I don't have advice (could ask the family member who knows more though), but I am sorry you and your family are going through this. I hope the family therapy is beneficial and it might be enough to counterweigh whatever oddness might come out of the Alateen setup. What is the expected timeframe for them going to Alateen meetings? Indefinite?
Could the caseworker be using "AlaTeen" as a stand-in for "support group"? 8-year-olds and 15-year-olds aren't really what I would call peers; it seems like having both ages in one group might make everybody's experience less useful.
But I don't actually know.
It does look like there's such a thing as Ala-kid, but maybe not a local chapter.
Also, public school counselors often run support groups for kids in similar situations. There could easily be 5-10 kids in an elementary school that a counselor could round up.
My friend who's almost finished being trained as an addiction counselor seconded the AlaTeen advice, saying everyone she's worked with who has gone there regrets not starting earlier. Partly thanks to her advice I tried Al-Anon before the breakup and it did help me (and encourage the breakup) to see other people going through similar tstruggles. But 2 is exactly my worry, that it just doesn't seem productive for anyone' involved. The investigator did mean official AlaTeen, because I asked for clarification, and they'd be eligible to keep going until adulthood if they found it helpful.
I believe the school therapy groups were in fall semester this year, but that would certainly be a future option. They're mire generally about learning coping skills , but that's not a bad thing either. I guess I should talk to my own therapist for advice too.
I don't really know anything useful at all about the specific situation, but at the highest level of generality I usually don't worry about exposing kids to things they aren't ready for. If the circumstances of the exposure aren't themselves traumatic, I think kids are really pretty good at tuning out and being bored by things that they're not going to be able to emotionally process in any useful way.
I would investigate group play therapy. Who knows if anyone will be doing it in your area, but worth a try.
I don't want to derail the thread, but I don't understand 6 at all, unless "if the circumstances of the exposure aren't themselves traumatic" is really doing a huge amount of work. In your view, is watching adult-themed movies not a problem for young children? (Horror, violence, sex, etc.)
6 is a good point, they young kids are good at tuning out conversation they find irrelevant. I do know I'm being overprotective right now because I'm in kneejerk "OMG, my poor kids!" mode and not being totally rational about any of this yet.
And the group play therapy may be an option. The places I've called about family therapy would be the places that do that sort of thing too, so I can ask for a more exhaustive list of options as part of playing phone tag.
8: I'm not particularly sure of myself here, but I'd draw a words/images distinction. Like, a scary movie, the kid actually sees frightening things. Talking about or reading about upsetting things, I think kids do better at filtering stuff out.
This is a semi-threadjack too but I made Heebie and Hawaii watch Hairspray with me the other day* when I was too sick to get out of bed, and I am very curious to find out what Hawaii though the plot was. Did she ignore the parts she didn't understand? Turn them into something else? Or maybe she'd already been reading up on US race relations in the '60s, I don't know.
*holding hands, on Halloween, while having heated ham and hashbrowns.**
**no
I've mentioned having a record of folk music for children when I was very small, that I suddenly realized decades later was a themed group of songs about school desegregation. I had no idea at the time. No idea of segregation, desegregation, that the songs were about anything in particular political, nothing.
11: I'm super curious, too. I almost stopped the movie a couple more times to talk about activism and marching, but then figured we'd come back to it later. She has some context - she knows that people in town have marched for various causes. I didn't take her to watch Wendy Davis filibuster or anything, though.
Nothing to add except good wishes in finding a good family therapist. I was in some group family therapy dealing with the destructive addiction based behaviors of an older sibling when I was around 12, and the experience struck me as utterly useless. Not traumatic or particularly bad, just "What's the point of this again?"
In fairness, "This Kindergarten Stays White!" has a nice hummable tune.
"The wheels on the bus must be prevented from going round and round..."
Re H-G's 3): It all depends, doesn't it? Imagining something from an emotionally super-charged description might be more upsetting than the real thing. One would have to know something about the teller of the tale and the listener to decide.
You mean if the teller blows it all out of proportion and it was really nbd? I guess.
