You very much should push the school (or city or county) to provide testing services. However, once the tests are in, I still encourage the idea of tracking down a good team who has experience with similar situations. There is always the chance that the school will use a “one-size-fits-all” therapist and you cannot afford to lose the time it will take to go through pointless therapy and then have to find another therapist and undo problems that developed under the first one.
= = =
CHADD got a bad reputation as “pushers” of Ritalin from the anti-Ritalin crowd. Most schools, (even if they know about CHADD), are reluctant to get embroiled with them.
I have never had any dealings with them–my kid’s problems were so far beyind simple ADHD–but as with any group, it is a good idea to check out the local chapter on the one hand to see if they can help, but with enough skepticism to avoid believing everything they say as gospel.
I want to quote this just to make sure it didn’t get skipped:
*This *is the kind of stuff *you *need to know, as a parent. Yes, he’s got “issues” and he needs professional help learning how to express himself in more appropriate ways. But leave that aside for the moment. *You *need to educate yourself about appropriate behavior, reward and, if you must, punishment cycles for a child of his age. Four days was much much much to much too expect of him, obviously. It would be too much for most kids his age. Now you know that, and I suspect you won’t make that same exact mistake again! You need to work with books, with grandparents, with a child behavorist or other specialist who can teach you what are a reasonable expectations at this stage. Who knows what might (or might not) have happened had the kid gotten a celebratory ice cream cone on Wednesday after school.
While I absolutely agree with other posters that professional help is urgently required in this case, I’ll also link you to a book series that I’ve found invaluable in my own parenting. It teaches techniques and strategies unlike any of the varied ones you’ve tried. It’s not about rewards, punishments, relating as peers or corporal punishment. Since none of those have worked for your son, maybe this will. I suspect it’s at least worth reading to see if you can glean any insights from it at all. Parenting With Love and Logic.
I don’t think that a kid having major issues is necessarily related to bad parenting.
However :
I would not hesitate to call the social services if I was aware of such a thing happening in a family I know. To say the truth, I’d probably call the American Child Protection services from my country if I knew the OP’s whereabouts (already did something like that for a person living in Canada, albeit in a significantly worse situation, and I don’t regret it). Better safe than sorry. I’d hate to know what the next step might be.
I don’t know what the OP needs to do, but he definitely needs to do something right now, and seek any kind of help he can possibly get before this becomes real ugly.
Kudos to you for coming back to this thread. (I didn’t think you would.) And while it’s just a message board, you came back and explained your position with patience and courage. I hope you carry those with you during this rough time.
*I’m feeling like there should be some disclaimer here that I don’t condone the poor behavior you’ve described in the OP, but I’m hoping that you don’t either.
This attitude is why people like us don’t talk about shit like this. This is why we are scared of even the people who we have to entrust to assist us, like his teachers and doctors.
At least those people would have the opportunity to see us in person, and some training. That you would throw a family into even more turmoil - a family who you know has been seeing professionals and who you know is trying their best - and one you wouldn’t know from Adam if they lived next door to you - says more about your desire to be a hero than to actually do something heroic.
I understand. I’m not a parent, and my brother was a few orders of magnitude better than your son, but there were a lot of days I thought life would be so much easier on the rest of us if we could send him somewhere for a while. And there were a lot of days I could read the same thought in my mom’s eyes. People who haven’t lived through it have no fucking clue what a never-ending physical, mental, and emotional grinder it is to live with an aggressive, oppositional kid who turns every tiny little goddamn thing into a huge fucking ordeal, so I can only roll my eyes at the sanctimonious “don’t tell me how hard it is to be a parent” responses.
I totally get your wife losing her shit, and I’m not going to condemn her for it. I certainly don’t approve, and I think she should do whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again, but I don’t think it makes her the out-of-control monster others have painted her to be. She’s certainly not alone in having had a total meltdown; I and most of my friends have a story of our parents having a meltdown and popping us one after having been pushed too far. These were, in all cases I’m aware of, one-off incidents from good and loving parents who just had more than they could handle at that particular moment in time and were horrified by their actions when they came to their senses.
Granted, our parents didn’t lose it as spectacularly as your wife, though one friend did get spanked with a wooden spoon hard enough to still have red streaks the next morning. (Her mom was cooking and happened to have it in her hand at the moment.) Then again, we didn’t provide anything like the level of provocation your son did, either.
“I would not hesitate to call the social services if I was aware of such a thing happening in a family I know. To say the truth, I’d probably call the American Child Protection services from my country if I knew the OP’s whereabouts (already did something like that for a person living in Canada, albeit in a significantly worse situation, and I don’t regret it). Better safe than sorry. I’d hate to know what the next step might be.”
Although I work in a field with juveniles with some major psychological problems, I am not going to attempt to diagnose this little boy. Our kids are 10 and older. Most psychologists are very hesitant to diagnose certain disorders on someone that young. However I also agree neurological testing might also help determine what is causing the behavior.
I am going to suggest like others that you look into family counseling, and see what kind of respite care services are offered in your area. Sometimes you do need a weekend or even a week away to preserve your own mental health.
Working with a therapist to institute some kind of safety plan for you, your wife and your son will help in the future when his behavior provokes an inappropriate response. It is hard to deal with a child that needy, and frustration causes our own behavior to escalate into dangerous territory.
