> I was reckless, taking my mom’s car out for joy rides without permission, skipping class
That may be after 16 years of doing outrageous things to get attention at home.
Some psychologists in the 1950s [1] suggested kids will do whatever gets them attention while striving for a way to participate in the family. That can include bad behavior. If they don't receive attention for good behavior, then they can gradually find their way towards things that will definitely get attention, like getting into mom's makeup, throwing around food or dirty diapers or whatever. Today, many psychologists suggest using positive discipline [2] to reinforce good behavior while weaning bad behaviors.
Often a family might have one "good" kid who excels in school while another struggles. Why is that? Aforementioned psychologists suggest it is because each kid finds a way to "stand out" in their family, and families who dote on the good child may reinforce the chosen behavior of both children.
In your case, maybe your family did effectively use positive discipline, or you were an only child, or you were the "good" one in your family.
If someone seems irrational, it’s because their shoes are so different from any that you’ve been in. You simply have never experienced anything like their life (because if you did, you’d be like them).
And you can’t actually ask someone to explain their own behavior because everyone only lives one life and they rarely know in what way their shoes are different from someone else’s.
Yeah I think that's best done with a therapist who will take time to guide someone through their past. Asking a kid why they acted out, or an adult why they did something crazy, is almost rhetorical. They're not going to know the answer without a deep dive into how they grew up.
Some psychologists suggest that kids fight because they subconsciously know it gets their parents' attention. So when a parent breaks up fights it can unintentionally reinforce that behavior.
I'm a dude who thinks about intentionally walking into propellers or windmills to take my face off, and turn into a fine red mist. So it's not totally weird I'd date women with suicidal tendencies. But yeah, if you say that kind of shit out loud, it's usually coming from somewhere true. I'm a pretty fucked up person. I'm trying with all my strength not to be one, to the people who matter to me and the people who count on me. But recognizing the dark ones so they don't fuck with you is essential to survival.
What I’ve noticed is all humans seem to operate on the same frameworks. It’s just filtered through their nature and experiences. Mental illness is just another filter.
Maybe it’s because my bipolar brain has a lot of hard, untreated mileage in it. I’ve experienced so many emotional and mental states that there is little I find difficult to relate to.
I disagree with this. As an example, a video came out the other day of a Chicago Transit Authority employee getting into an altercation with some guy. "Some guy" pushed him to the ground and walked away. The employee very slowly (he was quite obese) rose to his feet, pulled a gun, walked after the guy, and then shot 14 times hitting him 3 times. In short, he murdered the guy on video in the middle of a crowded station. There's no way that's not irrational behavior.
I make this distinction because if you want to change someone's mind or behavior, assuming that they are irrational is a non-starter. You won't make any progress. Once you get past that, you realize that they are actually being rational and that there are deeper obstacles that need attention.
Yes, but people are not computers. They are, at times, driven by emotion and impulse.
"If someone seems irrational, it's because you don't understand the person" "Thats not true, because I didn't understand why somebody did something, so he must be irrational."
IDK if you know what circular reasoning is, but you're suffering from it.
The video in your example doesn't fully explain the situation. You don't know these people, you don't know what happened before, you don't know if they know each other, you don't know what the other guy said/etc.
I personally don't know what the circumstances are, but I do at least admit, that in the infinite amount of possible circumstances there are at least a couple which allow for a sane/rational person to shoot somebody in broad daylight.
> There's no way that's not irrational behavior.
There's a book called 'Thinking fast & slow' that talks about questions like these. "Is someone's behavior rational?", is a very hard question to answer for your brain, unanswerable even. Still your brain quickly comes up with an answer: 'it's irrational', disregarding the fact that this by itself might arguably be irrational, how does the brain do this? What is this answer based on exactly?
To answer hard questions quickly like that, your brain has a trick: it doesn't actually answer THAT question, but secretly gives the answer to a different question, that merely looks a lot like the original question. In this case, I suspect your brain is actually answering: "If I had an altercation on a crowded station, and somebody pushes me to the ground, WOULD I slowly get up, draw a gun, and shoot the guy 14 times?" The answer is no, so the 'answer' to the question is this guy being rational is also 'no'.