I'm just going to get a little Canuck little-bitchiness out of the way: Pierre Trudeau was a Prime Minister. So technically the post should be signed "Yours in ministeriality."
Whew.
To the point: alternatives to Al-Anon programs vary by location, so where you are (roughly) would be material to answering your question.
18: Even if it was a big deal the reactions transmitted and thus the lessons learned could well be different. I'm finding a useful general rule hard to come by.
19.1: I initially wrote it that way and feared little bitchery would require someone pointing out that presidentiality is universal or something.
No one who isn't a lurker is local, so I'm not sure if that really helps. I am indeed not Canadian, in one of the boring parts of the US.
And thanks. Mostly I'm asking this just to feel like I'm doing something while CPS does its thing and so that I'll be prepared if things start to move more quickly and I'm expected to do something. I have no idea how that part will work and find it a little stressful, like I'm finding a lot of this a little stressful. If I'm requested to send them to AlaTeen of course I will, and I'll talk later this week with the friend who has first-hand experience with local programs to see if it's worth doing now or waiting until things are more stable and we know what's going on and so forth. I just know I've been surprised before by what people here know about and figured it didn't hurt to ask.
I grew up in communities where children routinely had to deal with things outside of the typical imagined middle class upbringing. I had a classmate die of AIDS when I was in first grade, and a bunch more with Hep C and a few with fetal alcohol syndrome. I had classmates whose cousins or siblings had been shot, and whose parents were addicted to drugs and alcohol. I also learned about date rape and intimate violence around age 7-8, when one of the kids my dad mentored (she was about 15) showed up with black eye because her boyfriend had beaten her up and raped her. My parents and teachers were good at filtering and explaining disturbing things in an age-appropriate way, and it wasn't particularly traumatizing. It was sobering to see how privileged my life was in comparison to lots of other children, which was in large part why my parents chose to raise us in part outside of the normal middle class milieu.
I do agree scary movies are different, because there is something about the image getting stuck in the child's head. My parents had no idea when it came to appropriate movies, and I remember being much more traumatized by Beetlejuice or Fanny and Alexander at age 6 than I was by real life trauma of my peers.
My parents took me to see Platoon when I was eight! They were super apologetic afterwards.
If you've exposed your children to classic N. European fairytales, they've already heard much more gruesome things than date rape. I was far less disturbed at age 5 by someone being drawn and quartered, beheaded, or "rolled down a hill in a barrel spiked by nails" than I am as an adult. Also, if they've read the original Andersen stories, where the happiest endings involve getting to go to heaven after dying, they should understand that life sucks and you generally don't get what you want.
"You should understand that life sucks" is written on most over-crib mobiles.
I love the part in Platoon where they all go to heaven afterwards.
I would think that in generally there's a big difference between exposing children to bad things and exposing children to bad things as expressed by 15 year-old kids. The latter seems a bit riskier.
There also is possibly some middle ground between "never let your children hear about bad things" and "it is impossible for children to be negatively affected by hearing about bad things."
But mainly I was thinking that if I were a 15 year old, I would probably find it distracting and entertaining, but not productive, to have an 8 year old in my therapy group. And when I was 8, 15-year-olds were basically adults. So if the idea is "learn from and with peers", I don't really think this big of an age range does it.
Maybe they sort them out into levels like soccer or something.
Support groups for eight-year olds don't allow goalies.
24: I bet we read the same editions. A matched set of Grimms Fairy Tales and Andersen's Fairy Tales?
28.last seems likely... I mean, they must have already thought about this issue, right? Have you talked directly to people with AlaTeen about your age concerns?
I'm waiting to hear back on the specifics of age grouping and what ages the local programs are geared toward, but I think it's more that conversations are guided heavily toward staying on the topic at hand than just letting teens free associate about what sucks in their lives. Officially, [g]enerally Alateen is for ages 13 to 18; note that some groups allow those younger than 13 to attend. Children must be able to participate in a shared learning experience, as Al‑Anon and Alateen group meetings are for mutual support. Alateen members share their own experience with using the Alateen program to deal with the problem drinkers in their lives.
