Recently I was out shopping and ran into a woman who called me three years ago asking about homeschooling, and has spoken to me a couple more times since then about the increasing difficulty with her son and asked for advice to handle him.  Though I spent a lot of time with her to understand the situtation and gave some clear suggestions regarding her son, she said my suggestions were too hard.  I pointed out a year ago that living with a volatile adolescent who was almost entirely out of control wasn’t easy, either, and would get much worse if it weren’t dealt with.  “Yes, but…..”

This is the challenge of parenting – sometimes doing what we need to do is really hard.  We’re tired, worn out, and emotionally spent at the end of a day.  It’s hard to be proactive and implement new ways of doing things.  I think this is at the heart of why there are so many books about ‘how to parent’.  Many parents are looking for quick and easy tips, for quick fixes to big problems that don’t entail making any real changes to how they already are doing things.  And I don’t blame them – I myself would love a magic pill or to just use the right phrases and voila – perfect children!  But that’s not the reality of parenting.

Back to the woman in the store.  I asked her how things were going with her almost 13 year old son (she called me initially when he was 10).  She said, “Better.”  Really, I asked, glad to hear it but surprised (surprised because I didn’t think she was going to make any changes in her approach to her son).  “Yes, he’s getting older, and soon he’ll be old enough to go to yeshiva out of town (boarding school) for high school, so he won’t be at home anymore.”  Oh.  I ask her if she thinks that sending him away for school is going to address his issues, and she says unconvincingly, “Maybe – sometimes it helps kids.”

Sometimes, I think to myself, but not this time, when nothing that’s led to the situation developing has changed.  If the parents can’t positively influence him at home and encourage the behavior they want to see, how likely is it that in the 24/7 atmosphere of peer presence that he’s going to rise to actualize his higher self?  We all know how good an influence peers are on susceptible kids, don’t we?   (Yes, I’m being a bit sarcastic.)  This boy also has lots of friction in his interactions with his parents, as well as watching ongoing conflict between his parents.  How would going to a school far away change that?  I would be willing to bet money that this boy will probably be asked to leave at least the first school they send him to, and that the parents response is going to be to explain it away because it wasn’t the right kind of place.  And then their energies will go into finding a different school.  Sheesh.

Avivah