My daughter skipped school once. I walked her to school, to the principal’s office to check in every morning for a month. When I stopped, I told her that if she skipped again, I’d walk her to the principal’s office every morning for a month, while wearing curlers and slippers, and loudly greeting everyone we meet. No problems since.
That said, we live two blocks from the school, and my work schedule allows me to walk her to school. I have nothing but sympathy for people who have to choose between going to work and making sure they’re kid actually goes to school. This parenting thing is hard under the best of circumstances, and the more limited your resources are, the harder it is.
Do you have children? Because they’re not actually empty vessels, waiting for you to fill them with qualities you approve of. They have inherent personalities of their own. Do you consider yourself to be *completely * the result of your parents’ skills in raising you?
Oh, next to zero. 14/first year of high school is when the envelope really starts getting pushed, rebellion wise. But again, I don’t believe chronic truancy is something that “just happens” at the age of 14.
Parents find themselves in a catch-22, because you’re encouraging this person who is becoming an adult to be independent and make their own choices, but at the same time still enforcing rules they consider necessary for this person to learn to adapt to society. Enforcing those rules is sometimes difficult and never fun. But I’ve noticed a trend toward being a friend to your child, and that doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a good relationship with your child, but it should be clear that you are the parent and the rules you’ve set down are not up for negotiation.
I saw this too, and the impression I got wasn’t that she was being jailed for her kid cutting class, she was being jailed because she didnt do anything to stop it. She didnt ask the school for help, call the cops, church, local support groups…nothing. She just gave up on it.
Now, had the mother tried every concvieable means to help her daughter and nothing worked, but was jailed anyway. I would have a problem with that. As it stands now, with the limited info I have, I dont see a issue with this.
Sure enough, but sometimes parenting problems don’t show up in earlier ages. Whatever problems there were might not have found expression until too late. And then sometimes the parents aren’t even the problem.
My parents, while not perfect, were just about as good as any could be expected to be. And yet when my sister hit that age, she was a hellion. I think she was arrested 2 or 3 times before she was 15. Myself, I was much better behaved. Meaning I didn’t get caught.
And rebellion isn’t always a sign of something gone wrong. We are programmed, at some point, to assert our differences over our parents and find our own way. It’s part of nature’s plan for us to become autonomous humans. Unfortuanately, this doesn’t always mesh well with the roles society has set up for teenagers. Most people find some middle ground, but not always.
I was under the impression that police services were paid for from the tax base, not on an individual use basis. How would calling the police (or the truant officers) have cost the family money?
There’s a charge for the school bus? Every school I attended that had a bus service provided the service free to the user. Of course, the funds to operate said service came from the tax base.
Where I live, the school bus is only available to kids in kindergarten through eighth grade, *and * only to K - 8ers who live two or more miles from school.
The ordeal doesn’t end with calling the police. The kid would be arrested, They’d have to come up with bail, a lawyer would be hired, time off work, etc.
Maybe she lived close enough that she didn’t qualify for the bus service. But my guess is that the mother wanted to ensure the kid was actually getting to school; hence, driving her rather than hoping she’d actually board the bus.
That looks like a very high rate to me (if it means “at any point in time 10 % of children who should be at school, are not”). Or does it mean “10 % of children are not at school when they should be, at least occasionally”?
Things have changed. At least here in California they have. I rode the school bus for free, too. Now, since the state Dept. of Education can’t afford the upkeep and costs of maintaining school buses and wages and benefits for drivers, parents are paying. It costs $350 a year for my daughter to ride the bus round trip. $200 per semester or for an annual pass for one way only, to or from school. Oh, they’re very nice if you have more than one kid riding the bus. Buy two passes, get the third one free. :rolleyes:
Shit, you bet me to it. These days, parents are limited in how much and what sort of discipline they can administer. I’m gonna sound like a cranky old fart, but in MY day, if I played hooky even once, let alone chronically, I would have gotten my ass kicked by mom, and then again by dad when he got home (no they weren’t abusive, but they did have a finite amount of patience, and I was hard headed). Do that today, and you go to jail for abuse. Then again, what happens if the kid has grown big enough to kick your ass? It sounds like a no-win situation. You can’t control them, and they’re till too young for the “get the hell out” speech too.
