When All Else Fails...
Talk about a classic, but truly unbelievable cautionary tale. Frustrated parents struggling to manage their recalcitrant young. They've seen their boys through adolescence into the upper teen years merging into manhood, and tear their hair out in despair at the deviant, anti-social and personally harmful direction their boys are headed toward.Despite, one would assume, all the emotional support and careful attention to their needs throughout their formative years.
At the end of their tether, fearing for the uncertain future of boys approaching adulthood cantering off into alcohol and recreational drug use gone beyond the experimental stage, they grasp for solutions which have so far eluded them. Is there a faint hope clause written into parenthood whereby if children abuse themselves and their parents' trust their parents can shed personal obligations to steer them safely into the future?
There are all manner of devices available, from consultations with personnel in the educational system, to family doctors and referrals to psychologists, to family members and friends who may also be struggling to accommodate the very real needs of their own children for direction and patience.
We've good reason to believe that we can imprint our children with sound values and morals, and an appreciation of their personal responsibilities. Its an investment that has sound dividends.
There are no reliable and fool-safe instructions packed into the parental kit when a child is born. The use of common sense, the understanding that the most vital element in a child's life is the need to be loved, encouraged and supported. Above all, the constant, reliable presence in a child's life of the emotional attachment to a parent. The general result of which is that said child usually patterns him/herself accordingly.
But things don't always run along a straight track, and emerging problems don't always reveal themselves to close and early scrutiny, nor do they lend themselves to easy answers, and the result is a constant struggle to contain the damage at the very least, reverse it if at all possible. What's a parent to do? Well, some parents in the United States are unburdening themselves, sharing their personal agony.
Their testimony before the U.S. Government's Accountability Office, Congress's Investigative arm, has aided a Congressional committee to catalogue thousands of incidents of horrendous abuse of vulnerable young boys and emerging adults at the hands of overzealous and perhaps slightly sadistic employees of so-called Boot Camps and "wilderness camps" whose parents have delivered them for instruction and discipline.
For their own good, needless to say. Because these children haven't been amenable to listening to the good advice of their parents, and because the parents have felt their patience to have been exhausted in the effort to re-model their children. We're so fearful for our children, for their safety, for the fall-out of their dangerous choices in life. Sometimes a little bit of careful introspection might shed light on the reasons for rejection.
Here's a court in Florida beginning a manslaughter trial as a result of the death of a 14-year-old boy whose beating at the hands of Boot Camp guards led directly to his death. The occurrence was actually filmed. The report just issued by the U.S. Congress identifies 1,619 incidents of child abuse in 33 states in the year 2005. Ten such deaths were of especial interest.
"Examples of abuse include youth being forced to eat their own vomit, denied adequate food, being forced to lie in urine or feces, being kicked, beaten and thrown to the ground" according to an investigator. The abuse leading to the deaths of the 10 selected teens was of particular note: "If you walked in partway through my presentation, you might have assumed I was talking about human rights violations in a Third World country".
One father described a daily journal his son had kept before he died at Northstar Expeditions in Utah, where they had delivered him hoping to rescue him from his school drug experimentation. A "bloody and battered journal" his son maintained revealed "an unbelievable account of torture, abuse and neglect" the father recounted.
"His mother and I will never escape our decision to send our gifted 16-year-old son to his death", the bereaved father claimed. His son died as a result of an untreated perforated ulcer after the boy had been beaten "from the top of his head to the tip of his shoes", during his month stay at the camp. Well, this family will never be the same again. They will live forever with their decision and its deadly outcome.
"To turn your son over to someone else and hope they're going to love and protect your child was naive on my part. We thought (the program) was an answer to our prayers. It turned out to be a living nightmare." There are so many ways in which parents neglect their obligations to their children, so many ways in which they are not sufficiently alert to a child's needs.
There are never any easy answers in life. But if one starts with the proposition that no one owns another person's life, and if you truly want to understand what is happening then you extend yourself to make the effort, however time-consuming, however painful, to reach that other person where it matters.
Having said which, life offers no guarantees.
Labels: Human Fallibility, Realities, That's Life
posted by Pieface @ Friday, October 12, 2007
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