Dear Mrs. Chango,
I am sorrowed to learn that your eldest son has become a male prostitute, specializing in homeless men who live under freeway overpasses and working class gay men who have a little money and weed. This is certainly not a fate or career field most of us would wish for our children, and I very much sympathize with your feelings on the matter.
However, since this letter will never be sent to the woman who actually inspired the letter (yes, she does exist, and the points in this letter are not fictional, or even exaggerated), I must be frank in pointing out that you, ONLY you, and not the public school system, bear the brunt of the blame for your son’s choices.
I taught your son for three years. He was listed as a “behavior student,” despite the fact that the only misbehavior I ever observed or recorded on his part was a failure to show up for class. He was disobedient, true, but ONLY in a passive sense. If you told him to go to class, he might or might not go. If you ESCORTED him to class, he’d go, and as long as there was a teacher in the room, he’d stay there. He might or might not do any WORK, but if you stayed on him and paid attention to what he was doing, he would do the work.
Which is, I suspect, your motive for insisting that he remain in my Behavior classes: the low student enrollment, the small class size, and the increased amount of personal attention each of my students receives. Nevertheless, he was not a Behavior student, and I cannot help but question your motives for insisting that he remain in Behavior, despite the fact he could and did function effectively in the mainstream classroom.
You will notice that when you managed to get administration to put him in Behavior full time, he soon circumvented you by simply failing to show up for school at ALL. And you complained about this. Most notably, when I look at my notes for that time frame, I recall that you attempted to have campus police installed on his bus, so they could get off the bus, enter your house, and remove your son from the premises to the bus, and be certain he arrived at school.
You were quite put out when you were told this was not workable under any circumstances, nor was it allowable by law.
“You have to meet me halfway, here!” was your exclamation at the time; I have it repeated three times in my notes.
The fact is, ma’am, the information you provided us, as well as the development map we constructed from your information, is durn near a textbook example of how NOT to raise a child.
You see, they begin as babies, a fact of which you are acutely aware, considering that when we last saw one another, you’d had nine of them, not counting miscarriages. A baby is completely and utterly dependent on its mother. When that baby becomes ambulatory, its development enters a new stage. Then, the baby must be constantly supervised and guarded and prevented from causing harm to itself or its surroundings. Eventually, a baby passes out of toddler stage and into actual early childhood, a semiautonomous state in which it can usually be trusted not to jam your keys into a power socket or taste test the contents of the bottles under the sink…
…and that is where your problems began, Mrs. Chango. Because at this stage of development, a child is still very much learning and growing and exploring not only its immediate environment, but the limits of what it can do and accomplish… and get away with. And this is where you completely and utterly failed your child. Because this is where you began IGNORING your child.
You have spoken at no small length about the difficulties of childrearing, Mrs. Chango. But I noticed that your monologue as of (date redacted for reasons of confidentiality), in which you detailed the thousand and one tasks of your daily life, each detail of childrearing was aimed specifically at babies and toddlers. Based on what you have told us about your family, Mrs. Chango, you had one baby and three toddlers as of this point. There was no mention whatsoever of your older children.
Human beings are learning creatures, Mrs. Chango. They continue to learn and grow, whether you are teaching and feeding them or not. The most important duty one has in early childhood through early adolescence is the instillation of basic societal conditioning. This includes a great many factors that will be vital in the child’s development. Most importantly, it MUST BE INSTILLED AT AN AGE when you are still big enough and the child is still small enough that you can PICK THE CHILD UP and move him where you wish him to be, and while you are still large enough and the child is still small enough that PUNISHMENTS MATTER.
Yes, I did say punishments. I say punishments, Mrs. Chango, because in the society we live in today, parents are the ONLY people able and willing to punish their children for their transgressions. I cannot. I am a teacher. I can persuade, and I can coax, and I can influence. I cannot punish. To do so would be to risk my employment, my employability, and potentially my freedom. I will not punish your child. The best I can do is report his actions to the police, a thing for which you screamed and castigated me at some length, since he pays no penalty for his truancy – you do. And every ticket he ever got for truancy was money out of your pocket, and what kind of a terrible, vicious person takes the very bread from the mouths of a poor working family and their children?
After a few years’ consideration, Mrs. Chango, I have concluded that in that, at least, you were right. Imposing fines upon you for your child’s behavior served no good purpose whatsoever. By that time, you were no longer in control of your son’s behavior, even in the most illusory sense. This is the time in which he realized that prostitution offered advantages that you could not. It could get him money, it could get him weed, it could get him admitted to the homes of people who had more to offer him than you did, and it could get him sex. When one looks at this, it is no surprise that he made the choices he did.
He does not, of course, see the potential dangers or down sides of this decision. And, at this point, it is unlikely that you or I or anyone else will convince him that there IS a down side. He has learned that you have no control over him, and that you have little to offer him.
In most families, it is different, Mrs. Chango. My own family maintained firm control over me until I was fourteen or so. That control was mostly psychological. It was instilled at an early age, when I was small enough that if they wanted me somewhere, they picked me up and put me there, and threatened to smack me if I did not STAY there.
