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When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

nytimes.com

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Re: When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

#121

Post by newaccount74 »

pc86 wrote: post #45
wolverine876 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do these cases not result in mass prosecutions? In Luzerne County, PA, judges were paid off by local juvenile detention centers to sentence kids there. Over years, they sentenced many, many kids, in court, for absurdities (e.g., I think one kid was sentenced for throwing a sandwich at their teacher). Much of the court system and local legal community had to know; nobody put a stop to it. Judicial conduct boards…

I don't think "the IT community" (is there even such a thing) has any sort of power where corruption in the traditional sense can even exist. Something like Kids for Cash is an institutional failing and requires the concerted effort and coordination of multiple, theoretically unrelated - or even opposed - parties that all have a lot of institutional power rarely found outside of government. Even huge multinational co…

There's corruption at every level in the IT community. On a large scale, there was a recent article how Microsoft is paying millions in bribes to local officials.

On a small scale, I have been approached by acquaintances who suggested they'd sign off on a large contract for me to make some trivial app if I paid them a percentage under the table.

Re: When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

#122

Post by [deleted] »

bobsmooth wrote: post #116
fsckboy wrote: post #91

> When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged There's a chicken egg problem here: when you were labeled a troubled teen, you already were a troubled teen. What happened to you after was bad, but it wasn't all peaches and cream before. Finding the appropriate way to deal with troubled teens (even if it did start with poor parenting) is not easy, and this discussion seems like a one-sided caricature.

>Picked off. Kidnapped. Taken. Call it what you wish, but trying to sleep each night with the notion that a pair of strangers could come to lift you from your bed, whether your actions were deserving of this treatment or not, haunts me, haunts thousands. How can the response to that sentence be anything but horror?

[deleted]

Re: When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

#123

Post by unityByFreedom »

noduerme wrote: post #120
unityByFreedom wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, so the question becomes, how do you break that cycle? These kids may grow up planning to be different from their parents. But when you become a parent, "muscle memory" can kick in. You end up parenting as yours did because that's what you know.

This really is the question. Not to be crass but at least 3 of the kids I knew were grabbed at night and taken to these places broke the cycle by committing suicide. I was tempted to respond to the Englishman in this thread who posted a heartbreaking story by asking whether he/they thought this was still having ramifications forward in British society, but then I thought, well it's an extension of 400 years of beatin…

> I consider this type of discipline itself to be a form of abuse

Absolutely. The "tough love" program made everything worse for OP, but the problem started earlier. Prior to being sent away, OP self-described as being misanthropic for years,

> The years leading up to my being taken and the eventual break out is now a blur of misanthropy.

If someone hates humanity for years, they deserve loving attention to help them see they are valued just as they are. In other words, Mr. Rogers was right, and we each need someone like that to believe in us.

Re: When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

#124

Post by droppedframes2 »

bythreads wrote: post #100
bythreads wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big hug

Sorry couldn't let this one go: I hope you've internalized completely that it wasn't your fault - and you where just a kid trying to survive - again not your fault.

My roommate who was athletic and feminine looking had it a lot worse. It was the first time I had seen any type of sex. It was violent and non consensual, and he was devastated, never the same. I felt faint there was a sense of shock. They involved me (with force) so that I couldn’t talk about it and they stopped me leaving the room. Then they said that’s part of the culture and he’s one of them now or something to that effect and stayed for an hour to see if he was going to talk. Then he and I had an argument and agreed that it just never happened, because being gay (I’m straight) is very much stigmatized and we both didn’t want our parents to find out. He went home I think a year or two later and overdosed and died. Then I really couldn’t talk about it, because my previous silence made me responsible. It depends how you look at it. I mean you never hear the story of the perpetrators in shootings. Not that I’m condoning anything like that, that’s no solution. But I do understand that level of anger and but for access to a gun at that time I may well have filled those shoes. You can only push an unstable teenager so far, and I expect these things happen behind closed doors quite frequently. I just get so angry thinking about it.

Re: When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

#125

Post by vkou »

wolverine876 wrote: post #64
vonseel wrote: post #55

I was sent to one of these schools and attended from late 2005 - early 2007. The school was called Excel Academy about an hour north of Houston; it has since been shut down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excel_Academy_(Conroe,_Texas) My reasons for being sent there are similar to the author's. I didn't take my dad's car without permission, but I did drink a lot, skip school, was generally rebellious and refused to be…

> Responsibilities were doled out in a few levels: on-shadow, shadower, and appropriate. An "appropriate" was the highest level of responsibility, trusted to monitor groups and make sure nobody broke rules or talked about inappropriate topics. "Shadows" were trusted to watch other people and help the appropriates deal with new kids and misbehavers. On-shadow just meant you always had to be with someone watching you a…

It's giving them a preview of how we run our prisons.

