I had a cousin who got sent off to some kind of special boarding school (that aunt married old money) when he was being uncontrollable as a teenager -- we're not close, so I'm not dead sure what the issues were exactly, but he's always been prone to thrill-seeking in a physically dangerous kind of way. I don't think it did much good, but it didn't seem to either do him any harm or wreck his relationship with his parents. (He is infinitely more fun than the rest of that set of cousins, who are pleasant but stodgy.)
I'd differentiate between some sort of inpatient treatment (for example for juvenile sex offenders, where intensive treatment could help, though a lot of those are awful) and a group home and boarding schools that can run the gamut and wilderness/bootcamp programs, which are definitely the item on the list I'd be most nervous about, in part because there's less room for parents to be aware of what's going on there.
There are a lot of awful versions of most of these kinds of programs. I've only casually looked at the research that shows a family-based approach to treatment of anorexia is much more successful than the traditional hospitalize-and-treat-the-child version, and I think that's true of a lot of problems with family dynamics. We're about to start something like 15 weeks of parenting classes where the girls will also be discussing the same topics from the child's perspective and although I'm dreading it from a time perspective, I think it will be helpful. (We also have two hours of in-home therapy a week, half for the child and half for whatever portion of the family needs the attention, and a caseworker who comes twice a month as part of the intensive wraparound program.) Even with a teen, I'd have a lot more faith in this sort of approach than one that cuts the child off from the family for a long period of time.
The low end of the reform school spectrum is utterly horrific. I'd be really worried about sending my kid off to reform school without extremely careful research into exactly what was going to be done with them.
The problem with the family-based reforms is that in many situations, the parents are utterly unwilling to entertain the possibility that they are contributing to any problems. If introspection is a nonstarter, then the parent will not agree to family-based reforms at the outset.
I'm also sure I'm biased a little because my dealings with Residential Treatment Centers and inpatient psych have been as a foster parent rather than someone who has full legal custody, but I suspect in both cases the communication wouldn't have been much better and the experience probably wouldn't have been either. I just could have had some actual choice in where a child would go and how long the child would stay and what the hell was going on while the child was there.
I recall being terrified of getting sent off to Military School. My parents ended up going the opposite direction, and sent me off to Quaker School.
Mind you, my only real crime was not giving a shit about getting good grades.
4 is totally right, but putting the kids into some place in the middle of nowhere with underpaid and probably undereducated staff doesn't sound like a great solution either.
Actually, I'm reminded that one of our favorite caseworkers worked at a wilderness camp for a while and he has great (in terms of therapeutic impact, not just awesomely funny though that too) stories from his time there. I do know that there are good options, but parents who are looking for an easy solution are not necessarily going to look for them.
And for those parents, being asked to be introspective is usually terrifying, because they've got a fragile house of cards for their emotional life which is barely strung together, and they risk having to question some terrifying assumptions that have been foundational for them, for decades, and to consider that their intransigence has harmed their kids. So instead they shut it down.
"Those parents" being those who are unwilling to be introspective.
This is the sort of thing where I think the answer is brutally intrusive state regulation. Any sort of business/organization/school that takes care of children or teens separated from their family should be getting inspected weekly: their licenses should be expensive enough to support that level of enforcement.
Yeah, someone else should probably speak to this since I'm trying to coparent with one of "those parents," though she's doing better and actually doing some work these days. And also because in other groups online I see people saying things like, "What is the youngest a kid can be to go into long-term residential treatment? I can't stand my internationally adopted 4-year-old and hope we can find a residential kindergarten?" and it's totally insane and terrifying.
They can get especially horrific in Florida. Religious freedom!
11! 11! 11! 11! But I have no idea how to convince states to pay for that, especially given the percentage of kids in the worst places who've been put there and are being paid for by the state in the first place.
When I was 14 and uncontrollable (by the standards of a fundamentalist household) my parents chucked me into the juvenile justice system of a state near the bottom end of the bible belt. I mostly hate them now, and probably always will.
Oh, at one point I was going to post that article that circulated about adoptions that get reversed. It was pretty horrific all around. Nobody receiving one tenth of the support services they'd need to support brutally traumatized children.
Oh, 11, absolutely. Which would make things unaffordable for most parents, so financial support also needs to be built in. Otherwise I suspect a lot of these teenagers would just get kicked out and become homeless.