Make sure to bring this up during any counseling sessions - that you have tried both positive and negative reinforcement with no success.
Has your son been tested to see where he stands, for lack of a better term, intellectually with his peers? I wonder if a learning disorder could be frustrating him and causing him to lash out behaviorally. Or it could be as simple as what happened with my husband - ear infections as a toddler had caused enough damage that he had hearing loss. As a child, he would misbehave in class out of frustration because he couldn’t hear clearly if he sat towards the back of the class. Moving a few seats forward helped.
My thoughts and best wishes are with you and your family.
There’s actually a kind of funny follow-up to that story. Many, many years later, when I was fully a teenager (16 maybe?), I mouthed off to my mother about something (no recollection of what it was), and my father was so mad, he stood up and unbuckled his belt. I looked him square in the eye and said, “Fine, go ahead and hit me. But just remember the last time, and think about who’ll hurt worse when you’re done; me or you.”
He buckled his belt back up and called out to my mother, “Eleanor, take away her allowance for X weeks.” To which I said, “Not that I’m happy to have my allowance taken away, but that’s certainly a more appropriate punishment,” and stormed off to my room.
Teenagers.
Still wishing you all the best. I’m confident you can come through this will all the help you’re seeking.
It’s likely that you’re not leveraging assistance from the school district enough. From what you’re saying it sounds like your child has disability that requires plans are resources developed specifically for him. Conferences and meetings are meaningless without a document that legally requires the school to provide assistance to him. He may have an IEP already, but from my experience it’s up to you to push hard for what’s actually required for you son to succeed in school. Do the research on IEPs and/or request and assessment in writing. If you come in armed for bear they will take you seriously.
IANAD - My daughter is on concerta for ADHD but they don’t help with her behavioral issues. For her behavioral issues she takes Zoloft. If you’re not happy with the therapy progress, try someone else. It took us a few different places before we were satisfied.
It’s fair to criticize what John_Stamos’ family has done here. I’m not going to police the thread to make sure people only say nice things and I’m sure John_Stamos didn’t expect everybody was going to react positively to the part about the beating. What clairobscur said is within the rules in this forum, that’s pretty much my only concern here. If you’ve got any other questions about it, please take it to a PM or ATMB. Thanks.
I cannot disagree more. A one-off event like the OP described is not sufficient reason to sic CPS on anyone, IMHO. As the parent of a child who went through some very difficult times, I can relate to absolutely losing your shit at the end of a hellacious day. I am shamed and embarrassed by it to this day. But I am an abuser? No. It sounds like the OP’s wife isn’t either.
Of course they need help dealing with this stuff. We all do- no one is born equipped to deal with this kind of thing. Most parents will never, ever have to deal with what the OP is dealing with, so it is very hard for them to relate, even if they think they can.
Child is hit. Screams. Is punished again. Screams. Is hit again for screaming. That’s how child abuse begins. Also : Child get bruises, and icy cold showers. Not the run-of-mill punishment nowadays, even though it was quite common when I was myself a kid. That’s also is quite worrying. Also : mother wants to get rid of her son for one year. Not a good sign either.
A mother who is at the end of her nerves, who wants to get rid of her son, beats him, and beats again because he screams to make him stop screaming is a really bad situation that could escalate quickly to child abuse. Again : what is she going to do next time? Will she tell her husband?
You might not have become an abuser, but the OP’s wife might become one. Apparently, the parents aren’t able any more to control the situation, or even to control themselves. I’ve no issue with calling CPS in such a situation. They aren’t the devil incarnate, and them also could help, including help the parents.
And again, better safe than sorry. I wouldn’t want not to have taken this step if I had personal knowledge of the situation and live to regret it. YMMV.
Funny how, when there’s a thread like this in MPSIMS or IMHO, about a situation that’s not yet at critical mass, someone mentions child services and they’re called self-righteous and accused of trying to destroy families. Meanwhile, in RO threads in the Pit, when the kid is dead or permanently damaged, people ask, “How could this happen? Didn’t anyone SEE? Why didn’t they report it?”
It’s must be nice to puff up your chest and proclaim judgement on someone looking for help in a near impossible situation. The OP was quite clear about the singular nature of the incident, how shocking it was, and the huge degree of regret and contrition afterwards by the mother. So here he is is on a message board looking for useful problem solving feedback, and your helpful contribution is to say “If I knew where you were I’d send the authorities to your house” so his feces smearing, other kid smacking and stabbing, utterly defiant, ferocious little kid with massive psychological problems can what… be institutionalized, be put into a group home with 10 other kids, strapped to bed, wearing a diaper and fed sedatives in a lock down facility? You appear to have some fantasy about what would actually happen to a highly dysfunctional (and somewhat dangerous) kid like this in the typical US social services system.
Many, many parents, I’d almost be willing to say most parents at one time or another during their lives have lost their shit with their normal kids just being their snotty selves, and delivered a serious smackdown on the kid. If this becomes chronic then kids need to be removed, but if you think you should be pulling kids for an utterly uncharacteristic one off incident there would not be enough social services on this planet to handle the load.
The OP is doing the best he can and it appears as if he is being proactive about trying to solve the problem. Delivering arrogant threats does nothing constructive.
