I placed this in GQ, hoping to get some real replies.
Butch is 24 years old and has a younger and older brother. His parents are very dear friends of mine.
Butch had some problems with police when he was a minor. As an adult, he got caught using stolen credit cards to buy drugs. The judge gave him four years in the big house.
He survived, got out and was enrolled in university classes and was working. While on probation, and texting while drunk, he wraps his car around a tree. He gets two more years in the big house.
He is back home and has a good job. Manages to save $2 grand, and buy a motorcycle. Then he turns the 2 g’s into crack in a two week period. And sold the motorcycle to get more funds for crack. Then proceeds to steal money, car keys of other people in the family.
He is currently serving 3 weeks in jail for non payment of a court fine. When he gets out, he will be receiving 10 weeks of workman’s comp, for an on the job injury. Which means free time and some sort of cash flow. I imagine he will be staying at the parent’s house, rent free.
I am sure that Butch has received the best drug rehab the state has to offer. It hasn’t worked.
His parents are at the end of their rope. Being “good” parents hasn’t worked. And I suggested that they seek professional advice on being a parent in this case. Being a parent is the biggest job in the world, yet we are so unprepared for it.
Maybe it is time to be the asshole parent? But, how do you do it? This off-spring is your son, your blood. Do you just lock the door and don’t look back?
I am sure some of you have been there, or know someone who has. Maybe you could provide some insight?
I like the line that they use on Intervention (paraphrased): “I will do everything in my power to help you live a clean, sober, responsible life, but I will do not do anything to enable your addiction or illegal activity.”
That’s not being an asshole, it’s being a good parent. A good parent would not help her child to do drugs or commit crimes.
You can always make a contract, signed or unsigned: I will allow you to live in my home as long as you (pay rent, don’t do drugs, don’t get arrested, whatever conditions you choose). Then if the conditions are not met, you remove the support.
I meant to add, the parents should definitely seek support for themselves. We have a good thread going about Al-Anon and alternatives, or they could seek therapy if they preferred. In either case, the support would be to help them live their lives, not to help fix Bruce in some way. As **Omar Little **said, Bruce has to be responsible for himself.
The first time my clients come to court, the whole family is there, along with that one coach from HS, a friendly neighbor, and maybe the family pastor.
Has anyone here had to actually do this? I’m curious because I am friends with the parents of a “Butch” and they simply can not watch him go down in flames on his own. They pay his rent, pay for his car and insurance. They don’t think they’re enabling, they think just a little more help and he’ll dig out of this hole. It’s so damn hard not to help your own kid, or to understand what exactly kind of help he needs.
I think people need to reassess their definition of “good” vs “asshole” parent.
Setting clear expectations for behavior and enforcing consequences is not being an “asshole”. The problem is that if you go for years letting the kid get away with stuff, it’s very hard to shift gears.
They need to set expectations, and have consequences for those expectations. It’s O.K. to pay the rent, conditioned on him getting a job or a degree within a designated time period. But paying the rent in order for someone to trash the place while constantly getting high and stealing from his parents and others to support a drug habit doesn’t help anyone.
The parents need to look honestly at what they are doing, and what they expect the results to be. This is where a support group or therapy can sometimes be helpful – not in changing the addict, but in helping the enablers to see clearly what’s going on.
Alanon would have experience with this kind of thing. Helping him get help is one thing, if he’ll apply himself. Helping him in a way that helps him do more drugs or be more irresponsible is just making it take longer for him to get desperate enough to want to change. I know a guy who lived for years knowing his son was homeless by choice. The son didn’t want to change, and wouldn’t take constructive help. So what can you do?
Agree, and I’ve tried to gently tell them that they are, in fact, enabling. They simply cannot break the chain, though. They say, “you’d understand if it was your kid,” and I can’t disagree because it’s not my kid. I honestly don’t know how I’d think if it was my kid.
My nephew didn’t have a drug problem, he just decided that he didn’t want to do any of the requirements for living at home. He didn’t bother to graduate from high school, he didn’t bother to get a job, he didn’t bother to do chores. He played video games all day. When he was 18 and out of high school his mother packed him up and dropped him off at the mission and said “good luck” He was back with an improved attitude the next day.
He did it again a year later, she did the same thing. One day later, he realized the demands of mom were not so bad.
He’s autistic.
Your friends are doormats.
They should read Beautiful Boy - more parents watching their son be homeless by choice because his choice is addiction.
I boomeranged back into my parents house in my early 20’s. There were reasonable expectations clearly stated before I moved in specifically because “we want to help you, but enabling you to be an unemployed loser isn’t help.” I spent about a year there and have been self sufficient ever since.
I had a friend whose parents were very firm that they would not give him money TO BUY DRUGS!!! but if he couldn’t pay the rent or utilities or auto insurance then they would pay those bills directly. Nevermind that he couldn’t afford to pay his own way because he spent his entire income buying drugs. He turned out predictably.
Contrary to being an asshole, the parent who summons up the strength and courage to do the kind of hard parenting that your friends will need to do with their son should be commended. It’s easy to raise good kids. I know, I have two. People congratulated me on how they turned out and I say in all honesty, I didn’t do much. I mostly stood aside and let them thrive. No extraordinary parenting skills required at all.