I don't think that my going to Al-Anon and then letting the wisdom I learn there trickle down through my parenting is going to add much beyond what I do already.
30: Omg I may have had that same one. Let's see, the Andersen's dust cover was blue and the Grimm's brown?
21: Okay, well -- I have a healthy respect for Al-Anon despite its "faith-based" nature and I wouldn't be too worried on behalf of kids of the age you're describing in an AlaTeen session. However, alternative programs like SMART run in much of the States and do have friends and family sessions that would be worth checking out.
33: I'd describe them as green and red, but they were pretty faded, so could be blue and brown. Small illustration on a white background in the middle of the covers -- maybe an inch by two inches?
Oh, wait, mine didn't have dust covers, I'm talking about the cloth of the binding.
Sally recently brought them up as having been super disturbing. But she seems just fine overall.
I appreciate the reassurance, Castock. There is a SMART family meeting in our area, it turns out, and I can get in touch and ask about their age ranges and whether it's useful/appropriate in situations without an interest in sobriety on the part of the person with the problem, since that's where we are right now.
And I'm not opposed to Al-Anon. I'm just not sure how much I need the support now that I'm not in that relationship anymore and time away from the kids is so limited that I'm selfishly not wanting to spend it on that. I am very grateful for the support and insight I got when I went and I may well go back in the future. A lot of this is just about mentally trying to figure out if this is more important and urgent than getting a Y membership again and starting swim lessons as requested by children who miss playing outside, that sort of thing.
If the official line is that it's for thirteen and up, I have to think that even if it might be harmless, I doubt under-tens are going to get much out of it.
"Teacher, it's a sunny day. Can we go process emotions on the lawn?"
Might there be value in mixed-age groups as well? Seeing how older kids cope, seeing your development in younger kids? Social skills are not necessarily best learned amongst peers.
A lot of this is just about mentally trying to figure out if this is more important and urgent than getting a Y membership again and starting swim lessons as requested by children who miss playing outside, that sort of thing.
"All therapy and no play" is a pretty serious cart-before-horse situation, speaking from personal experience, so my instinct is to vote swimming lessons way up. (Indeed swimming was very soothing for me as a kid.) But that personal experience was not a whole lot like what you're describing.
All of this is cart-before-the-horse because I can't commit to anything until I know whether/when there will be supervised visitation with the ex, which may well be part of some sort of therapy itself. I definitely want them to spend their time being kids.
Very anecdotal. I was bored by AlaTeen. I was eleven/twelve and the teen thing did seem to matter in terms of topics, etc.. Also, I didn't feel it was relevant. I was in the care of the state, so family drama seemed a non-issue. Likewise, the formerly active drinker parent wasn't drinking, so dealing with that seemed moot. Ultimately, I didn't connect.
The drinker I know hated AlaTeen, felt herself much too cool for it. My guess is that the groups differ widely and it is worth observing the specific one your kids would be attending, if possible.
There are bargeloads of YA books about kids with dysfunctional families opening up in support groups. Your kids are little, but maybe leaving a few secondhand accounts of groupwork around the house would be another low key resource for them.
As possibly the world's least qualified person to comment, I would like to second Lizardbreath's last point. I spent a chunk of today trying to shepherd an 8 year old and some teenagers around, and they might as well have been on different planets. Also, little kids should learn to swim!
Thanks, everyone. They have learned/are learning to swim as is age-appropriate, though the swim lessons are a good idea and will happen no matter what.
Apparently the state is going to make some sort of plan with the ex early next week, so I'll at least know what's going on. If, as I suspect, that means it could be a while before they have unsupervised time with her, the next step will be family therapy for my household. If she's right and we go right back to the old custody arrangement and she just has to pinky promise she'll be safer in the future, then I'll decide which path makes more sense to make sure they feel empowered to deal with it all.
Everything has been surprisingly good (except for the ex) and the children are dealing with it all well so far. I've gone through some emotional ups and downs but getting to be the parent all the time has real benefits too.