such things as safes--good ones, with real combination locks (not the little dinky school-locker locks). There is no excuse for a child having the car keys to a car owned by the parents without the parents' consent. If the child steals a car, hotwired or otherwise, you turn him in to the police. If he is in juvie, he is no longer stealing cars. Juvie is less bad than just about all these programs.
If your kid *knows* you will call the police on him if he steals a car or is a habitual truant, for *most* kids that makes them much less likely to do that. For the kids it doesn't make less likely, maybe juvie will be a learning experience---it's certainly a safer one than many of the programs.
If your kid is doing this stuff because there's something psychiatrically wrong, you treat the problem. Sometimes, if the kid is immediately dangerous to self or others and can't be stabilized with a short hospitalization stay (it happens), then a *good* RTC can be the only responsible choice. But that's the *same* criteria we use for involuntarily committing adults.
As far as destroying the house, or stuff in it, if the kid is throwing violent, physically destructive rages on an ongoing basis, that's not normal, that's dangerous. One of three possibilities: 1. kid is mentally ill, 2. kid is criminal, 3. kid is severely unhappy with parents/family based on some kind of normal reaction to an intense mutual conflict. If 1., hospitalize and stabilize kid. If 2., report kid to police and social services and press charges. If 3., find relative for kid to live with *or* emancipate kid *or* relinquish custody to social services *or* send kid to conventional boarding school.
You can't *kick* an under-17 kid out, but you can, depending on the law where you are, *let* them out---you can assist them to move out and get a job, and become financially independent of you, and emancipate. This is a good option if there's nothing wrong with the kid except that he hates you for whatever reason.
If a "problem" kid won't home or alternative school, won't emancipate, isn't mentally ill in a way you could treat and stabilize with meds, and is having rages destroying expensive or highly sentimental property, and there are no relatives that will take him---then I have a lot more sympathy when a parent chooses the safest boarding school they can find---lockdown if the kid can't manage not to get expelled from conventional boarding schools.
This is *rarely* the case. You have kids who cut but aren't habitual truants, who get suspended or expelled but are still accepted in and mostly attending *some* kind of school but maybe making lousy grades. You have kids who are having sex and using various drugs. You have kids who have run away a couple of times but come back. You have kids who will steal the family car if the parents are stone stupid enough to leave the keys lying around. You have kids that lose their temper and put a fist through the wall or a dent in the car. You have younger children that you really don't want taking your older kid as an example of what to do.
Mostly some variant of those, usually not all of the above, are what's going on with kids that get sent off.
Those are all awful, but manageable with normal parenting strategies. Will normal parenting strategies stop the problem shy of the kid turning 18, moving out, and growing up? No, not usually.
Will normal Mom-Fu *manage* these problems long enough for the kid to grow up? Almost always.
You think you have it tough? Go over to CABF and see what parents of bipolar children routinely go through managing seriously mentally ill kids whose medication needs change with their body mass, and the seasons, and who have to be put through trial and error through a lot of meds to find out what works, and have to go off some and on others as side effects develop.
You haven't *seen* tough, you don't *know* tough until you've lived through a full scale bipolar rage. FOUR to FIVE HOURS of full-on out of control rage.
You think you've dealt with school alternatives? Go read the "Educational Issues" message board. I'll lay odds you haven't even scratched the surface of educational alternatives.
I have a friend who was a special ed teacher, and who was the daughter of a special ed teacher. They dealt with profoundly disabled children. They dealt with the parents who were bearing up under the load of raising their profoundly disabled children.
My friend's mom's favorite comment when "normal" people started whining about how difficult their lives were, "You people have no excuse."
Maybe you do have a child that is immediately dangerous to self or others and has been through 7 or 8 short term hospitalizations without being stabilized---in which case when we're talking about avoiding programs, NONE of us are talking about you.
*MOST* parents who talk about "having no choice," most of the ones I've personally encountered, anyway, are blowing smoke.
Yes, sometimes you have no choice but to involuntarily commit a relative.
The situations in which you genuinely have no choice but to commit your teenage son or daughter very closely resemble the situations in which you could legally get a judge to order the involuntary commitment of your thirty-something son or daughter.
And, of course, tossing aside "status offenses," criminal misbehavior is criminal misbehavior, and we have the police and the courts to deal with that. If that's the problem and it's not nitpicky technical BS, then you don't resort to a private prison that treats your kin worse than the government prisons. You go ahead and make use of the police and courts, that's what they're there for.
You, personally, may not be bitching about "no choice" when your kid is so much less bad than the mentally ill kids whose parents I talk to every day that they would give their eye teeth to have a day that good with your child---you, personally, may not be bitching when you should be down on your knees thankful that your kid is basically healthy.
But I've seen it way too often to take parents word for it when they start talking about "no choice."
I know there are cases where there really is no choice.
But I've seen enough to ask some hard questions before I believe it when I get down to talking about specific parents and specific kids.
Timoclea
