My Problem Child

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have three sons- 16, 14, and 8.

The 8 year-old has always been a challenge. Even though he is intelligent, funny, charming, and charismatic, he has a difficult time making good decisions often.
Last Friday, he told me that a stranger hanging around our apartment complex asked him to touch his pee-pee. After I become upset and let him know that I’ll have to call the police to talk about this, he told me that it never happened and he made it all up.

Wednesday, I pick him up from school and he tells me that some lady came into school to ask him some questions about home and how he gets along with everyone here. We get home, and there’s a brochure and business card from a Child Protective Services worker. Someone called them because he told a friend that his older brother had beaten him up, I called the cops, and the brother was taken to jail. None of that ever happened, but now I’m being investigated by CPS. Not really a big deal, as there’s no violence in my home and I haven’t done anything wrong. Still a bit disconcerting, though.

This morning, he left for the bus stop by our complex right before I left for work, as usual. I noticed that he’d left his glasses, so I took them to the bus stop. He was not there with all the other kids. Another kid said he took off walking down the street. I walked around, then I drove around, calling his name and looking. Also crying and trying really hard not to totally freak out. After 10 minutes or so, I call the police. They drive around for a few minutes, then come back to tell me he had walked to another bus stop and was now at school. I then had to go to the school with the officer to talk to my son about what had happened. Both of us sobbing uncontrollably in the principal’s office with the cop, the principal, and the teacher. Fun!!

I know that all of these happenings and many more before them means back to counseling for him/us. He’s not a bad kid- he’s really quite a joy to be around, but we are really going to have to work on his decision-making skills and maybe tweak his ADD meds.

Not really looking for advice here- maybe some empathy, or even stories about your own problem children that grew up to be hugely successful.

Anything?

2

Did you ask him why he told the lies?

3

Make sure to see a psychiatrist, it might not just be ADHD. Or he might just need counseling, I don’t know, but a good psychiatrist should know.

4

Does he know the Tale of the Boy Who Cried Wolf?

5

He doesn’t know why he’s been making things up lately.

CPS getting involved with him may actually be a blessing- if they make contact, then they are required by law to offer services. I’m going to take advantage of that and get him into more effective counseling services than he’s gotten in the past, and for help with his daycare during the summer.

I don’t really have any answers as to what his problem is- for a long time I’ve been blaming it on the impulsiveness that ADD brings, and he does see a psych once a month for his meds, but obviously we’re reaching a point where more intensive therapy is needed. I don’t want to be doing this when he’s a teenager and his bad decisions produce more destructive results.

6

Not that I have kids or anything and this is probably totally obvious to you, but that sounds like attention-seeking behavior. Even if it’s negative attention for him, it’s still attention. I know that when I was a kid and made up stories that weren’t trying to avoid punishment, I typically wanted to feel special, or to get attention from my classmates or something. Have his siblings been doing things lately that get them attention so that he’s feeling neglected, perhaps? Has he been picked on at school and doesn’t feel like he can do anything about that so he acts out in other ways? Sorry if you’ve thought about this already.

7

It is a real possibility that he’s looking for attention and/or to seem/feel special. I am a single mom, and I work full time. The age difference between his brothers and him is, right now, vast. He’s cute, funny, and cool, but he does get picked on at times, and himself being a real drama king, takes great offense at being targeted by a bully, and will convince himself and you that nobody likes him and everybody hates him and he’s gonna eat some worms.

I do endeavor to give him an extraordinary amount of time and attention, but I can’t blame him if he feels it’s not enough- it’s probably not. I’m going to be spending a lot of time with his this weekend with just us, and we’ll talk. Thanks!

8

Good grief, I feel for you Alice The Goon, your plate is full.

9

I had one of these–my middle son–and he’s now in his early 20s and turned out okay.

Here are some of the things that happened. When he was in kindergarten he told people he had a volcano in his yard, a stepfather who was in the Mafia, and an uncle who was in jail. All equally false. (No stepfather or uncle to speak of. Except for a couple of incidents involving anti-war demonstrations in the '60s, nobody in the family has been to jail.*)

Grade school: Sold a lot of stuff for some school promotion, apparently by asking people “If you could have any of this stuff you wanted, what would you take?” without making sure they would actually pay for the stuff.

