Making kids mind

In My Humble Opinion
41

And all kicking them out does is make them see that there parents don’t really care about them, they just care about bullshit rules, but their friends will be there for them no matter what because that’s what true love is.

Kids are really, really dumb and make poor decisions. And sometimes you really do have to draw a line in the sand and leave them in jail overnight or tell them that they aren’t welcome in your home until they stop . That’s true. But other times, those sorts of ultimatums are literally the event that leads them to start trading sex for a place to stay or committing suicide or dealing drugs or breaking into houses or hanging out with absolutely terrible people whose only redeeming feature is that they are willing to put up with your kid’s shit–and so your kid latches on to them.

There’s a time and a place for tough love. But other times it’s the worse possible thing you can do. I’ve seen it work and I’ve seen it go terribly wrong. So I’m not going to second guess anyone else, or offer them advice from my comfortable vantage point. You do the best you can and hope like hell it works.

42

Well, my oldest is only 3, so I’m not quite there yet. But in general, the rules are:

  • Be a good role model
  • Be honest
  • Be consistent
  • Be in charge

Also be in a relationship with them. You can’t just ignore them all the time, then show up and expect people to do what you ask.

But here’s what I do with my son when he’s not acting right and my wife’s negotiations appear to be failing. I simply grab whatever toy he’s playing with and take it away. That usually get’s his attention where he responds with a “NOOOOOOO!!”. At that point I simply say “please go brush you teeth”, at which point he usually complies and I give it back.

Basically, kids sometimes just need a gentle reminder on how many cards they aren’t holding. That can be the car, the iPhone, having the police show up at your 15 year old daughter’s boyfriend’s house, or any number of other things that a teenager can’t typically provide for themselves.

43

I’ll say first that my child is eleven, so I don’t have a teenager yet, and I might have to eat crow in a few years. I’ll also say my child’s temperament and my own mesh well, so we don’t have the same relationship that some parents and children do.

That said…

I had a conversation with my co-worker about obedient children. It’s very important to her that her children obey. Obedience is not a quality I seek to instill in my child, nor one that I was good at as a child (or, um, as an adult) In our house we don’t have a lot of rules, and the ones we have IMO are worthwhile. I expect my son to follow the rules of our house because they make sense and keep us all safe/comfortable.* I expect him to follow the rules of the school and society because they are there for the same reasons. I guess my school of thought is not to get the children to “be good” because we tell them to, and they mind us…but rather because stealing from your dad and calling him names is a rotten thing to do. Doing drugs isn’t good for her (so don’t do them for THAT reason, rather than because I told you not to…although telling her not to and doing so himself is problematic, obviously)

I’m not sure I’m expressing myself well but what I mean to say is that in my opinion it is not terribly important to get children to mind. It is more important to get them to understand the importance of making good choices because that’s who they want to grow up to be.

*He regularly reads with a flashlight after he’s supposed to be asleep. I had always just pretended not to know. He recently confessed that he does “secret reading” at night.

44

The OPs friend has got a problem. I don’t really know if he can make a screeching u-turn with any success. Corporal punishment won’t work, if it ever could. I would maybe look into a boot camp type intervention. My Daddy was a USMC drill instructor when I was growing up. Tough wasn’t enough word for our household. We had inspections, k.p. duty, policing the house and yard. And endless lectures. But, (a big but) we were loved and taken care of. At the time I would’ve done almost anything to get out of there. Now I see what he was doing. With 8 kids and a sick and dying Mother, he had to have control or chaos and bedlam would have taken over. I was a softer, and more open to debate parent. I still managed to be considered strict, if you ask my kids. I hold no truck with lazy parenting. Or misbehaving parents. If you want to party and don’t want to do the work don’t have children. It is the hardest job you’ll ever have to do. And also the most rewarding.

45

Really easy to do if you don’t love your kids. But as Manda Jo said, do you want your kid on the street trading sex for drugs - or even a place to sleep. Because they’ve fallen into addiction, or are having sex at fourteen, do you think they should end up in jail for dealing because its the way to eat and feed your habit?

And probably worthwhile if you think your kid is beyond redemption. A few of them possibly are, and not enabling them and cutting your losses might be for the best. But at fourteen, most of them aren’t. Most of them have a good kid - if not a great kid - buried underneath stupid teenager. One that may reemerge if you provide love, support, what advice and discipline manage to get through, and time.

