To wonder why parents don’t take responsibility for their children’s behaviour?

[PPAPPINE]

I have noticed that particularly with older children/ teens with behavioural issues, parents and adults in general seem to think the child is solely to blame and take very little responsibility of their own.
I don’t believe children become violent, aggressive or incredibly reckless for no reason. I believe it is usually due to trauma or neglect/ lack of positive attention even (or especially) in ND children.
It seems like most people genuinely believe that a child or young adult with behavioural issues like aggression/ defiance/ criminal or reckless behaviour has just become that way either of their own accord or due to outside influences or neurodiversity. When it’s often down to neglect and lack of support and love at home.

Arguably, lack of education around attachment and parenting is not always the fault of parents and I’m not sure why it’s not encouraged.
Of Course there are exceptions and other factors that play a part but it’s hard not to notice that it’s often the children who have unstable home lives, multiple younger siblings and no boundaries or routine.
This all seems so obvious to me. AIBU?

it is usually due to trauma or neglect/ lack of positive attention even (or especially) in ND children.

When it’s often down to neglect and lack of support and love at home.

What evidence do you have to back these statements?

It's hard to say but it's more of the parents to step in and being responsible.

However, there are some parents out there who rather be on their phone and ignore them. So they rather let their child go wild.

Sadly from what I have seen, if the parents don't bother disciplining them why is the child going to care? Hence behavior issues.

I have 3 sons. Two went through adolescence with the usual range of good and bad behaviour.

One broke me. Aggression, drugs, risky behaviour, exclusion from school, involvement in (non-violent) crime. His dad and I had no control. We were utterly bewildered. There are no services unless the child is willing to engage and he simply laughed in people's faces. And no, we weren't sitting on our phones.

I look at photos of my joyful, cheeky and loving little boy and wonder how he became the callous, mocking young man full of hatred and anger. Unless you've been there, you have no idea.

10 years ago I would have agreed with you. Since having an autistic child that lacks empathy, no amount of punishments, explaining why his bluntness and lack of consideration for people’s feeling does, he will never understand, except it… some children are just easier than others!!!

I work with children and teenagers with behavioural issues. It is so much more complicated than you realise. There is lots of research out there and a vast amount of people who have experience of dealing with young people like this. Are your beliefs based on any expertise, training or experience in this area?

Obviously there are exceptions. Children brought up in very strong families with strong boundaries who go off the rails and neuro diverse children.

BUT it is exhausting as a teacher seeing poor behaviour in very young children being laughed off, young children swearing at their adults laughed off, young children biting, kicking, hitting adults, no response from parent. The amount of times we’re asked ‘what triggered them?’ Always trying to find some excuse for the behaviour.

And then there’s the ‘you can’t discipline my child’ parents. Who ALWAYs blame the school, the adults, everyone else. Again you see this from a very young age. You only have to look at local news threads for the amount of parents blaming a school for enforcing a consequence in a rule system they signed up for.

The problem is with this thread is, people are going to be personally defensive not actually look at the bigger picture.

Parenting is an issue. It might not have been for your child who has behavioural issues but it will be for many.

And ‘dare I say it’ as the mother of a child with ADHD, neurodiversity isn’t an excuse for poor behaviour in many cases (not all obviously).

I think there’s more to it than simply blaming either the child or the parents. Parenting, home life, trauma, neurodiversity and a child’s own temperament can all play a part. Parents should take responsibility for their role, but sometimes they’re also struggling themselves and need support rather than judgement.

I’m echoing the words of @SpanThatWorld; this is exactly my situation. I have one teen acing at school and friendships; he is polite, sensitive, socially engaged and sensibly moderate when it comes to social media. The other child, who takes up most of my time, is oppositional, defiant, takes risks, fails at school and has poor relations with classmates and adults. SS have already been involved. I can’t really think of anything more I can do but wait for maturity to kick in and hope that his stable family background will put him right in the end.

Teen behaviour is not solely related to what parents do or do not do in terms of discipline, connection to their child or boundaries set.

I dont think ND by itself causes criminal behaviour in teens. ND that is not diagnosed or handled well by educational settings can lead to disaffection, feeling like a failure, poor outcomes, NEET and then drifting into criminality. That's a massive generalisation as all posts will be but that's one reality. Alongside that you have desperate parents advocating for better support and not getting it. Schools mostly do try but dont have the resources. camhs etc are criminally underfunded and under resourced.

My nearest town has recently had some horrible incidents of gangs of teenagers assaulting security staff at the bus station. The police have arrested two lads. One is 15 and the other one is 12!

I think the world you describe is very simplistic.

I'm a teacher. I'm also autistic. And I'm nearly 60.

Some parents are awful, and this can be influenced by their own personalities. However, personalities don't appear out of nowhere. Someone doesn't wake up one day and decide to be useless. Lots of things have had an influence in developing that uselessness.

Poverty has also increased massively, and sometimes that's a poverty of time as well as money. This is also linked to ultra processed food because it's cheap and quick. And due to the housing crisis, we also now have problems around homelessness / temporary accommodation and overcrowding.

As we've seen recently with Zuckerberg, there's also the issue of SM. Excessive gaming also literally rewires the brain (before teaching I worked in neuroscience).

Don't get me started on what future these young people are looking forward to when all they're hearing is climate collapse and AI replacing humans in the jobs market.

It seems totally daft to me to say something from the 1820s (discipline and hard work is the way to fix this feckless behaviour) in the 2020s. The world is a much different place. But the bosses are still saying it, and some of the workers are stupid enough to repeat it.