When he was about 8 we went to the pool with the kids from across the street. He disappeared. The rest of us fanned out looking for him (thereby losing our place in line to get into the pool, which was only letting people in as other people came out because it was full). Then he turned up with another family, helping the father of that family carry a water cooler. It turned out that this guy, a total stranger, had walked up to him and asked him if he wanted to earn a dollar, and he said sure. He’d been warned about things like that, but apparently the warnings did not take.

Many, many trips to the principal’s office. Only one trip apiece to the police station and the emergency room.

He was diagnosed as ADHD, got a trial scrip of Ritalin, and decided he did not want to take even one pill. He was old enough by then that I figured it was his choice and he had alternative strategies, which he said he’d prefer to use. (So I took them, but that’s a different story.)

He just squeaked through high school, in fact the only reason he made it was that he did an independent study thing that involved explaining high-level physics concepts to students who hadn’t been able to follow them before–and it worked.

Refused to go to college. He had pretty dire grades but did very well on the SAT and a couple of advanced placement tests. In general, the way to get him to perform well in a class was to suggest to him that he couldn’t do it. He finally did decide to take a couple of college-level classes. He took Japanese.

He is doing great. In high school, he got a job as a data entry clerk with a high-tech company. He taught himself programming, finagled a programming job, studied on his own, worked hard, solved some problems with the company’s software, got sent to a couple of company seminars, and ended up as a network administrator. He then was offered a job at another high-tech company as a software development engineer. Got a sign-on bonus (payable over a two-year period) that was more than I make in a year. Bought himself a condo and a $45,000 car.

So he is doing okay, probably better than could be expected for having a weirdo for a mom.

*Or so I thought until I located my birth father. However, that only happened a couple of years ago.

10

+1

11

Yeah, my plate is pretty full.

I’m glad to hear of your son, Hilarity N. Suze. I feel like Nathan can either be a huge success- game show host, maybe- with his charisma and charm he captures everyone’s heart immediately- or a huge failure, prison maybe. He has a way with words and an innate awareness of complex emotional issues- more than enough to know just what to say to manipulate you into giving him “one more chance”. He is sooo cute and sweet and loveable- it’s just that when faced with the choice to do this (the normal, acceptable thing) and that (the bad, bad thing), he will more often than not choose that. How many times in the last two years I have looked at him, mouth agape, and asked “How could you do that??” (He doesn’t know, by the way.)

I’m obviously going to have to give him even more than I have been (and missing even more work for him!), even at the expense of time and attention to the older boys. They will understand, I think. Even though Nathan tries them, too- he will always, always say something so freaking WITTY that none of us can be mad at him for long, including them.

12

Do not respond to me, as the answer is none of my business (or anyone else’s), but consider this question:

Was there a period during the first year of his life when you were unable to care for him (e.g., for medical reasons–yours or his, military deployment, or whatever)? The reason I ask, and it might be something to consider when talking to his new counselor or psychiatrist, is that some of his behavior is very similar to that of my son who suffers from Reactive Attachment Disorder. The sooner RAD is addressed with a kid, the better chance the kid has to overcome it. (And if no gap in caregiving occurred, I would not worry about that too much, if at all. My only concern is that trying to address ADD in a teen or pre-teen is limited to damage control, not actual recovery, and some of your son’s behaviors are similar to those of my son.)

13

Be VERY careful about allowing these people into your life, Alice. Around where I live, the courts have become a profit center and these “services” end up being billed to the parent with the court applying “child support” laws to enforce collection. These can end up costing you tens of thousands of dollars. :eek:

14

Eh, I suppose it doesn’t hurt to ask that question once, in a non-threatening matter-of-fact way, but go easy with that. One of my abiding negative memories of childhood is my mother endlessly asking in an agonized tone, whenever my behavior fell below her expectations, “Why? WHY? Just tell me, why did you DO that?” I remember thinking “Gee mom, I’m an 8-year-old [or whatever age] kid, I’m supposed to psychonanalyze myself?”

Most kids (and even adults) don’t have the level of self-knowledge, much less the ability to articulate it, that would permit a truly insightful answer to that kind of question. So I wouldn’t press it.