So basically your brain is transplanting your own experience, your own set of learned behavior, yourself, into the situation that you saw in the video, and then decides: "Well, I wouldn't do that, so conclusion: this guy is crazy". But ofcourse out of all the possible upbringings, experiences, lifes you could have, you only have 1. So you will never truly know how it is to be someone else.
The only way to know if the shooter in your video was rational or not, is to ask why he did it.
Who said I didn't understand why the guy shot him? I certainly didn't.
>To answer hard questions quickly like that, your brain has a trick: it doesn't actually answer THAT question, but secretly gives the answer to a different question, that merely looks a lot like the original question. In this case, I suspect your brain is actually answering: "If I had an altercation on a crowded station, and somebody pushes me to the ground, WOULD I slowly get up, draw a gun, and shoot the guy 14 times?" The answer is no, so the 'answer' to the question is this guy being rational is also 'no'.
Uh, no that's not what I did.
>I personally don't know what the circumstances are, but I do at least admit, that in the infinite amount of possible circumstances there are at least a couple which allow for a sane/rational person to shoot somebody in broad dayligh
In this case there isn't.
...I'm not sure you can shake off Nobel prize-winning research like that and retain any credibility.
>In this case there isn't.
I think you didn't count some of those infinite possibilities.
Those are all just "things that kids do", or they used to be some years ago, pretty sad that "skipping classes" has transformed into a "reckless" thing that risks getting you, as a kid, quasi-institutionalised.
It might be "things that kids do", but it shouldn't be normalized or tolerated. Especially children, there's a lot of things that, until they can understand themselves, they need to be Told. How many things did you (dear reader) do growing up that, in hindsight, you think "wow that was stupid / reckless / I could've died"?
You omit the many sadly common cases for legitimate rebellion and escape, such as sexual abuse from stepparents or foster parents. Those unfortunately can't be remedied with "positive discipline" and they don't make a child the "bad" one.
One of the tenets of "positive discipline" is that disagreement and rebellion are expected. By accepting such behavior, a trained therapist may earn a child's trust. And, that can be helpful to a school or therapist to discover if abuse is occurring.
That said, if you know a kid hasn't experienced abuse, you might wonder whether or not they receive any attention for doing good things. They may be acting out more because that's what got them attention. What constitutes "acting out" is very personal for each family and individual.
I brought it up because it is usually an underlying reason for kids doing crazy shit because they don't give a fuck anymore. It's not always the reason, but it's way more often than most people realize. You think your kid hasn't been molested. There's a good chance he has.
43% of men report having been sexually assaulted or harassed in America. Actual penetrative rape numbers are around 20% of women and 5% of men, which equates to 20M+ men in the US at a minimum [1]
This.
If they get therapy, there's a slim chance that that therapy will lift the repression and expose the trauma; but it's usually repressed for good reasons, and exposing it will just lead to more trauma. But if you can make them feel safe and loved, you have a reasonable chance of addressing the unwanted behaviour.
Consigning them to a coercive regime in another state isn't going to make them feel safe and loved.
Especially when you have them snatched at night from their safe space. That alone is serious trauma. And should be illegal, regardless if the parents are ok with it or not.
Sexual abuse and trauma underlie all child psychological problems, according to my ex, who has spent her career as a child psychotherapist. In fact she says that literally all psychological problems have their roots in repressed trauma.
I think she's an extremist; she hasn't convinced me that schizophrenia and manic depression are caused by trauma. But bad behaviour and non-compliance? Absolutely.
From Wikipedia:
>"It is based on the idea that there are no bad children, just good and bad behaviors."
Given the fact that we've known for decades now that behaviour is roughly 50% nature (and 50% nurture), this foundational (implied) premise is unequivocally and demonstrably incorrect. Some children are "bad" and need to be taught not to hurt others. This parenting style is growing in popularity and I don't think it's a surprise that we now see an epidemic of kids with mental health problems.