I think as a society we have to stop treating ND as a get out of jail free card to let kids do what they want. Parents seem to think that the only way to parent an ND child is to let them do anything they want but there are other ways and it produces better behaved kids. Kids are a product of their parenting and it annoys me that a whole generation of ineffective “behaviour experts” have been trained to think otherwise by badly researched dubious papers written to be controversial as that gets more citations/recognition for the academics that wrote them. NT children respond to age appropriate discipline and a lot of ND children would too, if only they weren’t being let down by the feckless parents and the well meaning but misguided parents and professionals who fundamentally underestimate those kids’ ability to learn how to function in society. They are being set up to fail at life almost to prove a point and it’s very sad. I work in Asia and we treat kids differently, the kids here just behave, the behavioural incidents are rare, and no one has all the ridiculous ineffective pandering like “class leaving passes” and other bullshit non-answers being touted in the UK by for-profit “experts”.

I’m sure it will

I am very worried about this with one of my children. I can really see him going totally off the rails tbh, and he’s not even quite six!

My other child is fine. I do discipline him: he has boundaries, loses privileges (although honestly modern parenting makes this difficult) and I try really hard but then the same things happen over and over and I often feel powerless.

I dont think some parents of ND children get access to the right support at the right time. If they do get support it often isnt evidenced based or best practice and sometimes even against nice guidelines and can escalate issues.

Effectivetive parenting of ND children can look very different than effective parenting of other chilldren. The public dont recognise it and are judgemental about the things that do work.

But also not all violent agressive and reckless behaviour has anything to do with ND or trauma and plenty a loving parent is blindsided by the change at puberty and the influence of a bad crowd.

And there's always the caveat that bad parents exist of both nt and nd children and that will impact in behaviour

This is us, too. 😢

Please tell me your son got through it and came out the other side? 💐

I think some children who have behavioural issues have a silent pain unseen and have been sexually abused. Having had serious MH issues which means pretty peculiar behaviour sometimes and met many people through being a service user a lot of them had been abused. When people suffer trauma it can act out in many ways. I didn’t tell a soul I had been SA till I was in my forties. Obviously some people who are SA as children behave perfectly well but this is something most do not want to even contemplate.

A colleague had 2 DS one led a very dull and regular life and the other had become an abuser of class A drugs which meant wrong crowd from 14, police involvement and a slippery slope that ended up in prison. They had the same upbringing, I always wondered if those drugs were for hidden pain and he had been abused.

HM Inspectorate of Probation is pretty solid and recognisable research to reference but it's not novel research, the association of environmental factors and childhood, youth behaviour has been researched over a number of decades now.

You can't control what your teenagers are doing when out of sight- walking to / from school or meeting up with friends.

All you can do is hope you have taught them the difference in right & wrong, good & bad behaviour. And then hope some more that they remember!!!
Honestly OP you have no experience with groups of teenagers.

Nobody would understand unless they’ve been there. I have 2 children who truly have been raised the same. I appreciate birth order matters, but same home, same schooling, same parents, same circumstances. I can’t even describe how different they are. One is neurodivergent, and this one has extremely different (socially unacceptable) behaviour, which will undoubtedly be attributed to bad parenting by anyone she meets who is not a member of our family. The other child shines in everything he does, has the most amazing manners and social skills and we are frequently praised on how he is a credit to us and what great parents we must be…by people who haven’t met his sibling. It can’t work both ways can it!

Gabor Mate did an incredible talk where he explained that we are born with 400 genetic traits, some of which can be extremely negative. Things like high sensitivity which renders people susceptible to extreme anxiety, anger, depression. An inability to regulate emotion etc. He stated that yes, of course nurture is important, but too much emphasis is placed on praising parents whose children are great, and criticising parents whose children are not. That has certainly been my experience.

Also, if we’re going to go down that route can we place as much blame on fathers? Everything always seems to be mum’s fault but it’s clear as day that outcomes for teen boys can be worse if they have no father present, if the mum doesn’t cope well managing everything on her own. Yet mum still gets the blame!

Also modern life - surely we can attribute some blame for outcomes on the internet and what people are exposed to. And all the other stresses of modern life, which damage families.
It’s a completely complex situation.

You have literally made that up. You have no evidence for it. You have just invented a reason for someone else's behaviour.

He's mid twenties, has a job and a steady girlfriend. He lives at home but they are hoping to buy somewhere nextvyear. If you met him, you'd probably like him - although you might find his political views difficult, depending upon your own.
He still drives like a twat. The risk taking is still evident.

Our relationship is still broken. We are polite and talk about the cats or whether the dishwasher is working properly. It is like living in a flat share. I still don't know where my son went.

Edited to add that I am so sorry for your pain. It is visceral.

Yea, it's all mum's fault.

NAh, its more like misogyny and cruelty to women is so culturally ingrained that we often don't even see it or question it.

When you add in that the nuclear family is an unnatural way for humans to organise themselves, the whole picture becomes clearer.

@SpanThatWorld If you want actual evidence that CSA may lead to risky and difficult behaviour then please look at articles that are available free of charge online on the (BMJ) British Medical Journals website. It’s one of the longest running and respected peer reviewed medical journals in the world.

This. Rich or poor, there are good parents abd bad parents. 🤷‍♀️

Parenting is important. However so is peer group and natural strength of character. Once a child starts operating in the world without you by their side, your influence shrinks and other types crowd it out. I think teen behaviour is part parenting, part personality and part keeping your fingers crossed they get in with a good crowd.