You cried out about barbarism. You may have a point. Smacking a child is not the only way to impose punishment. There is “time out,” there is “penalty corner,” and entire books have been written about how to penalize children for inappropriate or undesirable behavior. Not that you’ve read any books lately, but your child’s teachers and counselors have and do, and had you listened to any of us, you might have made use of that knowledge. You did not.
And so, finally, in late adolescence, I broke free of my parents’ control. It is part of the process of teen rebelliousness, and it is, for the most part, normal. It can be unpleasant, but over time, most children realize the debt they owe their parents and the importance of what their parents have done for them. They are in a position to realize the VALUE of what has been taught them, AND WHAT HAS BEEN IMPOSED ON THEM AGAINST THEIR WILL. Control, discipline… these are invariably unpleasant at the outset, Mrs. Chango. Only later does one come to realize their value and importance, and to appreciate the people who provided them for you.
Without discipline, there is almost no relevant achievement.
You seem to have largely ignored your children upon the reaching of middle childhood, in favor of the next crop still in diapers. Rather than teaching them control, you taught them to fend for themselves as best they could. In your eldest daughter’s case, you taught her that triggering emergencies would get your attention, and now she has become a rather extreme drama queen, because this is how she was taught to draw attention when she wanted it. Your eldest son, on the other hand, realized that the house was well stocked with food, cookies, entertainments, and so forth, and that he did not NEED your attention, guidance, or much of anything else. You would impose control from time to time when you saw fit, but the minute something else got your attention, your son was forgotten.
He quickly learned that simply sitting still and feigning compliance would result in complete freedom within a very short time.
This is the life lesson you have left your child. *Be quiet and obey for a short time, and then you can go do anything you want, again. *It is a lesson that has served him well. I almost laughed when you told me how you had begun putting padlocks on the pantry, to keep him out of his father’s cookies and snack food, only to find that he had quietly waited until you went to bed, and then removed the hasp with a screwdriver and eaten all he pleased, and then quietly put the hasp back, leaving you to wonder how the hell he was getting into and out of the snack cabinet. After you figured that out, you began keeping the cookies and so forth in the trunk of your car, and then, again, became quite mad, wondering how he was getting into the trunk of the car. It did not occur to you how until I quietly asked you, in the ARD meeting of (date redacted for reasons of confidentiality), “Where do you keep your car keys, Mrs. Chango? My mother kept HERS in her purse. Finding my mother’s purse was usually pretty easy, in my house.”
It was then that you realized, Mrs. Chango, that you had no control over your thirteen year old son. And that this is a very bad time to lose control over a child. But by then it was too late, and there was not a thing that the public school system could do to help you with your problem. Or, for that matter, the social welfare system, or psychiatry. It was simply too late. And now your son blows homeless guys for joints and pocket money.
I would go so far as to say it is too late for your three eldest, Mrs. Chango. And if I intended to deliver or send this letter, I would say that it is NOT too late for the rest of your children, and to seriously rethink your childrearing methods. They have, so far, brought you nothing but sorrow. Regrettably, I no longer have your address, and if I did, I would think twice about sending the message, even after editing it to remove all the snark.
You see, Mrs. Chango, you have taught ME some things as well. Most importantly, that parents of a certain stripe do not WANT genuine help from the state or from the schools. What they want is COMPLIANCE. The parent in question figures out what thing it is that they want, and then sets about trying to figure out a way to extract that thing or service or resource from the social services network or public school system. In your case, what you wanted was something like a jail, but where classes were taught, and where your child would presumably have little choice but to sit down and do his lessons and get his education, whether he liked it or not.
You wanted US to do the job of MAKING him comply, rather than shouldering that burden yourself.
You are not alone. In the time I have worked for the public school system – twelve years, at this point – I have met far too many like you. None EXACTLY like you, of course, you are all unique in your ways, but far too many who simply seem to think that they are owed something, and that their sole real responsibility is to figure out how to make the system GIVE it to them.
In this, Mitt Romney was correct. There ARE people out there who will never be convinced to take responsibility for themselves, preferring to seek out ways to force public agencies to do it, instead. I find this hilarious, considering Mitt Romney probably never met a welfare queen in his life, and would probably run screaming from the room if confronted with a real one. Nor is he correct in assuming that nearly half the population is made up of people like you.
Far from it.
Most parents are at LEAST middling competent. And apparently, incompetent parenting kills extremely few children. Kids are remarkably resilient critters. Quite a few manage to repair THEMSELVES, surprisingly enough. Perhaps your son will do the same, in time. He’s not a fool. He has simply been badly raised.
I regret your son’s bad choices, Mrs. Chango. He was rather a sweet boy. Still is. I liked him. He was a good student, when he was interested and willing. I wish him well, and hope he makes better choices in his future. And I certainly wish you no ill, although I think it unlikely that you will make better choices in your own future.
Still, there is always hope.
And you have taught ME much, Mrs. Chango, that I will use to benefit myself and others in my future. And for this, I do thank you.