(no subject)

[erda]

One thing about being severely sleep deprived is that the little voice that tells me to shut up never woke up this morning, so I've just been going on and on about stuff and I don't really know what I'm talking about.



I'm heavily engaged in the homework wars with my eight year old already. Technically he doesn't have any homework because he's in a full time es(emotional support) class, but since he refuses to do his work there, they send it home with him to work on in the evening. I have very mixed feelings about this plan. It goes to an overly simplistic behaviorism mind set, which I usually end up utilizing simply because I have no better game plan.

You know, people see that these troubled kids are wildly undisciplined and they latch onto that as a reason for their behavior, but I have my doubts about that. I know some people who were raised by parents who loved them dearly but were unable to set reasonable limits. Those kids grow up spoiled, sure, and they have problems related to their lack of discipline, but they do not exhibit the kinds of behaviors I see in my attachment disordered children.

I don't understand why people always latch on to the lack of discipline, when that is just a minor side line to the main problem with the parent child relationship for my kids, i.e. there is no relationship. The kind of severely neglectful parents whose children end up in specialized foster care fail to discipline, yes, but more importantly they fail to attach, and it is that failure that causes (or maybe just brings out) these serious personality disorders in their offspring.

More discipline (which somehow always means more punishment) doesn't help. It may even make things worse. My kids already know that adults are the enemy, that adults won't help and can't be depended on, and these pitched control battles are very comfortable to them. I believe in structure and predictability very strongly for these kids, their lives have been chaotic, and they need that, but punishment not so much.

So now I'm in the no TV or snacks until the work is done zone, which means a lot of head banging and punching of walls and breaking and tearing up stuff, and laying on the floor screaming, and talking about suicide, and asking to go the (psychiatric) hospital. Eventually the work gets done. Afterwards he's so worked up he can't settle and tends to follow me around telling me all about his plans to shoot and stab people at school. Those kinds of little plans got both of his brothers locked up for a while, but now their workers are pressuring me to bring them back home, older and even less attached to people, so locking them up didn't help.

I just don't think punishments are very motivating, I guess. I don't think anybody writes fanfiction to avoid punishment. To me it's all about community and interacting with people. I mean, otherwise, if you're just writing for yourself, why bother posting it? You might as well just stick it in a drawer somewhere. Our online communities create so much content. It's truly amazing all the work people do. Outside of shunning, there's really no threat of punishment involved. The reward is the connection with other people. That's what attachment disordered children don't have; that's what it means to be unattached. That's what makes them so very, very dangerous to all of us.

I don't have any answers for any of this. Experiments with other primates seem to suggest the early damage can never be undone, and the only therapies out there seem pretty far fetched to me. I do think it's ridiculous to blame the schools for not being able to repair the damage done in those crucial early years. As a society we don't really value young children or their caretakers, and until we do, we will have to live beside these dangerously antisocial people who were unable to attach to anyone in early childhood.

Weirdly it seems that at least in the early years of life, love really does pwn almost everything else. Think I'll stop rambling now as I don't seem to have any particular point.

Comments

[dodificus.livejournal.com]

This was a pretty depressing read.

Weirdly it seems that at least in the early years of life, love really does pwn almost everything else.

But this does make me feel better...I sometimes worry about the slackness of my sisters parenting skills but she does love her kids and showers them with physical affection.

[keefaq.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I rarely post about the kids because it is kind of depressing. I think of the kids as terminally mentally ill, and I'm just a hospice worker, trying to ease the worst of their suffering. Like with all the terminally ill, it's best to focus on one day at a time. They have this day, and I try to help them experience as much of life on this day as they can. I can't fix them, but at the very least I can refrain from adding to their pain or blaming them for their situation, something far too many people who work with them are eager to do.

I was over tired yesterday and lost track of my mission statement.

Your sister, like most of us, is probably a good enough parent.