Re: When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

#126

Post by noduerme »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #123
noduerme wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really is the question. Not to be crass but at least 3 of the kids I knew were grabbed at night and taken to these places broke the cycle by committing suicide. I was tempted to respond to the Englishman in this thread who posted a heartbreaking story by asking whether he/they thought this was still having ramifications forward in British society, but then I thought, well it's an extension of 400 years of beatin…

> I consider this type of discipline itself to be a form of abuse Absolutely. The "tough love" program made everything worse for OP, but the problem started earlier. Prior to being sent away, OP self-described as being misanthropic for years, > The years leading up to my being taken and the eventual break out is now a blur of misanthropy. If someone hates humanity for years, they deserve loving attention to help them…

Definitely his report of his own behavior leading up to it is enough to make you wonder what you'd do if it were your child.

A lot of times when I'm out in the world and watch people acting out, or just behaving like they were raised in a barn, the coldest part of myself thinks their parents should have disciplined them. The warmest, fuzziest and most liberal part of myself thinks that their behavior is mostly due to abuse they suffered that was probably meant as discipline, which failed to impart its rationale and which their parents didn't know how to do any better since they were probably abused themselves, and their grandparents and so on.

So since you made me think about this, if the kids are fucked up little sociopaths already because of their families - which are incapable of valuing them and giving them that loving attention - short of taking them away from their families to some kind of utopia, what's the answer? We really can't effect a chain of kindness in those families just be being patient strangers. The only thing we might be able to do is sanction the parents and take away the institutions they rely on to perpetuate abuse. It's also possible we're just a few reasonably friendly people sitting on top of a volcano of hundreds of millions of psychotic assholes.

Re: When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

#127

Post by newaccount74 »

fsckboy wrote: post #91

> When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged There's a chicken egg problem here: when you were labeled a troubled teen, you already were a troubled teen. What happened to you after was bad, but it wasn't all peaches and cream before. Finding the appropriate way to deal with troubled teens (even if it did start with poor parenting) is not easy, and this discussion seems like a one-sided caricature.

The discussion is one sided because the practice is so horrible that there is no way to defend it.

There are a lot of other ways to deal with non-conforming teenagers that do not involve kidnapping, isolation and brainwashing.

Re: When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

#128

Post by newaccount74 »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #68

Stories about these institutions get conflated into a mess that scarcely resembles the reality. In a way, this is inevitable with a wide variety of schools and treatment centers, and a yet wider variety of perspectives. This particular story tells us little about these schools – it describes the perspective of a student, a client. This is valuable and I'm grateful to read it. However, I caution other readers against…

> some students thought it was abusive to require skiing and mountain biking two days per week (I disagree)

The question of whether this is abusive or not depends on the consequences for refusing to go.

Do kids lose TV privileges for a day if they refuse to go? Then I'd say it's not abusive.

Are kids locked in a room if they refuse to go? Definitely abusive.

Re: When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

#129

Post by DiggyJohnson »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #119
Gareth321 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Today, many psychologists suggest using positive discipline" From Wikipedia: >"It is based on the idea that there are no bad children, just good and bad behaviors." Given the fact that we've known for decades now that behaviour is roughly 50% nature (and 50% nurture), this foundational (implied) premise is unequivocally and demonstrably incorrect. Some children are "bad" and need to be taught not to hurt others. Th…

> Some children are "bad" and need to be taught not to hurt others. The title of this post is relevant. OP "obliged" because he was told he was bad. The point is to not do that. > Children certainly need boundaries and rules Rules are paramount in "Positive Disipline". From the section "Creating Rules" [1]: > In her book entitled Positive Discipline, Jane Nelsen emphasizes the importance of not only creating clear ru…

I appreciate your response and I apologize for the brevity of this one, but I worry that pretty much everything in the second half of your comments is based on a highly-idealized perspective of the situation.

What if you try and be fair with a kid and they just never understand fairness? What do you do if you need the kid to follow rules so they don’t get in trouble? What are the “natural consequences” for a kid who keeps hitting his classmates on the playground? Law of the jungle?

Re: When I was labeled a ‘troubled’ teen, I obliged

#130

Post by DiggyJohnson »

noduerme wrote: post #105
thrashh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I’ve learned at this point is that almost l no kid or adult is actually irrational. If someone seems irrational, it’s because their shoes are so different from any that you’ve been in. You simply have never experienced anything like their life (because if you did, you’d be like them). And you can’t actually ask someone to explain their own behavior because everyone only lives one life and they rarely know i…

This goes along with my own observation that when someone you just met says "I'm a really fucked up person," you should believe them no matter how attractive they are.

This inspired me to stop saying this as a joke lol
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