Troubled Kids are not born, they are made by the negligence in parenting. Parenting troubled kids requires massive piece of parenting advice, parenting tips, parenting help, parenting skills from professionals.
We treat ourselves, as I blogged here, as we were treated. Psychological problems can often be usefully framed as a question of how we treat ourselves. Depression can be the result of beating ourselves up, or neglecting ourselves. Too, often, therapists (and friends) deal with depression as if they are interacting only with the victim of self-abuse or self-neglect and not with the perpetrator. Anxiety can be the result of not knowing what to do, or not knowing how to evaluate available evidence. Anxiety looks like a child lost in the mall, but it typically involves a parent who doesn’t notice that the child has not kept up. Treatment that lasts will involve that parent—the part of the person that is unavailable during anxious moments—and not just the frightened child.
The idea of introjects—internalized representations of others—is very old, and it is well-known that it takes a tightly framed, extremely intimate relationship for a therapist to become a new kind of introject for patients. But the understanding of how parents (and others) become introjects in the first place is often obscured by overly complicated thinking on the subject. There are all sorts of chaotic, systemic forces at play, but the smart move is to say to your children what you want them to learn to say to themselves.
1. Honey, do you have to pee? I discovered while toilet training my older son that the process mainly involved making this question a core aspect of his self-experience. If he was aware of having to pee, he knew what to do, but the risk was that he would not become aware until it was too late. In this model, “awareness” is simply a mentalized substitute for being asked the question. Most of us have this question so embedded in our self-systems that checking for pee seems like second nature. Even passed-out drunks will, occasionally, get up and go to the bathroom, so ingrained is this question.
The “honey” is meant to represent the tone of the question as that of a concerned and supportive parent. You can induce toilet training with the bark of a drill sergeant or the annoyance of a busy parent, but you will not create a functional system of self-care with that attitude. Plus, you will have …