It couldn’t be more perfect if it was a full-fledged conspiracy that had the singular purpose of keeping our children helpless.  They simply cannot deal with the unpredictable, the uncharted, the unfamiliar.  We have taken away their capacity to think on their feet.  They have been understood and collaborated with to a point where they are ineffective at navigating even the most innocent of confusing situations.  Their brains freeze up and they lurch to some bizarre response, pursue fight or flight or simply have the deer in the headlights look that says we have enabled them to the point of possible no-return.

Two examples: One young man was ready to leave the program and be employed full-time at a job we had lined up for him.  19 years-old and being given the opportunity to earn $28,000 a year plus benefits.  To see if he was ready, we gave him one last real life test.  It was a Thursday and he had just told one of the staff members that there was no way he would blow this chance.  He came by the office and jokingly said something borderline inappropriate to the boss.  He was immediately confronted and told that he needed to rethink what had just happened and come up with a better response.  He looked lost.  Again, it was demanded that he make a different choice.  Out comes the old behavior - oppositional, screw you, “I have no idea what you are talking about”, you can’t tell me what to do.  One last time, a directive to fix this and still he was blank.  In 120 seconds, he had blown a pretty sweet deal.

Another young man was volunteering at a startup program that had just received funding.  As such, there was no equipment yet, no routine established, no official start date.  His response was to say that the situation was “fishy” - how could a program have no equipment?  It was as if he thought that we are all just dropped into situations where everything we need is already there.  He was literally overwhelmed with the idea that nothing was ready yet and it was going to have to be created each day.  He quit.  Full-time job, money for college, high demand skills being taught, all weeks away, and he could not deal with the uncertainty that it wasn’t there this minute.

We have done this to them.  We have rendered our children impotent in the face of the spontaneous, the unusual, the seemingly incomprehensible.  We have robbed them of what is necessary to be creative, patient, visionary.  What is it that we get out of making our young people helpless?  What grand advantage, what sick rationalization, what pathological need moves us to ensure that our children are ill-equipped to navigate the parts of life that are potentially the most exciting, rewarding, open-ended, change producing? 

To their kids, dads are often bigger than life.  They are influential in ways they might not be aware of… the following is a letter from a 10 year-old to his dad.

“Dear Dad,

I haven’t been acting to good the last couple of weeks.  I have been talking smart and having a bad attitude toward some things but I think you should not fly off the handle and start to yell at me.  You should listen to what I have to say.  example.  Yesterday you said nobody did anything in the way of helping around the house and you started to yell and I was about to say Jerry and I worked for an hour.  You didn’t let me say anything and got mad.  You always say I get mad and be a bad sport (no offence) but you also get mad and pouty and on sundays you are so edgy and say things about mom and swear.  You say not to say dirty words and stuff when I do it yet you do it.  I tell you about it but you say I make you mad and that’s true but have you ever thought that we do it because were mad.  It doesn’t only apply to children.  You end up punishing us without punishment.  I will try to do better and I would like it if you did to.  Love, your son Bobby.”

There is a lot of cliché advice out there but most of it is sanitized pabulum.  It is the empty feel good stuff.  You don’t have to think too much, you don’t have to do anything differently, you don’t have to do any heavy lifting.  Apparently, it tells parents and societal helpers what they want to hear free of controversy, conflict or the need to change the status quo.

A great example of this is when we are told that it is a good idea for families to have meal time together.  And then the authors cite all the benefits of sitting down together.  Or the big push for mentors and how just hanging out with kids can turn their lives around.

The fact is that a number of large studies on mentoring conclude that mentoring in and of itself isn’t all that effective.  It is much more than the relationship and simply being ourselves.  If mentors are not active change agents, engaging kids in a new way of thinking, provoking them to relish the exploration of the unknown, motivating them to question the suffocation of their own little boxes, teaching them to welcome and thrive in the unpredictable, then what’s the point?

The family sitting down to eat together and perpetuating all the negative patterns of behavior is useful how?  If I have a captive audience and I don’t use the precious time for something extraordinary, then it is just another notch on the belt of mediocrity.  Sis-boom-bah.

Are we really that frightened of mixing it up with the kids?  We need someone to let us off the hook with the emptiness of “why can’t we all just get along?”  It is not always about taking the path of least resistance.  Sometimes it is about cooking up something unforseen, experimental, pioneering and outside our own limited, protective little shells.  Bon appétit.