I recommend listening to this lecture from Jonathan Haidt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5IGyHNvr7E&t=569s
Children certainly need boundaries and rules. They need corrective measures when children rebel. I think it's clear that a lack of negative punishment is leading to all kinds of negative outcomes for children.
The title of this post is relevant. OP "obliged" because he was told he was bad. The point is to not do that.
> Children certainly need boundaries and rules
Rules are paramount in "Positive Disipline". From the section "Creating Rules" [1]:
> In her book entitled Positive Discipline, Jane Nelsen emphasizes the importance of not only creating clear rules, but of making them fair...
Positive discipline is anything but permissive parenting. The point of the statement you quoted is simply that all kids can be guided towards good behavior, because as you said, nurture and nature both contribute.
> I think it's clear that a lack of negative punishment is leading to all kinds of negative outcomes for children.
To each their own, but I agree with Dreikurs that natural consequences are enough to teach kids the lessons they need to learn. Forgot your lunch money? Figure it out. Maybe it's hard to convince your kid to brush their teeth because the consequences are so far in the future, but if you take a moment to explain the importance of healthy teeth, they will hear you. The idea is to build a forthright, trusting relationship with kids so they feel comfortable coming to you with the harder problems later. I'd argue that using harsher measures pushes kids away so that when they do struggle with more advanced concepts later, they feel left adrift. On the other hand, if your parents were "tough" with you and you still have a good relationship then maybe that works for you.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_discipline#Creating_r...
What if you try and be fair with a kid and they just never understand fairness? What do you do if you need the kid to follow rules so they don’t get in trouble? What are the “natural consequences” for a kid who keeps hitting his classmates on the playground? Law of the jungle?
My little brother did that, he was like 6 or 7. My father pulled him from school for a week, brought him to work. At the time he was a social worker, finding jobs for excluded people and helping reinsertion through work, in a rural area (not as rural as some areas in the US, but very rural for western Europe). Gave him some books, pens and blanck sheet to draw, took him to lunch, probably had him "work" a little (he did basically the same to me when i was 14, only it was only work). He also send him to judo classes. Worked pretty well i'd say.
It wasn't a punishment, it was more of a "timeout". Also, all kids understand fairness, they just don't always have the same understanding. You just have to explain it, before the act. You can't say "don't hit people" to a kid and expect him to understand, ESPECIALLY if he has been hit before. Also, this would have been a lie, as he can hit people. And to teach how, when, why and why not hit people, a martial art teacher is probably better equiped than a pacifist father.
If that's your kid, speak to a therapist. There's definitely more to good parenting than a single concept, and more than anyone could relate on HN. By mentioning natural consequences and positive discipline, I'm only introducing topics which are described in more detail in books. I mentioned natural consequences specifically as an alternative to punishment which I don't think works. Adlerian psychology suggests misbehaving kids subconsciously want to be punished because that's how they learned to get attention. By the time they're adults, they act out all the time as a matter of habit.
This comment is not based on reality. It's laughable, really. There are kids who cannot be reasoned with. You try to explain the importance of healthy teeth to troubled teen and they will respond "I don't care".
"Natural consequences" are not sufficient. A troubled kid will drink himself into the hospital over and over. A troubled kid will have run ins with the law over and over.
These kids are labeled troubled because they are.
If they are so troublesome that they are a continuous threat to society (e.g. murders or serial sex offenders), there are legal ways to get them into psychiatric clinics (those means are easily abused as well so). If they are not, well, in a free society you cannot prevent people from ruining their own lives.
Most "troublesome" kids, so, are nowhere even close to these categories. And if they turn out to have really troubled lives after wards (e.g. drug abuse and everything that comes with it), I'd say most of that was caused by the "treatment" they received previously.
just to take your example of a drinking teen (being German my threshold for that would be considerably higher then the US one at that), how do you think such a teen, with already existing problems of substance abuse, would behave after going through months or years of mental and physical abuse? Turning sober? Or falling deeper into that hole?
