I was looking through some articles to gain inspiration for my blog this month, and after reading this article, I was truly intrigued by the angle the author took.
So many times when working with families, I come across parents who feel that somehow they have failed as parents if we need to look into residential care for their children. I like this article because it asks the difficult and often unasked questions, and that it doesn’t immediately assess blame for a toxic situation upon either the parent or the child. As I often tell families, this is a family issue, and everyone must do the work…


Accepting That Good Parents May Plant Bad Seeds
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
Published: July 12, 2010




“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” the patient told me.
She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years.
When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling.
I asked her what she meant by mean. “I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,” she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members.
Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range, with no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. Naturally, she wondered if she and her husband were somehow remiss as parents.
Here, it seems, they did not fare as well as their son under psychiatric scrutiny. One therapist noted that they were not entirely consistent around their son, especially when it came to discipline; she was generally more permissive than her husband. Another therapist suggested that the father was not around enough and hinted that he was not a strong role model for his son.
But there was one small problem with these explanations: this supposedly suboptimal couple had managed to raise two other well-adjusted and perfectly nice boys. How could they have pulled that off if they were such bad parents?
To be sure, they had a fundamentally different relationship with their difficult child. My patient would be the first to admit that she was often angry with him, something she rarely experienced with his brothers.
But that left open a fundamental question: If the young man did not suffer from any demonstrable psychiatric disorder, just what was his problem?
My answer may sound heretical, coming from a psychiatrist. After all, our bent is to see misbehavior as psychopathology that needs treatment; there is no such thing as a bad person, just a sick one.
But maybe this young man was just not a nice person.
For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it.
But while I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook — sadly, there are all too many of them, from malignant to merely apathetic — the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children.
When I say “toxic,” I don’t mean psychopathic — those children who blossom into petty criminals, killers and everything in between. Much has been written about psychopaths in the scientific literature, including their frequent histories of childhood abuse, their early penchant for violating rules and their cruelty toward peers and animals. There are even some interesting stories suggesting that such antisocial behavior can be modified with parental coaching.
But there is little, if anything, in peer-reviewed journals about the paradox of good parents with toxic children.
Another patient told me about his son, now 35, who despite his many advantages was short-tempered and rude to his parents — refusing to return their phone calls and e-mail, even when his mother was gravely ill.
“We have racked our brains trying to figure why our son treats us this way,” he told me. “We don’t know what we did to deserve this.”
Apparently very little, as far as I could tell.
We marvel at the resilient child who survives the most toxic parents and home environment and goes on to a life of success. Yet the converse — the notion that some children might be the bad seeds of more or less decent parents — is hard to take.
It goes against the grain not just because it seems like such a grim and pessimistic judgment, but because it violates a prevailing social belief that people have a nearly limitless potential for change and self-improvement. After all, we are the culture of Baby Einstein, the video product that promised — and spectacularly failed — to make geniuses of all our infants.
Not everyone is going to turn out to be brilliant — any more than everyone will turn out nice and loving. And that is not necessarily because of parental failure or an impoverished environment. It is because everyday character traits, like all human behavior, have hard-wired and genetic components that cannot be molded entirely by the best environment, let alone the best psychotherapists.
“The central pitch of any child psychiatrist now is that the illness is often in the child and that the family responses may aggravate the scene but not wholly create it,” said my colleague Dr. Theodore Shapiro, a child psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The era of ‘there are no bad children, only bad parents’ is gone.”
I recall one patient who told me that she had given up trying to have a relationship with her 24-year-old daughter, whose relentless criticism she could no longer bear. “I still love and miss her,” she said sadly. “But I really don’t like her.”
For better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children. That is why they should not be so fast to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become.
Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan.

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On The Road...