The week before last I met with 9 teenagers and young adults.  I offered them the opportunity of a lifetime.  A full-time job for 47 weeks.  The experience of building a new house from scratch with green technology and renewable energy applications.  The ability to earn $2400 each for college.  The promise of assistance to find employment and/or college admission at the end of the 47 weeks.  And a variety of support and incentives along the way.

After the meeting, it was obvious they were excited about being a part of a project that was bigger than any one person.  Each had expressed the fact it was difficult for them to find employment and no job possibility had the perks this one did.  They were ready to go, they said.  They were told the interview process would be intense, in part, because the opportunity was great.  I scheduled an individual meeting with each for last Tuesday, June 2nd.

By June 2nd, one was in jail, one decided to work a cash job for the day thinking he could reschedule the interview at the last minute and one was angry, defiant and acting entitled and even after being asked to take a break and come back and try it again, he was unable to present himself appropriately.  The other six were barely prepared and will be offered a second interview with no guarantees.

For 27 years, I have heard all the arguments about being positive, talking to kids about success, building their self-confidence, doing the “you can do it” pumping.  But that is the easy work.  It’s clean and nice and uplifting.

None of this will be effective unless we are willing to address the power of failure and the reality of sabotage and self-defeating behavior which permeates many of this generation of kids.  Failure is not just the end result; it is the thinking process along the way.  We grossly underestimate its active presence.  By doing so, we fail our children.

Who is going to dare to crawl into the interconnected caves of their minds, whether invited or not, to see what lurks there and to do battle with the patterns of thought that foment the destruction of opportunity?  Who is going to wade into the cesspool of their unacceptable behavior and tell them in no uncertain terms, “not on my watch”?  Who has the guts to take on empty vessels that care for little, want for nothing, in order to demonstrate that there is a higher authority based upon principle and value and seniority?  If not parentwarriors, then who?

Worth another look…

If I dress my dog up to look like a duck and try to get everyone to believe it’s a duck, it would be foolish.  But every single day I work with kids who talk about how they have changed when in fact they have only temporarily modified their “appearance” and soon they will return to the same self-defeating behavior that caused the problems in the first place.  I remind them that the definition of behavior change is: when old behavior is gone forever and replaced with new behavior.  I tell them that when this has happened they won’t have to sell me or anyone.  We will all know…

Thousands of times I have heard these words: “If I knew what to do (to change), I would do it.”  This is not true.  There are many times we know exactly what to do and we do not do it.  Families (like individuals) are programmed to resist change.  The family thermostat is set at the “comfort zone”.  Any action, no matter how well intentioned, that pushes the family outside the zone is met with all kinds of elaborate defense systems, offensive weapons and plain and simple opposition.  “I cannot do what you suggest.  I am not powerful enough to change my kid’s behavior.  I’ve tried everything.  It must be a chemical imbalance.  You can’t just do things differently because someone tells you to.  His father and I just see it differently.  They will grow out of it.  It’s because of the divorce.”

If you could step outside the situation, just for a moment, you would see how nonsensical this is but at ground level it seems sort of reasonable.  All these well practiced assertions are designed to keep families in the comfort zone and justify the inability to change.  So family members are left to modify and then return to the same old self-defeating behavior.  At least it’s comfortable, right?

When parents finally get to parentwarrior, they have, more than likely, run the gamut of therapy for the children and themselves, medication trials, school interventions, self-help books and an assortment of other attempts and nothing has worked.  Nothing has changed the bad situation at home.  Their kids are still being pains in the ass and now they have run out of options or ideas about what to do next.  So, unfortunately, parentwarrior is like a last resort.  Did I mention that nothing had previously worked.

But even with all this on their plate, parents still want me to say things to them in some “normal way”.  Not only am I supposed to tell them what they want to hear, I am supposed to tell them in a way that is acceptable to them (so they are not offended, upset, confronted, forced to examine, made to switch gears, etc.).  And this is how family situations stay virus-ridden and sick.  Even though all the nonsense that came before did not work, parents still want the nonsense in some form or another that they can recognize.  Garbage recycling.

When I don’t give them what they want then they manipulate even harder to have the same crap recycled or they run away.  They feign commitment to change saying they will do anything.  I tell them it is a lie and they won’t just do anything.  They might try a few things that make sense to them while rejecting anything that is confusing, ambivalence-producing, outside their basic mindset or god-forbid might actually work.  Parents, who by their own admission have no answers, are still trying to dictate how the process will go.

The process of change is often just down and dirty and you get your nose figuratively bloodied and you are forced to deal with issues that you have avoided your whole life and you get shaken to your core.  Without rocking your world, how do you think someone could be of use to you?  That is what you need.

