That’s precisely the point. She is not mature enough to understand that she controls her own actions and her own future. So your job, as a parent, is to set her up in situations where she makes her own good choices in spite of herself. No matter how much you would like it, you cannot control her. You might be able to for another year or two, but, ultimately, everything she does is her choice. She could choose to continue to act out, or choose to follow the rules and live a peaceful, successful, and happy life. You continue to force her to submit and some teenagers will explode in exactly the wrong direction.
In this situation, for whatever reason that you are not able to perceive, she is not able to function normally in your household. She is not able to make good decisions for herself in this environment. You have said repeatedly that she is able to make good choices for herself in a different environment.
Look at it from this direction:
Situation A: You keep her where she is and her levels of anger and frustration continue to mount. You keep battling with her because you are not able to communicate with her, or her with you. Her violence escalates, her peer group gets worse and worse. You send her to boot camp which makes her feel like a prisoner and removes all control she has over her life and her situation. It could either go well, or could backfire and make her seriously hate you for the rest of her life. After five years with this serious trauma having occurred it’s a tossup where she might be.
Situation B: You put her back in foster care, as she is at risk in her current situation. She acts sweet as pie, toes the line, does what she needs to do, goes to school, and lives through the next couple years of teenagerhood in a relatively peaceful situation. After a few years of adolescence and development, she might have a better grasp on her relationship with you and her self-destructive behavior patterns as a teenager.
I don’t think are understanding that right now she does not think as you do. I mean, literally does not mentally function in the same way. She is not capable–not because she’s not smart enough, but because teenagers are incapable of thinking abstractly or seeing long-term future consequences as necessarily relevant to their current actions. They are still going through a tremendous mental growth and developing adult-type thinking patterns that allow them to develop the ability to think abstractly, think about long-term future consequences, set long-term goals and strategies for success, and comparing themselves with their peer group in those terms.
Yes, it’s all very logical and straightforward from your point of view, she’s only holding herself back–but she can’t see that, no matter what you do or say, and forcing her is not going to make her understand, it’s only going to make her resent you.
Look, when I was a teenager, I made some very poor choices. I was going through some serious trauma that my parents did not know about. I could have fixed the whole thing by going to them and telling them what had happened, what I was upset about, and asking for the help I needed. My parents are wonderful, loving, supportive, compassionate people and they asked, they did, but I just wasn’t able to open up to them. It just was not something I was capable of doing at fourteen.
All the acting out, all the bad behavior, all of that was a collection of symptoms that reflected how I was feeling, and was no reflection whatsoever on my parents’ actions or lack thereof. They tried clamping down on me and forcing good behavior (which, in my case, extended to my appearance) which had the net negative result of the following reaction, illogical as it may be: “great, X is happening, and all they care about is that I wear too much black. They don’t like that? Let’s see what they think about piercings and tattoos.”
Like it or not, perception is reality, for all of us. What you perceive about her behavior, and what she perceives about it may be two very different things. Like it or not, you do not understand why she is acting this way, but you can still take steps to move the situation to a point of reasonable stability while you try to figure it out.
To put it another way, if I am working with an animal and it starts to act in a way that I don’t like, I have two choices. I can force it to do what I want, or I can stop my own actions, and try to figure out what is causing the behavioral change in the animal. Maybe it doesn’t like the physical environment. Maybe I brought the animal into a room that makes it feel insecure and defensive. I could continue to work with the animal in that room, and punish it when it shows its teeth and doesn’t pay attention because it’s too busy watching out for some perceived danger. Or, I could take it outside and work with it there where it feels comfortable and safe and relaxed.
I’ll bet you can guess how much better we can communicate when both of us feel safe and secure, and how much more we’ll both have learned. You don’t know why she’s acting out, but she is. It’s not that she’s a bad kid, you know that. You also know that there’s something about your environment that causes her to act out–it’s not the rules and structure, because she follows the same rules and structure somewhere else. So what else could it be?