Had one of them been a bad apple and I had to be a different type of parent, I hope I would have risen to the occasion, but I can’t state with 100% certainty that I could have, particularly after their dad died and I would have had to do it alone.
First, why would you invite an adult into your home after they basically stole from you - let alone the whole trashing their life thing?
My wife’s relatives had a pretty good plan - the rule was, the son graduated but didn’t go to college? get a job, pay rent, no sitting on your ass for free. Ditto for their daughter when it was her turn. (fortunately no drugs involved) When the son got married, moved out and wanted to buy his first house, they took the rent he’d paid, which went into a savings fund, handed it to him, and he had a down payment. For the daughter, when she eventually moved out it was a start on her 401K savings. But both knew the parents were serious - no free ride.
Harlan Ellison had a pair of books, The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat collections of his TV critic columns. In one chapter, he published a script he’d tried to sell to Hollywood. Basically, old high school girlfriend shows up and plays the sob story, turns out to be an addict and robs him blind. When a relative says she’d been doing this for years, also remarks “she must have really loved you. She saved you for last.”
Addicts won’t change until they want to change. The parents have to face this fact. If he comes back home - he’ll rinse and repeat, stealing anything not tied down, and doing a life sentence in installments 2 years at a time.
I think it was Mark Twain who said, “if at first you don’t succeed, try again. If that fails, give up. No point being a durned fool about it.” I think the parents have given him plenty of chances. Either they say he’s out now, or they say he’s out next time no ifs ands or buts - and stick to it.
I agree. If anyone is the “asshole” here it’s Butch. Yes, he has an addiction problem, but he is also doing other criminal activities and throwing everything back in the face of those trying to help him.
The parent or parents enabling his behavior are the actual assholes in all this. Because once Butch starts to have a negative impact on others because they have been enabling him for years, then it’s a very hard vicious cycle that has been created.
I know someone who has a “Butch” in their family. I’ve heard the story over the years. As a teenager he stayed out all night, drank and did drugs. His parents looked the other way. When he finished high school, he convinced his parents that high school was so stressful that he needed to take off a full-year before starting college. During that time he didn’t hold a full-time job, did nothing to gain additional experience and devoted his time to doing drugs and now was selling them, full-time. He was arrested by undercover police for selling cocaine. In order not to get any jail time, he became a police informant. This led to him getting badly beaten by some he helped get put in jail. During this whole time, his parents financially supported him, allowed him to live in their home. He also had his girl friend move in with him, because she was pregnant. So here he is, a druggie, a drug dealer, no job, had been arrested and has a common law wife (who also didn’t work) and now started having kids. With his drug addiction out of control, he started beating his wife. She left him with the kids, while he continued to live in his parents house well into his 30s. Now he claims he can’t work and collects disability which everyone knows is an act.
This “Butch” ended up tearing the family apart, because once his father passed away, he took over the house. He prevented his mother from having contact with any other family members or friends and had the phone disconnected. No one outside of this situation could do anything about it, because I was told the mother was suffering from Stockholm syndrome. At this point, this “Butch” has turned into a full-blown paranoid schizophrenia. He has removed the mailbox from his house, won’t allow anyone to come into the home unless it’s law enforcement. I’m told you can’t have a normal productive conversation with this “Butch” any longer.
If only the parents had kicked him out of the house where he would have had to deal with life, he would have had a chance of leading a normal productive life and contribute to society. But this enabling was a lose-lose situation for everyone around him, including himself. To allow a teenager/young adult to not work, not go to school and just do drugs full-time is not going to lead to anything positive. Anyone who doesn’t think so, just isn’t living in the real world. It’s why employers drug test prospective employees because they don’t want this negative element in their lives.
I know there are some people who will tell you, an addict is an addict and there is nothing you can do to help them. Maybe that’s true, but they can’t be allowed to take down everyone else around them in their daily drama of how “unfair” the world is to them.
My brother is a Butch. I also have a stepbrother who is an ex-Butch.
At some point, people have to stop enabling the behaviors, drop the addict, and let them find their feet, or fail. This is hard, but also a kindness. At some point, the parents will no longer be around to pick up their kid, and what will happen then?
No one has done that yet with my brother; he’s still doing his Butch routine.
The ex-Butch stepbrother got tough love from my stepfather, and made a 180-degree turnaround. The guy spent a few nights on a park bench, realized that “homeless” was a crappy life choice, then got his act together.
The parents have to let the kid fail, and not save him from the consequences.
ETA: then the parents need their own therapy to talk through their emotions and cope with the guilt, and to obtain coping strategies for when Butch backslides.
I’m grateful to my parents in a lot of ways. When I was age 16 and struggling at high school through lack of motivation and an over-inflated idea of my own brilliance, too smart to do any work and failing at everything in sight, they agreed that the best thing was for me to leave, provided I got a job and paid my way. So there I was aged 16, working full time with grown adults and paying board and bills, and I grew up and learned a work ethic pretty damn quick, and figured out that maybe having read a bunch of books and having a quick mouth wasn’t going to give me the keys to the kingdom. I worked for 5 years and decided that maybe I should give this education thing another try, enrolled at university as a mature student and fucking aced a Masters because I’d given up a paying job and wasn’t there to fuck about. Best lesson of my life was that there are no free rides, from family or anyone else. Setting expectations and enforcing consquences isn’t being an arsehole parent; it’s being a good parent.