There is a medium option - which is a group home. You can send them to a group home and hope like hell that the counselors and program will overcome the fact that the other kids in the group home are the definition of “bad influence.” The state will charge you if you can afford it for your kid’s time in the group home - and they aren’t cheap - so that might be a consideration. If you are wealthy, you can lock them up in a private school setting for delinquent kids - and again, hope like hell that the peer group pressure is weaker than the counseling influence.

When you hear stories like this, just pray (or hope) that you’ll never have to choose.

By the way, my friend’s nephew - the one who managed to get thrown out of a group home and probably sells meth to middle school kids - is not facing the consequences of his actions - and he won’t until he’s doing a long prison term or gets shot. In the meantime, there are middle school kids who are facing the consequences of his actions. At least if he mother were capable of providing a roof over his head, he might not choose to deal to tweens to provide one for himself.

46

That was a consistent from you from a young age. Tough love, love and discipline.

The OPs friend has raised a daughter who has had no consistency. You don’t learn that at 14 from your inconsistent parent. You MIGHT learn that at 18 if you join the Marine Corp.

47

The guy has problems which are far beyond normal parenting. If he has any sense of responsibility as a parent, he needs to consult with a professional on this.

48

You also have to hope like hell that the staff aren’t abusers themselves or that the whole thing isn’t a scam to keep your kid as long as possible at thousands of dollars a week. Or that when they recommend insane medication, they know what they are talking about and, if they do, that they are thi king about what’s best for your kid, not just what’s easiest.

49

My parents threw in the towel when I was 14, and turned me over to my aunt and uncle.

My behavior wasn’t terrible, but my school performance was, and my relationship with my parents, especially my mother, was. I think I might have been depressed, but I’m not sure. At any rate, I was a totally different kid after a few months with my aunt and uncle. Their different methods of discipline helped, and also they believed me that the headaches I was getting were really BAD, and took me to the doctor, who finally diagnosed migraines.

There wasn’t a lot the doctor could do, other than recommend caffeine and Tylenol during the aura stage (which actually helped sometimes), and giving me darvocet and a nausea medication for the actual headaches. The nausea medication worked, and the darvocet put me to sleep. I woke up with the headache gone, nearly all the time; sleeping through it was a blessed relief. So was being believed. So was not having to go to school the morning after a migraine, if my homework wasn’t done. I got a 24 hr. reprieve on the homework for my morning classes, and the morning to do the homework for my afternoon classes, because I hadn’t been able to do it the evening before. Also, nobody nagged me if I didn’t want to eat dinner.

I got a headache maybe every 6 weeks, so we’re talking about something that happened maybe 5 or 6 times in a school year. Not a big deal academically to miss a handful of mornings.

Mostly, I didn’t have any screaming fights with my mother anymore. That helped a lot too. My grades weren’t so-so my freshman year, but they got better every year, and I made the honor roll my junior and senior years. I also had really good grades in college. I’m not sure I would have made it through high school, had I been with my parents.

Now, I had a pretty volatile temperament-- I was not an easy kid. As a counterpoint, my brother got straight As all through high school, and never fought with my parents. He was just an easier kid than I was. But I spent a lot more time with my aunt and uncle as a little kid than my brother did, because my mother was still in school, taking classes for her Ph.D, and working as a graduate assistant. She couldn’t really dictate her own schedule, and my father was an associate professor, so he got the dregs as well. That’s why my aunt, a SAHM, took care of me a lot (they paid her, but I doubt a lot). By the time my brother came a long, my mother was working on her dissertation, and except for some time when she traveled, which was mostly during the summer, she was able to set her own schedule. My father became a full professor, and could pick the times for his classes. So my brother wasn’t raised by my aunt as a small child.

50

It was never my desire to teach Celtling to be obedient. Obedience doesn’t work in today’s world. I have, however, required that she be reasonable. And that she learn to trust. She knows that I almost never bark an order at her, so on the rare occasions that I do she acts first and asks questions later. Then she expects a reasonable answer as to why the order was so urgent or important that I couldn’t ask respectfully and explain beforehand.

That trust had to be earned, and maintained. If one week I decided to give out random, arbitrary orders and refuse to explain them, by day three she’d surely be ignoring them.

Your friend needs to get the board out of his own eye before he goes after the splinter in hers. She’ll notice the change if he makes one, and respect can be earned at that point. But it sounds to me like your friend’s daughter is following his example pretty closely. That’s different from “not minding.”