Sometimes the life of an educational consultant is like the Willie Nelson classic, “On the Road Again” When one figures I’ve been to 200 schools and programs over the last 5 years (a good number of the twice, or even three times), 25 IECA and 10 NATSAP National conferences, countless lunches, one day meetings or outings with colleagues and who knows how many trips to see clients at programs or schools, I am shocked that they don’t simply roll out the red carpet for me at the airport, or at the very least always reserve an exit row seat for me! Granted many of the travels I go on are to wonderful and beautiful places; I rarely complain when my travels bring me to the Wasatch mountains of Utah in winter (funny how I always time it that way) or to the beautiful Arizona desert in March, and I’ll confess I’m often looking for an excuse to travel to the southeast in late fall.

Visiting programs is a crucial part of what we do as consultants. Not only do we need to do program visits to keep up our membership in IECA, but we also tour for professional development reasons. So yes, we have to tour, but for many of us touring is an exciting and fulfilling part of our job. Most of us work in small offices, or alone, so visiting programs allows us to get out and see what exciting things our colleagues are doing at their programs. It is important for us to get our hands dirty as it were, so yes, we ride the horses, bust the fire, and even, occasionally, muck the stalls. It is imperative that we roll up our sleeves and get to know not only the staff but also the students at these programs; because when we refer our clients to them, many times it’s because we know the people and we can, for lack of a better word, see our kid at the school. Of course we need to do our due diligence when it comes to reviewing testing, speaking to therapists, parents and other professionals, etc. but we cannot lose sight that many times our gut tells us if a place is a good match or not, and, well, you can’t rely on your gut if you’ve never been there!

So for us, often times it is indeed life on the road, and for many of us, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Do you know the signs?

If your son’s friend comes to your door wearing a hat with FML emblazoned on it, do you know what that means? Are you aware of what your teenage daughter is saying to the world when she goes out in a t-shirt which has the numbers 187 on it? What if your son comes home talking about his friend, the Emo? Does this mean anything to you? When you overhear your teenager talking about a pharm party or special K, do you think they are talking about the petting zoo and breakfast cereal?

All of these phrases, logos and expressions have very specific meanings to our teens, and while they may sound foreign and even a little silly to us; to our adolescents they are real, and can be very scary.

I don’t want you to think that if you hear of one these expressions or see one these logos your child is running in a gang, or is on drugs. But I do want you to look at them for what they are; clues, or signs as it were, that we should pay extra attention. We as adults must be informed as to what’s on the street, what the drugs are, what the lingo is so that we can have a fighting chance.

It’s scary not knowing what is going on; we feel powerless as adults. We want to feel that our children can talk to us about anything, but we know, deep in our hearts that they aren’t; just think back, did your parents know what you were doing at 16?

So get informed! Learn what the drugs are (www.streetdrugs.org), what the lingo is (www.noslang.com), and be proactive. Yes, you may make a mistake, maybe even over react and risk having your adolescent mad at you, but an angry teen is a lot better than the alternative.

5th Annual PDW in Park City

I just got back from spending 3 days in beautiful (and surprisingly cold) Park City, UT where I joined 80 other consultants, therapists and clinicians for meals, workshops, social time and presentations. This year the folks at Aspen did things differently, and they joined the "speed dating" phenomenon and gave us each 20 minutes to sit with clinicians, executive directors and line staff to learn what's new at their programs. By no means did these 20 minute "dates" take the place of a full visit, but I found them a great way to catch up with what's new at the 6 programs I spent time with.

In addition to the speed dating there were some great sessions. I attended a 3 hour, two part session about trends in drug use among teens and young adults which was very educational, and a quite scary. The session was presented by two police officers/school compliance officers, so it was some real frontline stuff.

Michele Borba gave us a 2 hour presentation on parenting which was excellent and I don’t think there was a truly dry eye in the house when Erik Wahl gave his closing keynote, on using inspiration to overcoming mediocrity which combined inspirational speaking, discussion of left brain vs. right brain, painting and laughter; hard to describe, but really amazing stuff.
Later in the week I’m going to be adding links to my site not only for the sessions I went to last week, but also some others which I think everyone would find interesting.

Until next time,

Bar