The Struggle Is Everything

Dear Penikese Parent,

We are so glad you enjoyed your trip to Penikese Island the other day, and that the meeting with your son went well. My heart goes to your husband, a person doing all the right things for his family yet clearly feeling so frustrated and helpless where his son is concerned. When faced with such powerlessness, the urge to do something even if wrong can be overwhelming, but it usually accomplishes little except to make things worse. Taking drastic action is actually more about our needs and feelings of helplessness and loss of control rather than what is right for the child. Easy to see but so difficult to do the right thing…

Getting into it with your son about his choices and behavior will succeed only in making all this about you and your authority, which for developmental and other reasons he will oppose no matter what. Clarifying your expectations, outlining the possible outcomes and then sitting back to let your son to make his own choices will instead put his behavior back on him. In time, circumstances eventually will bring him to that place where he has to start thinking about how well his behaviors are working out, and whether he might want to do something about it.

There’s another reason why we discourage the scorched-earth control strategy: even if your son doesn’t readily see this, the most important thing he needs is to stay connected to you, and drastic actions often have the unintended consequence of blowing things up, often beyond repair. Those parents able to choose the path of less-is-more and stay connected tend to have the best outcomes, except the only problem is that doing so can be agonizing in practice. There is just no linear, certain or clean and tidy way through this, nor any way to feel OK about letting go when stakes are so high.

Sometimes, however, the very thing that tips a boy towards choosing the right thing and changing his behavior is the fear of losing you, a strange happenstance given how he treated you all along up until that point. The question is, do you want to be there with and for him, connection somehow intact when that moment arrives?

We have seen kids and parents completely write each other off over far less than what I have seen so far with your family, so if you can’t find much else to feel good about as a parent right now, know that you are in the distinct minority of parents able to hang in there beyond a point others can endure. Furthermore, those that somehow stay connected through this process not only tend to have the best outcomes, but also forge a special kind of bond that only those who have survived an ordeal together can develop.

That is your ultimate goal: keep in the struggle without giving up no matter what, and strive to stay connected no matter what. The last thing to keep in mind is the strategies we cooked up the other day may not work the first time, they probably won't work every time, but if you stick to them, they will work over time.