I'm puzzled that I even have to argue against a system that, as was proven time and again, results in very serious child abuse.
Irrespective of the camps, OPs parenting advice is bad, insulting, and deserves to be called out.
> There are kids who cannot be reasoned with.
Are you familiar with an approach that can help?
The approach I mention has been around for over 70 years.
What ever makes our children human beings able to show compassion with others, and stay safe as soon as they have to live their lives on their own feet, is good parenting. Everything else is secondary. Same as the most important thing with new born toddlers is "are they healthy?".
And yes, if you already have a parenting style that works, stick with it. I mention Positive Discipline because it works for me and there are a lot of resources for it.
So far so good, but then the rough teenage years are still ahead of us!
As you said, saying you're sorry helps a lot. Not having it happen to often as well. And as long as it's not abusive (as subjective as that might be) it is, to some maybe cruel extend, part of training for life. It's also borderline bad parenting. Usually I care a lot more about results and effects then intent, when it comes to parenting and relationships in general intent plays a huge role so.
Not so much with the other two.
The starting suggestion positive discipline might have is to block out some one-on-one time in the week, one parent with one misbehaving kid, even if it's just for an hour each. Then you are fulfilling their need for a connection in a positive way. You may see each other in a different light and even discover new strengths and contributions to the family. The idea is their need to get your attention by misbehaving will decrease over time.
[EDIT] Also:
> The starting suggestion positive discipline might have is to block out some one-on-one time in the week, one parent with one misbehaving kid, even if it's just for an hour each. Then you are fulfilling their need for a connection in a positive way. You may see each other in a different light and even discover new strengths and contributions to the family. The idea is their need to get your attention by misbehaving will decrease over time.
Yes, we've been doing that for years, of course. It is partially effective, at very, very high levels of time committed. Effective enough we can tell when we've not been doing enough. I'd say it closes the gap between the easiest kid and the most difficult by maybe 20% on a perfect week.
A family counselor could better guide on how to get that started. It may be awkward or bumpy the first few times.
Both my kids sometimes exhibited "challenging" behaviour. As we all grew older together, I became increasingly sure that coercion isn't a helpful response to such behaviour.
I was brought up with coercion; I was sent to a boarding school where I was caned (yes - when I was a child, adults attacked me with sticks). My parents were of a generation where that kind of act was considered reasonable.
It took me time raising my own kids to realise that coercion isn't a solution, unless your child is literally a psychopath. Psychopathy is a pretty rare trait.
The most effective method, though, is time. The author of the article is one example, and there are many more in these comments. Eventually, the teenage brain becomes an adult brain and a lot of the rage, impulsiveness, and destructive behaviors go away. (Most) people mature eventually. The key is to try to limit the damage of the "troubled" phase. If you end up going to jail in your teenage years because you act out, you're going to have a much harder time building a life for yourself later on.
Rather than waiting I'd suggest families try to find a therapist they can all visit for counseling together. There may be a broken relationship in a kid's past that can be mended, and that won't happen without understanding where the problem began. The kid isn't going to be able to tell you offhand where he went off the rails. It takes time to build a trusting relationship and share traumatizing stories.
> The author of the article is one example
It seems presumptuous to conclude the author never went to therapy or did not have further discussions with his parents that helped him move past the trauma. Maybe he says more in his book [1].
> there are many more in these comments
I haven't seen any suggest that waiting for time to pass is a solution for years of feeling "a blur of misanthropy".
> The key is to try to limit the damage of the "troubled" phase. If you end up going to jail in your teenage years because you act out, you're going to have a much harder time building a life for yourself later on.
It almost sounds like you would suggest parents bail their kids out of trouble so the system doesn't mark them as "bad". Maybe you're not saying that (if not, how would you "limit the damage"?). Anyway, I think parents covering up their kids' behavior, thinking it's just a phase, is exactly what gets kids into this pattern. People don't grow out of habits, they grow into them.
Well, again, the title of this post shows the results of that attitude. Years of misbehavior and a well written story from a lucky one who made it to the other side, no thanks to "tough love" bootcamps according to him.