51

This guy is not really a friend as much as an acquaintance, I don’t socialize with him, I just happen to be in the same place he is very often. The girls mother died from a drug OD when the girl was about two and she has no memory of ever having a mom. She got off to a rough start from the git go.

52

It all starts at birth. Most parents who lose control of their kids do it in the first 18 months.
Being old, it was still OK to be spanked etc., even though I did not ever get an over the knee whipping, there was never the need.
I am the second oldest of 8 live births and the consistency started at birth if what I saw with my younger siblings is any clue.
My parents did what they said they would and later, seeing the younger ones come up, I could see why I was not like the OP’s kid or others here who are or had to struggle with control of their kids. IMO, they blew it in that first year.

At the point of being a teen, if they are as described like in this thread, the odds are, IMO, about 60/40 that they will survive until they are 25. The parents need to wrap their minds around that and be aware.

Being a good parent in this day & time is even more so than before the hardest job a person can ever do.

IMO, there is nothing left that can turn the OP’s kid around. I hope I am wrong but experience says I am correct.

53

It is a long shot but it can work in some cases. My best friend’s younger brother got married and then started drinking and using drugs hard. To make a long story short, his parents finally just called the Parish Sheriff (a family friend) when he was in his 20’s and had him arrested and thrown in jail for a week. They visited him every day and explained exactly why they were so disappointed in him and what he needed to do to fix it immediately and then they sent him to rehab. He did it and now he is a model family man with a set of twins.

That is a little different than the question in the OP because he wasn’t out of control as a teenager but it does demonstrate that a parent’s job doesn’t necessarily end even after a child is grown. I have a younger cousin that required an intervention in his late 20’s as well after a near fatal drunken motorcycle crash among countless other things and he is doing just great as an husband, father and employee as well. The odds may not be good but it is never too late to try. The key difference may be that the ones in my examples actually have responsible parents.

54

I used to have a copy of an article about how to raise a juvenile delinquent. The copy is long gone, but IIRC, the idea is that you start of with a defiant child and then have inconsistent parenting.

I believe that a lot of parents, including myself, just get lucky on our kids’ personalities. I think most parents are reasonable and it generally works.

I know of people who believe they are exceptionally excellent parents, and believe that they are the reason for their child’s successful outcome.

It’s always interesting to watch someone who has an easy child first and who breaks their arm patting themselves on the back then have a difficult child.

Now I’m in education I see many more children and see those who try even the best of parents and teachers.

That said, it doesn’t sound like this father is in the top of the class. It has to be hard to have lost his partner but you have to wonder if he’s not coping poorly in general.

Certainly the girl has drawn a bad hand. That really sucks. it also sounds like the OP isn’t close enough to have a sit down discussion about what would be the best for the girl.

What a sad situation.

55

Extraordinarily simplistic, but what worked in my household growing up was, “One of you does something wrong, you’re both punished.” Now, I can easily see where this method could go off the rails, but it did the trick.

56

14 is too late for parenting. The only hope is to get them all in family therapy. The father needs to spend lots of time with the daughter to show his love and appeal to her natural desire to please him. Then get real about all the inevitable bad consequences her behavior will produce. They need to get better together.

57

I just want to toss this out their. Calling the police is a bad idea. Unless they are physically assaulting you… The police are not equipped for this. Increasingly I have more and more of my guys going to calls where a 9 year old is backtalking his parent. Once after the third call from a woman about her eight year old I gave her information about parenting classes our juvenile courts were offering… she was actually insulted.

58

I disagree with the fourteen year old is too late sentiment. Others have said the same. I think you have to seek therapy with the child and change your ways. If the kid sees you being straight up. changing your shit… setting rules and sticking to it… then they’ll go with it. Kids naturally want stability and discipline. I never understood that till adulthood. My buddy was in a broken home and dropped out… he spent all his time at my house with me and my parents… go figure

59

I don’t think its a great idea either, but there is little else you can do.

My experience is that they don’t go to therapy. When they do go to therapy, they sit there and say nothing. And after six sessions the therapist says this isn’t working. Alternatively, you get a child who says all the right things to a therapist, but doesn’t follow through (this was my own kid). But since it takes a month to get into a therapist and the sessions are separated by a week or more - you are three to six months further through the problem and have not managed to create any change. Therapy only works for people interested in change.

60

so what purpose does this defeatism serve?

because teenagers with an outwardly destructive streak affect other people too, not just you.