9 is what I assume about the parents in 15, frex.
Or I guess that should be "Because religious freedom."
18,9: Yeah, it was an abusive, miserable household, though I never labelled it as such until I did a year of therapy in my early 30s.
I don't know. She's sitting there with her adopted daughter. You don't think that there's a subtext or a subconscious thing going on there, heebs?
Or even a regulartext thing, given she says "Nora, I will fail you in lots of ways, but I will not kick an underage you out of my life for being difficult. That's a promise."
It's funny that I have a total kneejerk opposition to bootcamp for minors, but I know several folks who joined the military after high school, and it so clearly helped them to fix their lives in a lot of ways. I think most of what they gained, though, was the ability to trudge through unpleasant tasks to reach a goal. Then, when they got out, they could set goals and meet them, rather than just not completing any work they thought was BS and doing what they enjoyed (drugs, sleep, video games).
I guess maybe my problem with bootcamp, or any program that's basically "send us your kid and we'll fix them" is that it doesn't really open any doors for the kid later (the benefits seem to accrue mostly to the parents), plus the screwed up dynamic at home probably just comes right back until the kid is old enough to move out.
23: Once you get out of military training, people are impressed with you. I guess once you get out of bootcamp for minors, people think you're mentally ill and you've been in juvie.
21: Oh, that's totally likely. I just think she's wrong, nevertheless.
I recently had my first experience baby-sitting a "difficult" child. Not even solo (both my sisters were there) and only for half a day, but it was fucking exhausting and terrible and I would absolutely sympathize if his parents gave up.
Addendum to 26: this kid is seven years old, so he's not even big enough to be very scary when he's violent.
My aunt-in-law from her first marriage sent her son to a therapeutic boarding school, because he was acting out and stealing.
I don't know whether it worked or not (behavioral health is hard!), but it was certainly professional: super small classes, regular therapy, parent meetings, and they let the kids not go to class when they really didn't want to.
She's kind of reactive*, and it probably wasn't a situation where this was necessary, but it seemed like a good school.
The same cousin tried pot once, and she sent him to rehab. At the end of the treatment, the counselor said, "Mrs. H, you do realize that he only tried it once, don't you?"
It sounds like the school my cousin went to might have been similar to what LB referred to in 1. It was very expensive.
I think my cousin was maybe 11 or 12 at the time.
David Sedaris has a New Yorker story on essentially this topic.
Give him a few years, I meant to say in 27. Unless he gets a personality transplant or at least a more effective regimen of meds by the time he's adult-sized, I don't want to be anywhere near him.
I have to say I'm on Mimi's side with this one. Anecdata:
1. Best friend from HS: Inpatient treatment at big local hospital, basically for being queer and angry, got physically threatened by other patient. Ruined her already bad relationship with her mother.
2. Friend of a friend in Omaha: Parents sent him to Boys Town* for smoking weed and being queer. Scarred him for life, never trusted his parents again, later he had a psychotic break and killed friend's pet rat after torturing it with household chemicals.
3. Friend from my early activist days: Sent to treatment for smoking weed by liberal college prof parents. Also gave him a lot of problems with trusting people, poisoned relationship with parents.
4. Local orphanage/refuge/whatever place: Long history of physical and sexual abuse. Basically everyone I knew in HS who came from a shaky background was terrified of being sent there based on the high incidence of rape by staff and other inmates.
And the stuff from Pennsylvania, of course, which should give anyone pause about ever putting any kid in that kind of situation.
*The thing he was angriest about though, was not his own confinement, but the fact that kids who were at Boys Town because they were, for instance, the victims of sexual abuse, were under exactly the same disciplinary regime as the "bad kids." It was on a point system. You get 5 points for washing your dishes, 10 points for making your bed, whatever. But if you act out, they start debiting you thousands of points at a time, meaning you're basically never going to get certain privileges back. The house parents aren't allowed to touch you, so if you're really acting up, they call the special Boys Town cops, who cuff you and lock you up in a bare holding cell for the night.
The Sedaris piece in 30 really rubbed me the wrong way when it came out. It seems the ways he's exploited her stories as part of his public persona may have played into her pain, and that her request that the family not be at her memorial service seems at odds with then writing a giant article about her that brought him extra fame. I know there's more going on than that, but it felt icky to me.