Every kid looks up to someone, whether they see that someone in person or on a screen. Becoming that someone, or a trusted figure for a teen, is a lifestyle change. Building trust takes time, and it can be lost in a moment.
> healthy teeth
So "cannot be reasoned with" seems to mean "refuses to accept that I'm right". If you have charge of an unruly kid, I hope you aren't focusing mainly on their dental hygiene.
> These kids are labeled troubled because they are.
Gosh, that sounds rather black-and-white - they're "bad" because they're "bad". I think the word "troubled" here is serving as a dog-whistle; a lot/all of the time, what's being referred to as "troubled" is really "traumatised".
That's unnecessarily combative. Are you arguing that refusing to brush your teeth is a reasonable position?
> I hope you aren't focusing mainly on their dental hygiene.
Dental hygiene was OP's example.
> a lot/all of the time, what's being referred to as "troubled" is really "traumatised".
I agree that most of the "troubled" kids I've known have been traumatized. But traumatization does not necessarily lead to being "troubled", and being "troubled" does not require traumatization. In any case, it does not excuse illegal, damaging, and destructive behaviors.
No, I'm not. I'm arguing that poor dental hygiene isn't in the same universe as getting drunk, stealing your parent's car, and wrapping it round a tree. Or beating up small kids at school.
It seems an awfully trivial misdemeanour to bring up, in a discussion of "troubled" kids and abusive incarceration.
If all you did was explain to them the importance of healthy teeth, then denton-scratch is justified, all you're saying is that the kid cannot be reasoned with because they didn't listen to your explanation. Show them a root canal. Let them talk to the local crackhead. If your kid doesn't already have trauma and they aren't listening, most likely you aren't trying hard enough or aren't creative enough in your approach.
To be fair, it's likely those mental health problems were there with most generations but went undiagnosed.
We don't have a pandemic of cancer today, people just used to die from other shit before it got to them.
Unless you don’t believe self surveys of the children themselves, it is unequivocally worse now.
Sounds like that would be very subjective and hard to compare?
I would very much refrain from using the phrase "given the fact" here, and a video titled like a Buzzfeed article might not be the best evidence either
Mmm, let's ignore the profound changes in society, as well as the life-altering technologies... Yeah, being nicer to your kids is making them fucked up.
Look at child sex abuse scandals: Who do they abuse? Vulnerable children without resources to fight back. Have you ever heard of such a thing happening to the children of the powerful? At Penn State University, at least some of the victims were in a program for parentless children (I don't remember if they were orphans, foster kids, etc.). IIRC, one had been abused elsewhere and was kicked out when he reported it - what could he do this time? You know what the abusers say: 'Nobody will believe you.' And he's a child, alone in this situation.
Graham Spanier drew a salary from the university DESPITE being complicit in the cover-up until 2017. He merely was “removed from leadership.” It’s on us as a society to punish misuse of power more effectively. The consequences for misuse are often minor.
https://apnews.com/article/north-america-us-news-ap-top-news...
I don't think you're saying anything here that needs that kind of protection, but just something to keep in mind.
There are some truly cowardly people and malicious incentive structures there… but I met some good folk too I suppose. Shout out to the good professors there with the patience to do the right thing. They don’t always win.
WE ARE (human traffickers?). <:(
Weren't Penn State U board members who punished the wrongdoing removed from office by their constituents?
Yes. It happens all the time. In some areas of high society, in the recent past, it was downright common. Look into the history of British boys schools. I myself attended a British-style boarding school. While I never witnessed anything personally, a few years after I graduated my former math teacher was fired in disgrace. I never got the full story beyond "he had fail to register with appropriate authorities and so was let go".
The reason it seems that the children and powerful are immune is only because such issues rarely becomes public. Poor people report crimes to the police. Rich people talk to their lawyers and the issue is settled between the families.
This can then follow them the rest of their life. Being fired for failing to notify your employer could be a case as mundane as that.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201...
Shame on me for not going to the police. But as a young teenager you just don’t know.
