Why aren't parents correcting their DC?

[Meili04]

I just saw the DM article about an 11 year old boy being tasered for brandishing a knife over a tantrum in burger king. The mum said they were too harsh. I've seen this in my DDs school their child is a little angel and can do no wrong. If my child is mean to another child I correct the behaviour , if they rude I do the same.
My DC is a human being with faults and isn't perfect 100 percent of the time, no person is.

Why can some parents see no fault in their child? Our responsibility as parents is to bring up DC to be functioning adults who thrive. Treating DC as mini deities does them no favours. I think parenting is becoming too gentle. AIBU?

With bullets or batons, there's zero tolerance to sharps there's no accredited training to disarm someone with a knife.

And the child had a knife.

According to the mum, the boy has Global Developmental Delay. Intellectually and emotionally he is younger than 11.

Useless mothers shouldn't be allowed on Google!

Yep. Is it a butter knife,, steak knife, boning knife. It doesn't differentiate. Someone is threatening the public and police

This. I find it extraordinary that three trained police officers can't sort out an 11 year old with a butter knife without tasering him. How did they manage pre tasers? Ultimately if all else failed they could simply have stood there till he gave in through tiredness

I would imagine pre-tasers they'd have gone for physical contact.

Having worked with a lot of young people and known many involved with the police, none have been tasered. It isn't something done lightly in my experience.

Standing there til he gave in through tiredness is ridiculous. How many other crimes wouldn't be dealt with because they can't leave an 11 year old waving a knife around? Or if they did leave and he went on to injure someone that would be the police's fault as well and his mother would probably be all over the press complaining that the police did nothing.

I did see a helpful suggestion online that they should have poured a bucket of cold water over him…

Ive been in a situation recently where the mum refused to acknowledge, even with actual physical proof, witnesses and a phone call from the school that her son was in the wrong.

What she actually did was flip it back to my DD saying something she did 2 weeks before to him means she deserved it.

She sent him a picture of him, that she got from the class blog, too him and said he looked so young which provoked online threats from him then an attack in school from a large group of boys he had whipped up.

He is 10 years old, known to be an absolute fucking terror .

Anyways from this experience and others, its mum's with their sons that are unable to admit any wrongdoing and it truly disgusts me.

Some pp have asked how teachers manage this sort of situation without resorting to tasers. Well, we spend a long time calming and regulating the child, once other pupils have been removed for safety of course. We talk them down, neglecting our other duties, and risk injury. If necessary we call parents who usually don't care and tell us it was our fault, or we call the police. The pupil is then excluded for a period before being welcomed back on a clean slate. I can't help thinking that all of this is part of the problem. Insufficient consequences. Maybe we need tasers too, and only half joking. He won't do it again.

Im sorry your DD went through this its disgusting and enabling behaviour. I totally agree if there's a father involved they normally are able to admit their sons faults more and attempt to correct the behaviour. Some mothers of sons are utterly useless and see the son as a literal baby with no flaws it must be someone elses fault interestingly I dont see this behaviour as much in mother and daughters. More is expected of daughters. These mothers set womens rights back.

Anyways from this experience and others, its mum's with their sons that are unable to admit any wrongdoing and it truly disgusts me.

Likewise, I don't suppose absent or permissive fathers are particularly conducive to turning out well rounded, fully functioning members of society.

Just because the police are in a position of authority does not mean that they should not be accountable for their actions or that their judgement cannot be questioned. Policing, by its very nature, is a command and control environment. Time after time though we see these incidents occur, whereby a different approach could have de-escalated a situation. We see it particularly where mental health is concerned. How do you talk a person off a roof - by pointing a taser at them, or employing listening and negotiation skills?

Police officers don't routinely carry tasers. Those who are dispatched with tasers tend to be those who are part of a specialist unit drawn to the command and control environment, rather than the softer skills of listening and negotiation. There are times when this is absolutely appropriate - man wielding machete is actively attacking bystanders for example. There are times when this approach will instead escalate a situation - boy, who may or may not have learning difficulties, mental health problems or neurodiverse condition, who is threatening to use cutlery as a weapon.

In this case, specialist officers were likely dispatched following a call from a concerned member of the public stating "someone with a knife is threatening to attack people". Completely understandable. Adrenaline rushes, officers enter expecting the worst having received limited available info from the control room. Officers are by now committed to their approach.

This is the problem with specialist teams. They are specialist and trained accordingly, requiring specialist skills that enable them to respond quickly to life and death situations.

Policing is an imperfect science. Units are dispatched usually on very limited information meaning that mistakes can and do happen.