On the other hand, I'd already been planning to post something about how between running in foster care circles and the local lesbian parent community with lots of past breakups and new relationships, my girls know a lot of kids who "used to be" siblings and that's not a phrase we have to use within their families and histories (since they didn't identify prior foster siblings as siblings) but I was really fighting against that kind of wording or mindset when trying to explain termination of her parents' rights to Nia last night. We do not have good terms for any of this. I like Mara's youngest big sister, who's decided that since I'm her sister's other mom I must be her stepmother.
Scarred him for life, never trusted his parents again, later he had a psychotic break and killed friend's pet rat after torturing it with household chemicals.
Actually, I think residential treatment might not be a bad idea for kids who torture animals. That's not generally a good sign, is it?
32.2: From what you write it's hard to tell whether that was caused by his being sent to reform school or whether he was already on that path. Torturing pets seems like something someone with sociopathic tendencies might do
A lot of these programs are outright criminal. A friend of mine in HS was sent to one which advertised on TV: Is your teenager moody? That means he's on drugs! Sent him to us. Once inside, kids were put on massive doses of painkillers to keep them docile and dependent on the person running the place. Eventually the feds shut the whole thing down and I think the guy who ran it went to jail.
34: Disagree strongly. If a child is lacking empathy and feelings of connectedness that lead him to torture animals (and I do know of girls who've done this too) then I don't see why the solution would be to isolate him from the family members who care about him and can try to help him learn to strengthen his love and ties and instead put him in a holding pen with other boys who are doing the same thing or worse so they can all share stories and learn from each other, etc.
I do think there are good programs out there and actually do think some animal-abusing kids could benefit from them. But that shouldn't be the default assumption, not before you try door alarms and line-of-sight supervision and making pets inaccessible and lots of other things that are (as I see it) part of parenting.
Damn it JP, I really wanted to go there first.
It was a reaction much like Mimi's* that led me to take in my pretty seriously difficult teenage brothers for a couple years as I was finishing up college. It was a disaster for all three of us, but I still think it was probably better than shipping them off somewhere, even if a more "structured" environment or whatever might well have had some particular benefits along the lines of 23. All I know for sure is that I couldn't live with myself "getting rid of those people", so in that sense it was better for me; I suppose I do worry about having done them a disservice to spare myself that guilt. (Though in this case the problem was not simply that they were seriously difficult kids, it was that they were also effectively orphans, so there were a lot of practical and emotional factors in play.)
*Not so much the "barely trained thugs in an unregulated environment" part--that probably wouldn't have occurred to me at the time--but the "hand an emotionally wounded child over" part.
It really is the greatest, though. Let's all take a moment to appreciate.
34/35: Well, obviously, I never psychoanalyzed him. But when I met him he was just sort of normally depressive, with some substance abuse warning signs. He hated living in Omaha A LOT though, so then he moved to Florida to live with one of his friends from HS who had become a successful drag queen/escort in Miami, and then when that soured, moved to DC and lived with my friend, at which point he tortured and killed her rat. Not sure if we know whatever became of him after that. I hope he did get some help, and that his Boys Town experience is not preventing him from accessing services or whatever.
37: I still get angry thinking about these places. Really, screaming teenager angry.
There was another one in Wisconsin, I think, where a girl collapsed on a forced march and died while the "counselors" stood there are mocked her for being weak. In a later interview, one of the counselors protested his subsequent treatment, essentially saying that one negligent homicide shouldn't ruin a career in child care.
There need to be safe mechanisms for getting a kid (troubled or not) out of a toxic home life, which doesn't rise to CPS conditions, though, when the parents are unwilling/unable to do one of the family-based treatments described by Thorn.
I mean, in these places as an aggregate, how many kids are basically in there for being queer, smoking weed, and/or having sex? A lot, I would bet, even if it says something else on the intake form.
That's a huge problem, I agree. On the other hand, there are also emotionally disturbed kids and parents who have exceeded what they can cope with. There's no good way to tell these situations apart without investing in government structure.
46 gets it right. And while it's a given that mistakes are made, generally the parent in question is in a better position than outsiders to assess that. On the other hand, they may not be in the best position to evaluate the options for dealing with things.
I think it's immoral to send a kid to one of these places against their will, unless they really are insane and a clear danger to themselves or others. A lot of those places flat-out forcibly kidnap kids. See Kidnapped for Christ .