When the Littleton shooting hit the news this was the first thing on my mind. Lots of us know those events have deep roots in the local community.
You were a kid in an impossible situation; you weren't and aren't the responsible party. Most adults couldn't handle that situation, and the adults there didn't handle it at all. Your story and your roommate's story are just heartbreaking to hear. It makes me angry at the adults and, though I try to remember that they are conditioned the same experiences, at the attackers.
I don't know about The Lees; the boarding school I went to was full of homosexuality, both between the boys and between certain teachers and boys. It was treated very casually; "boys will be boys".
I was a victim of (mild) abuse. I never told anyone, until my father died, a few years ago (my mother died 40 years ago). I had read an article by another victim, which named my abuser - at a different school. After my father died, I finally felt able to report my abuser to the police.
The way it works is that sooner or later, some boy reports the abuse to their parents. The parents complain to the head; the head explains to the abuser that he has two choices; he can stay and be prosecuted, or he can leave, with a clean reference. So he just gets a job at another private school.
The head absolutely doesn't want a scandal.
Uh, how do you break the cycle. Maybe one out of ten people who are abused have the strength to see the viciousness of it and reclaim some part of themselves instead of repeating the abuse, and write about it for the NYT. The rest go to alcoholism, self-harm, anger, and repeating the same on their kids.
The only thing that's sort of worked to break these kinds of chains of abuse is when NGOs and governments go after them and expose the evil. That has had some effect on the Catholic Church, and a little effect on the worst excesses of the prison system in some states. The 20-30% of people in this country who were lucky enough not to suffer some sort of abuse [edit: Or who consider it wrong] are a minority, but thankfully in control of most of the media and civic institutions (for now: When they're not, it looks like Russia).
So I guess the best way to break this particular chain is at the weakest link, which is these kinds of "schools".
[Edit: Just re-reading your earlier response in another chain, I should clarify that I consider this type of discipline itself to be a form of abuse, often including sexual abuse. But in any case, breaking one chain or another is equally difficult when someone has been subjected to it and is now subjecting their children to it.]
Absolutely. The "tough love" program made everything worse for OP, but the problem started earlier. Prior to being sent away, OP self-described as being misanthropic for years,
> The years leading up to my being taken and the eventual break out is now a blur of misanthropy.
If someone hates humanity for years, they deserve loving attention to help them see they are valued just as they are. In other words, Mr. Rogers was right, and we each need someone like that to believe in us.
A lot of times when I'm out in the world and watch people acting out, or just behaving like they were raised in a barn, the coldest part of myself thinks their parents should have disciplined them. The warmest, fuzziest and most liberal part of myself thinks that their behavior is mostly due to abuse they suffered that was probably meant as discipline, which failed to impart its rationale and which their parents didn't know how to do any better since they were probably abused themselves, and their grandparents and so on.
So since you made me think about this, if the kids are fucked up little sociopaths already because of their families - which are incapable of valuing them and giving them that loving attention - short of taking them away from their families to some kind of utopia, what's the answer? We really can't effect a chain of kindness in those families just be being patient strangers. The only thing we might be able to do is sanction the parents and take away the institutions they rely on to perpetuate abuse. It's also possible we're just a few reasonably friendly people sitting on top of a volcano of hundreds of millions of psychotic assholes.
IMO we could all benefit from taking a "positive discipline" [1] approach to relationships. And in those difficult families, hopefully outreach can connect them with a trained therapist who can both listen and appropriately guide. We're not all in a position to directly help, and it is largely up to the individual to make necessary changes for themselves. But we can each be a sort of light by which individuals might find their direction.
Ah, yes: when someone mentioned British Naval traditions to Churchill, he replied "Rum, sodomy and the lash".
I'm not sure what you mean? Plenty of parents and older siblings abuse their power, and plenty don't.
I see what you mean now. I did not mean to say that we could depend on power corrupting parents ... but now I wonder: how much does it, and to what degree do we normalize it and not see it?
> They need training, not condemnation.
Yes, they are humans too. It's true of most people doing bad things (if we define 'training' very broadly).