She caused a fire because she got distracted with Social Media.
As a parent I would also confiscate electronics and probably consider therapy at that point.
1. Therapy requires mutual trust to work. Administrating therapy at this point, after turning the child into an adversary by taking away electronics as a form of punishment, would make the child think that the therapy sessions are no more than another form of punishment. Nothing useful can come out of the therapy if the child perceives the therapist as an enemy.
2. It frightens me how people turns everything that is supposed to be a part of human life into a medical condition, and treat 'therapy' as the deus ex machina that could solve all inconveniences in our social life.
In my experience it's correlated with the US West-coast passive aggression. Nothing can just be a difference in opinion and/or personality clash.
As you said, you need the patient to want to change in order for progress to be made, and mixing punishment and therapy makes that nearly impossible.
What we need is a fundamental shift in how we view mental illness and discipline. Instead of just punishing people for doing something wrong, we should be looking at why the mistake was made and try to work with the individual to fix that and use punishment only if more effective methods don't work.
Maybe we need psychologists to work with parents/communities so parents know how to approach deviant behavior in a constructive way. I firmly believe that if parenting is done well, people will be better equipped to deal with problems later in life.
I’m a parent and based on that experience I expect the subjects episode was part of a larger pattern.
Yes, it happens. I set some bacon on fire because I forgot about it when I got distracted. My wife set a jacket potato on fire because she got distracted. It happens to normal people.
> As a parent... probably consider therapy
I know who sounds like they should be in therapy, and it's not the kids.
I’m with the GP. People get distracted no doubt. It’s normal. But I think the comment was about what the GP would do if put in a similar situation. If one continues to get distracted while doing something potentially dangerous, for example cooking bacon, and it happens frequently, looking at the root cause of the distraction is probably warranted.
The root cause is kids get distracted. So do adults. You learn from your mistakes, avoid distractions, and get some smoke alarms. Even then, these things happen. It's life.
Based on my personal view, this is a case of addictive personality, caused by parent's poor education. I imagine the parents placing her in front of screens for her entire childhood, in order to babysit her. This is a long shot, but it's an educated guess.
Based on the (inevitably) scarce information, my guess is that the parents neglected the subject during the childhood, she grew up used to "passive entertainment", and she developed an addictive personality.
If this is the case (see the part where she mentions she's easily bored), removing some means would just transfer the addiction to other ones, potentially (but not necessarily) more dangerous.
An approach would be family therapy, as the parents also had a causative role.
Of course, all of this is a wild guess.
What about just talking to each other, like a normal family? I'm happy my parents didn't insist on therapy anytime anything happened.
Nobody wrote that therapy is a universal panacea (I wrote "approach", which is an entirely different concept).
Also, you clearly don't know how therapy works. It's not something can "do" "anytime anything happens", like going to the car mechanic, in particular, because therapy takes a (at least relatively) long time to have effects.
The idea to go to therapy in cases like this is actually based on the opposite of what you wrote:
1. that the event is exceptional (it's not "anything")
2. that there is a pathological context (addiction)
3. more subtly, that there is at the very least a communication issue in the family
Realistically she could just as well had to go to the toilet and then forget about the stove, and what are you banning then?