On 2005-05-25 20:38:00, Anonymous wrote:
Just wondering if you have an idea of what to tell her. I know she would never refer anyone to the program but I know her friends have kids who are having a hard time and I was wondering what advice you would give them?
You're not rambling. What I would tell
your mother is that I'm sorry ya'll had to go through such hell. Don't waste it. Learn from your mistakes. Obviously, the problem wasn't some flaw in you. Sounds like you were acting like a normal kid who's being abused and scared to tell anybody.
If her friends are entering a white knuckle chapter of parenthood, I'd tell them to NOT PANIC! At the end of the day, there's absulutely nothing that these programs can do for a kid or a family that you can't do yourself. And they can and do do a lot of harm of varieties that are less likely to happen when the kid is living in their own community and family w/ wittnesses and other options than whatever is not working so well right now.
Kids sometimes have difficulty dealing w/ what life throws at them. The troubled parent industry promises to solve all of those difficulties. But all they really do is hide the kid hundreds or thousands of miles away, tell the parents whatever they want to hear and coerce the kids into supporting their story.
Take our friend Dolphin for example. She's been posting here as a Program parent for a long time. You'd think she'd
know something by now about how the program really works. But she doesn't. She paid good money for her fantasy and she'll be damned if she'll let it go.
My mom was the same way. Several years after the Program, one of the first times she saw me face to face was at my wedding. She asked my why I had bleached my hair and flat out refused to believe that I hadn't. So I tried to explain to her that my hair had been darker when I was in the Program because we were never allowed out in the sun. But she simply refused to believe it. She reminded me that, after 2nd phase, we went to school (took me a good 10 months to make 2nd phase the first time.) and that on 4th phase, we had days off (but you had to have permission days in advance to go out of the yard, then only on those days off, after school and before time to go get the newcomers... most of us used our first few weeks of days off to catch up on sleep.)
She absolutely didn't remember how it really was. Instead, she remembered the more pleasant version of events they discussed in Parent group and among each other at fund raisers and other times they were permitted to speak.
These days, when my kids seem distant or troubled, I ask them what's up. If they don't feel like talking, I start making Machiavelian plans to create opportunity. Sometimes they come to me for advice. Sometimes they don't. So far, so good. They're all healthy and relatively happy and pursuing their own interests, getting better at accomplishing their goals, etc.
You just have to have a little faith in your kids to overcome difficulty. Don't steal their thunder! A big part of growing up well is all about sorting things out
for yourself. If someone steps in and strong arms you into making what they think are the right decisions, even if some of those decisions are really better, you're still left w/ the daunting task of proving to yourself that you're capable of taking care of yourself. And, after a program, you have so much extra dependency to overcome and you're years behind your peers.
No matter how you slice it, it's just not worth it.
Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself - that is my doctrine.
--Thomas Paine
