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?

@PassTheCranberrySauce the problem is I don’t know if he has ADHD - it isn’t impossible of course but even just exploring the possibility seems arduous to say the least!

DS has had a lot of problems with repeated ear infections since being a baby and to be honest I’ve been fobbed off quite a lot with ‘children are prone to ear infections but he’ll grow out of it.’ He hasn’t grown out of it and I am kind of hoping that’s been the driver for a lot of problems. He has an appointment next week where grommets will be discussed. SO many people have said their child was like a different person with grommets and I hope so as as much as ds can be really lovely he is very shouty, loud, physical (not necessarily purposefully aggressive but just always has to be ON you) and he has had some horrible incidents with other children this summer.

Sorry, that was a ramble. I guess it just worries me because I'm there thinking that ok, he is nearly 6 now, and the signs are that this element of his personality isn't going to get much better. I remember reading once that a parent with young children with significant SEND should savour the time as babies because the gap is only going to widen as their peers develop, and that seemed so applicable last week. What would have been acceptable for a one year old or two year old was not for him: even my three year old would be expecting to outgrow those elements (if she had them: she doesn’t yet.)

I am currently reading No Such Thing As Naughty but like so many parenting books I’ve tried it just oversimplifies things: there’s a lightbulb conversation in which the child confides in the parent something and the parent gets it and it’s all fine from then on but real life just isn’t like that!

What do school say? The ear issues could be contributing but wouldn’t account for the whole story. I would get the ball rolling with ND investigations alongside the grommets etc. and I’m not one to jump on the diagnosis bandwagon. It sounds like he’s really struggling.

@PassTheCranberrySauce this is kind of my point, there is no way to get the ball rolling that I can see unless I pay for a private assessment which I’m reluctant to do unless things continue to deteriorate. At the moment, he’d almost certainly be diagnosed with something. However, this wouldn’t take into account the ears and some trauma related stuff. I know that there can be a view on here that a diagnosis of neurodiversity is at most benign and I’m not sure I agree: unfortunately it can be detrimental because of prejudices which I recognise should not exist but they do.

So that leaves me with taking him to the GP, who would talk about boundaries and consequences and perhaps suggest parenting courses. Maybe after many years of to-ing and fro-ing to the GP I might get put on a waiting list, I don’t know.

DS is borderline is the problem. He doesn’t clearly present as anything. He is very high energy and could be ADHD, but he also could just be an active five year old boy. He can be aggressive but he can also be lovely. I can have months of taking him to places and he’ll make friends and this summer that seems to have unravelled and he’s become snappy and irritable with other children and aggressive on at least two occasions. There have been flashes of sweetness - I heard him chatting excitedly to another boy about ‘my favourite football player is Marcus rasher too!’ and I nearly cried because it just sounded like my son, if you get me? These aggressive incidents kind of flare up, they often seem to come out of nowhere and it’s weird because I can understand a child getting so annoyed and frustrated they just kind of explode and shove or hit another kid but with ds it feels a bit more like calculated meanness where he’ll bite and no one needs to jump on me and tell me that’s not normal at his age, I know!

School has mostly been fine. He’s well behaved in lessons but there have been incidents at lunch time, most at the lower end of serious. However, he has got two friendships at school which aren’t positive ones and despite my best efforts to try and encourage other friendships (and he does get on well with the other children, even some of the quieter girls seem relaxed enough around him) he keeps gravitating back to them and it is not a good combination at all. Hoping things may dilute this year (he hasn’t gone back yet.) there was one incident this year that I would call serious where he attacked one of those boys - the teacher said it was unprovoked. My view is that it was likely to have built up over time which does not excuse it but I know one of the boys regularly says unkind things to him over and over which he comes home repeating. But he can’t use violence - apart from anything else the other child is twice his size and ds could have been seriously hurt if he’d retaliated.

It is a massive worry for me though. It’s a tiny school (only sixty children in the whole school) and I worry he’ll end up ostracised and isolated. And because it’s so small the SENCO is spread across several schools in the academy trust so can’t just drop in and speak to them, etc. He does have the same teacher this year as last which is good and one of the boys will be in a different class. But the incidents happen at social times. Sigh.

Quite. I actually had to give up my job to be at home around school hours when dd was 15. I had to get her there, make sure she stayed there (she would often just walk off campus in the middle of the day), and be around after school to make sure she got home and wasn’t doing anything untoward. Doors and windows had to be locked at night and we had an alarm
on the front door because she would try and escape. At that point she just wanted to be with her horrendous ‘friends’ and was wildly seeking dopamine in all the wrong ways and places. A determined 15 year old will find any means possible to do what they want to do and it’s not that easy to stop them. Not everyone is able to give up work to become their child’s full time jailer. And tbh my career has never recovered.

It was what worked for us, even though it was horrendous for all involved, but it wasn’t easy. People who say ‘how can you not know where your 14 year old is?’ have no clue what some parents are dealing with. (Obvs there are some parents that don’t actually care and that’s a different issue).