She didn’t, unfortunately, and I couldn’t find anything to back up her statement by googling when I posted. It seemed high to me as well; that’s why the story caught my attention. Truancy is defined (at least by my children’s school) as three straight days absent without a valid excuse from a parent or doctor.
If it just means the first case, that honestly doesn’t seem that bad to me. Let’s say you have 30 kids in a class. That means at any given time, 27 are going to be present. In a school environment, whatever is “going around” gets around fas. Kids are sick a lot. Add to that various random other reasons a person might need to miss class, and the occasional person actully “skipping” class. I don’t know if these stats include excused absenses, but often even if there is an excuse, people don’t bother to offically document it.
My take on the whole jail situation is that it is probably too late for the mother to become a great parent, and jailing her only puts a burden on the system and keeps her out of work. I think state dention with a lot of community service-for the kid-would be a better solution.
Sorry it took me so long to reply-- I’ve been out of town for a few days.
Normal rebellion is one thing, open defiance is another. Every kid goes through a stage of testing the boundries. I, myself, went through a rebellious phase and did some things I now wish I hadn’t, but I never would have dreamed of saying, “I won’t go to school and you can’t make me.”
My parents didn’t physically punish me, but I feared their anger and dissapointment nevertheless. My disobedience was always furtive because I knew there’d be consequences if I was caught. Though I did not always obey, I had a healthy level of respect for my parents and would never have even contemplated openly defying them.
No, I do not, but I well remember my own childhood, and I have several nieces and nephews. I’ve seen good parents and bad parents, good kids and bad kids. I’m aware that raising kids is not easy, and that sometimes, even with your best efforts, kids can go bad, but in my experience, kids don’t usually “go wild” all of a sudden.
I know this may sound strange, but the best way I can explain the way I’m thinking is to point to dogs. It’s very rare for a perfectly trained, well-socialized dog just to suddenly haul off and bite someone. Yes, it happens on occasion, but 99.9% of the time, the signs that the dog had aggressive tendencies were there all along. Usually, the dog gave cues that it was likely to bite which were either unrecognized or dimsissed by their owners.
Kids are much the same way-- parents ignore little defiances and when the kid is out of control, wonder why. It’s generally a slow build-up of bad behaviors which the parents ignored or excused, a pattern of slowly worsening behavior until the child is completely out of control.
I believe that we are products of our socialization, yes. Not prisoners, mind you: a child raised by racists is not certain to be a racist themselves when they are adults. It’s more likely, but not a certainty. Likewise, a person who is raised well can chose to go against it, but it’s not all that common. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” fits this situation. Most often, people end up being quite similar to their primary socializers in their morals/ethics.
I do credit my parents with instilling in me a strong sense of empathy and a firm moral code. My parents were my primary socializers, and children tend to take on the characteristics of their primary socializers. Primary socializers are not always the child’s parents. If the child is raised in a permissive or dysfunctional environment, the child’s friends may assume that role, and if their socialization was anti-social, they can instill those values.
I’ve got a buddy with three sisters- two of whom were adopted from Vietnam as small children. Nicest family you could find…mom is an elementry school teacher who bakes cookies, dad works in his shop, everyone lives a nice middle class existance in their small mountain town. All of the kids were a little dorky, but overall nice ane easy going people.
Except one. She’s 13, runs away if left alone for even a moment, has expressed a desire to get pregnant, and seems to be doing whatever she can to make that happen. All of her “friends” are older drug users. Clearly something deep in her childhood (she was adopted at 5) is surfacing with puberty. This family has enough money to send her to an out-of-state “school for wayward teens” where she has 24 hour supervision.
Now, growing up in a third-world orphanage is kind of an extreme situation. But all kinds of trauma can happen to young children that takes a while to come to fruition. And not everyone has the resouces for these 50k a year private prisons.
The police will not and can not take a child in to custody unless they have committed a crime (I remember as a teen one of my friend’s parents tried to do this). A parent cannot relinquish their responsibility for their teenage child. It’s hard enough for a poor person to find a dentist to look at their freaking teeth when they have a toothache- it’s not like there is some “wayward teen” phone number you can call where they dispach people immediately to help you.