Right now we don't have the ability to adequately regulate the juvenile detention system for actual criminals--see, e.g. the PA judge who sold kids to for-profit juvenile prisons. Why do you think we would be able to regulate a second system for people who have not been found guilty of an actual crime or diagnosed with a real mental illness?
Nothing against the many fine parents in this forum, but in some of these cases, it sounds like the parents essentially manipulate or provoke the child into doing something actionable. I'm pretty sure that's what happened with friend #1 in my examples above -- her mother didn't approve of her lesbianism and gender non-conformity, and escalated the situation until my friend flipped out and they could call the cops and have her stuffed in the hospital. So I'm very skeptical about the "parents-know-best" line of reasoning, if for no other reason than that these situations are highly charged emotionally, and lots of people tend to make poor decisions when under that kind of stress.
49: I don't think that. But these are the kids that end up kicked out and homeless, so they're getting failed by the system either way. What is your alternative to the kicked-out-and-homeless scenario?
o I'm very skeptical about the "parents-know-best" line of reasoning,
Has anybody said this?
I think I'm probably the one most clearly advancing what sounds like a parents-know-best line of reasoning, but I am in favor both of totally improving the systems that care for young people who can't live in their families but also in general focusing on family preservation whenever possible. That doesn't mean letting the parents be tyrants, but trying to fix the whole family dynamic when there's a problem. And no, parents don't like that, but they typically don't like the situation they were in before they started working on their shit either.
I'm also way, way on Team Smartypants, if that wasn't clear. I just do also think there's also a need for out-of-home placement sometimes, which is not surprising coming from a foster parent.
You know who else supported out-of-home placement? Sometimes for whole families.
You know who else supported out-of-home placement? Sometimes for whole families.
In case I missed offending anyone the first time.
49: it never ceases to amaze me how much shittier the US manages to make problems that even in countries that are trying are hard to solve. Dealing with difficult children is hard enough when you don't have for profit hucksters and fanatical ideologues poisoning the well: at this point you have to be really desperate or hate your child to put them at the mercy of the outplacement industry.
A friend of mine in HS was sent to one which advertised on TV: Is your teenager moody? That means he's on drugs! Sent him to us
One of my Evil Software business plans was a net-nanny sort of program that you put on your kid's computer. It monitored all their web activity and went through emails for keywords and so on, and compared them to neural networks trained on the internet activity of, well, whatever undesirable behaviour you specified. So every day the parents would get an email saying "Based on their internet activity in the last 24 hours, your child is 22% similar to our Suicide/Self-Harm profile, 86% similar to our Sexually Non-Traditional profile, 4% similar to our Schoolyard Shooter profile" - with a graph showing trends over the last month. So after a bit parents would stop noticing the overall levels and just start reacting in panic to any upward tick, no matter how small.
"one negligent homicide shouldn't ruin a career in child care." - may I nominate that for the mouseover?
60: that is HORRIBLE. You win.
64: the more people use it, the more panic spreads and the more people want to buy it! You could have an option to share your kid's score with other equally paranoid parents. You could use it to market add-on services - "well, since we sent Micah to Inexpressible Island Summer Camp, his Self-Harm profile match has gone down to 54%!"
61: the first sentence of that story is merely shocking, but the second is a killer.
Researchers in Florida exhumed 55 bodies from the campus of the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school notorious for its brutal treatment of students that closed in 2011.
Good Lord, how terrible!
That bodies were buried on campus is no surprise, but the specific numbers are significantly off from what records indicated.
...wait, what?
You can sell profile weighting enhancements to both local childcare providers as well as to content providers. My Little Pony or Ylvis could be wholesome (5% score boost!) for the low, low price of 1 bitcoin per ten thousand teen subscribers in the wealthiest postal codes.
Florida is well known for not being able to count regardless of how important the topic.
Not quite as bad as that Florida school, but there's a "Christian" reform school in the Dominican Republic that was pretty bad that was the subject of the book "Jesus Land" and the recent movie "Kidnapped for Christ." It is now, as I understand it, under new management with a new name, but with some of the old staff and practices.
"Lots of acting out and minor criminal behaviors" = this was a kid at risk of going to prison if she didn't manage to kill herself first. Oh, and bankrupting the family with legal fees and civil judgments and preventing any of the other kids from having a life (no college for you! all the money went to pay for the house your sister vandalized and the lawyer who managed to keep from having to serve her sentence in an adult institution!)