And if you are going to take on the kids - who are better manipulators than you will ever be - you damn well better be better prepared then you are now.  Welcome to my world.

Every day I hear this nonsense.  “You cannot change someone”, they say, “You have to wait until they are ready.”  It is bizarre and cowardly and yet another way of getting out of taking action.  My favorite mind screw is, “They have to hit bottom first and then they will be ready to change.”

What if they are traveling at 100 mph when they hit bottom?  Will they bounce?  So here’s the terrifying question for all you parents out there that want to do the wait and see crap or it will get better with time or they’ll grow out of it.  How will that sound when you bury them?

What will you do after the tragedy when you find out that you could have done something?  What if I’m right and the conventional wisdom is wrong?  Shouldn’t you at least consider the possibility?  And the downside of taking change-producing action is what?  You are going to make the situation worse?  Give me a break.  Have some guts.  Change the kids for the better.  They will not bounce.

You have this vision for how you want your family to be doing.  But you wake up one day and it hits you in the face that the family is off course.  The patterns may have shifted gradually and the changes were subtle.  One child is doing well and another, not so great.  The marriage is lukewarm and you want it to be hot!  You search for explanations and ask yourself “why” the vision is not being fulfilled?

We have this built-in mechanism that makes us look back as if we missed something and it can be discovered and then we can fix it.  It may be, though, that going back is a trap and sets us up for repeating the old stuff once again.

I know it is a lot of responsibility but I have always believed that mothers are the true North.  They are the fixed point by which we set our course.  Yikes, you say, another one of those blaming mothers.  If it sounds that way, I’m sorry.  It is really quite the opposite.  It is a statement about how much power you have.

Forget looking back.  Trust the vision.  Settle for nothing less.  Lead us into a new future…

With kids who are on psychotropic medication, it is amazing how well they do in environments where there is structure, stability and where they are challenged mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually.  It is a fact that kids who are consistently in these types of environments often need less medication and can sometimes be weaned off medication altogether.  I rarely hear kids in our program explain their negative behavior with, “I forgot to take my pill today.”  First of all, they know better and second, they are learning to take responsibility for their choices.  Medication sometimes assists decision-making; it does not make decisions.

Pills may have their place but they are so overprescribed.  Their place is not to replace commonsense which is often the takeaway kids have. We know what kids need: exercise, balanced eating, sunlight, creative outlets, the ability to dream, accountability, an energizing world that provokes them to safely experiment with who they are and what they can do.  Before we medicate them, we need to examine whether we are giving them the essentials they need to be healthy and successful.

I fear the long-term studies of so much childhood medication are going to show a number of things: 1) We will find that most of the current medications (which are adult medications downsized for kids) were not all that effective and other factors (like powerful, creative parents) are more influential than pills.  2) Kids, as they become adults, will develop health problems from so much overmedication; some problems will prove irreversible.  3) Some will still be explaining their bad behavior with, “I forgot to take my pill today” but they won’t be 13, they will be 30.

1) I admit that I am dependent on my children for love and acceptance and the consequences are unhealthy for the family.

2) I accept that in order to cure myself I need to refrain from dependent and self-defeating behavior by seeking new ways to get my needs met.

3) I admit that I may require help in identifying the seemingly innocent, addictive behaviors because I have been unsuccessful in resisting my desire to engage in self-defeating patterns with my children.

4)While I may have personal problems that feed my addiction, I do have the capacity to change my behavior and establish an effective parenting relationship.

5) I reject the idea that I must accumulate endless amounts of information and seek out multiple experts to tell me what to do, recognizing that this can become another addictive process and create more dependency.

6) I reject the idea that I must be perfect but accept the reality that I must be more effective in how I raise my children.

7) I place a high value on being creative and daring in learning how to start new patterns of communication.

8) I accept that I am responsible for my thoughts, emotions and actions and will not blame others for my situation.

9) I recognize that stopping negative dependency is better than attempting to control it.  Too much is at stake to risk further addiction.

10) While there are no perfect solutions, I will take strategic risks to achieve my goal of ending all self-defeating patterns with my children.

11) I choose to give up ideas of guilt, blame and worthlessness as a matter of principle and as a personal demonstration that I am committed to a new way.

12) I accept the fact that mentally and emotionally healthy adults are not inclined to be dependent on their children.  I will complete my recovery and be free of the addiction to my children and as a result my family will be healthier.