But tasering an 11yo - even an 11yo little shit who is the product of poor/ permissive parenting - is extreme, and can only be considered a failure, both in terms of lack of communication and soft skills recruitment/ training.

It's definitely not just mums with sons, some mums with daughters are exactly the same

Whilst I agree taser officers are dispatched to incidents involving weapons frequently, this officer is not in a specialist unit.

In Police Scotland a number of response officers are trained to carry taser and whilst they will deployed to serious incidents, they also attend the normal, run of the mill calls.

I don’t know where you get the idea that taser would be considered for a person on a roof? That’s absolutely not the case unless there was a specific reason for that.

Parents of autistic children report higher parenting stress and lower psychological well-being than the general population 3] and compared to parents of children with other disabilities 4, 5]. The socially challenging behaviours associated with autism contribute to the difficulty of raising an autistic child 6] but so does the public response to this behaviour. Parents in numerous studies report finding the stigma surrounding autism particularly challenging 7–9]. Parents report feeling blamed for their child’s atypical behaviour 10, 11] which subsequently undermines their confidence in their parenting abilities and negatively affects their self-esteem 12, 13]. Negative reactions and attitudes from others also lead families to feel socially isolated 14] and socially excluded 15].
Stigma is prominent in the lives of families with an autistic family member, with up to 95% of families reporting to experience some form of stigma 15–17]. Ali et al. carried out a systematic review of 20 studies to assess the impact of stigma on the well-being of carers and parents of children with intellectual disabilities, including autism 18]. Their results demonstrated that stigma affects the psychological well-being in parents and leads to an increase of parental stress and increased caregiver burden. A recent systematic review carried out by Papadopoulos et al. 19] explored the relationship between autism-related stigma and the mental health of informal caregivers. The review, which assessed nine studies with diverse study designs from across varied socio-cultural settings, consistently found that stigma has a harmful impact on the mental health of caregivers. For example, autism-related stigma was found to be directly related to depression 12, 20], anxiety 21] and psychological distress 22].

I've worked with a number of kids who've carried knives. I have yet to feel the need to taser any of them. There are other ways of deescalating a situation that do not involve tasering a child. Further training is clearly needed here.

I think the police have probably done that lots of times too - deescalated and disarmed without using a taser. But every encounter is different isn't it. Maybe on this occasion the usual strategies didn't work. I'll reserve judgment I think.

De escalating doesn’t always work. Surely that’s obvious?

Abstract

Parents of individuals with developmental disorders or mental health problems often provide life-long care and support to their children, which negatively affects their health in part due to chronic stress. This study aimed to examine the experience of stigma as a source of chronic stress among parents of individuals with developmental disorders or mental health problems and the effect of stigma on parental health outcomes.

Method

Using data from the Survey of Midlife in the United States (MIDUS 2 and 3), we constructed a sample for a longitudinal analysis including 128 parents of individuals with developmental disorders (e.g., autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, Down syndrome, intellectual disabilities, brain injury, ADD/ADHD) or mental health problems (e.g., bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, major depression) and 2,256 parents whose children were nondisabled.

Results

Parents who had children with developmental disorders or mental health problems prior to the beginning of the study (i.e., at MIDUS 1) reported higher levels of stigma related to embarrassment/shame and daily discrimination than parents of nondisabled individuals ten years later at MIDUS 2, which in turn were associated with poorer parental health outcomes (poorer self-rated health and a greater number of chronic conditions) nearly a decade after that at MIDUS 3.

Conclusions.

The findings suggest that the stigma associated with parenting a child with disabilities may be one mechanism that places such parents at risk for poor health. Efforts to alleviate the stigma associated with developmental disorders or mental health problems may have beneficial effects on health of parents of individuals with such conditions.

Taken from: Health of Parents of Individuals with Developmental Disorders or Mental Health Problems: Impacts of Stigma Jieun Song, Marsha R. Mailick, and Jan S. Greenberg

My dad always said if I ever broke the law I better pray the police found me before he did. If I’d brandished a knife and got tasered he would have shook the officer’s hand. Of course, he needn’t have worried because he also gave me love, structure, boundaries and all the rest. That’s parenting.

I don’t know where you get the idea that taser would be considered for a person on a roof? That’s absolutely not the case unless there was a specific reason for that

@Nicknacky that's not what I was saying. The point I was making was a general one about deploying the right tactics for the situation. Of course you wouldn't pull a taser out on someone threatening to take their life. You'd use negotiation skills to de-escalate.

I hadn't appreciated that this was Police Scotland. But my point remains, response officers, whether part of a specialist unit or not, need a strong mix of skills and training to ensure they deploy the right ones at the right time.