Remember that the goal of my writing on this site is helping people with difficult kids raise future adults. In other words, the plan is to empower children with personal challenges to grow up to be functional members of society who are willing and able to take responsibility for their lives no matter their personal shortcomings.
This is not a piece intended to make excuses for adults who didn't have the kind of information I am trying to make available nor to merely excuse bad behavior on the part of a child. I am trying to give parents tools for effective mitigation.
As a small child, he was a lying little brat who thought he was being clever to just say whatever BS popped into his head. I began checking his story and he came to live in fear of The Momminator or Darth Mom checking his story because I would go ASK other people questions.I broke him of lying and he began proactively making sure his friends told me stuff ahead of time so he didn't need his story checked.
That's on a piece called For Love of Math. A potential alternate title was The Only Lie He Got Away With.
He told me years later he really lived in dread of having his story checked and I have tried a few times to be humorous and tongue in cheek about being The Momminator and quoting Terminator about "That's ALL he DOES and he WILL NOT STOP until you are DEAD!" and making it about how Mom will not stop until she knows the truth or something.
But, gosh, people online think I'm an abusive mother for clearly communicating with my kids "I need the vacuuming to happen. I don't need to go shopping for video games. If you want to go shopping for video games, the best way to try to make that happen is do the vacuuming fairly soon so I have time and energy for shopping."
So, uh, maybe comparing myself to a human hunting killing machine is not a good way to try to be funny about raising my kids.
But I raised difficult children and one very good friend once told me kids like mine are somewhat frequently beaten by parents at wit's end. I never did that.
But I'm not kidding when I talk about having goals like trying to keep them from ending up in prison. And I don't mean they are inherently bad people. During COVID-19, I did most of the shopping because I was concerned that stressed out, scared people the world over plus the social challenges of my kids could result in arrest for essentially being rude with bad timing.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be a full-time homemaker for about two decades. And I spent some years homeschooling. So THIS (below) was never a pattern that really had opportunity to take root:
Abusive chaotic evil types engage in DARVO and typically want to act like hurt little children and insist only their feelings matter and nothing else matters and insist they have a RIGHT to hurt people because someone else hurt them first a long time ago.They demand endless second chances. They have ENDLESS excuses for why no one can EVER hold them responsible and make ENDLESS empty promises that "This will be the last time, I promise!" and similar.And they COUNT on an ever-changing social landscape of a new school teacher every year and a new judge in every court case and a new boss every single time they change jobs to let them blatantly LIE their asses off and get away with it.
My kids simply didn't have an ever changing social landscape of authority figures who didn't know them well and could readily be fooled. So they simply never had the opportunity to spend years and years in circumstances that fostered the development of a habit like that.
They mostly had me in charge of them and I had a good idea of what was going on with them such that it was challenging for them to actually fool me as children trying to make stuff up and con an adult who knew a lot of context for anything they said.
The observations and conclusions in the piece quoted above called DARVO are strongly informed and shaped by my marriage to the man who contributed half his genes to the little hellions I birthed and then tried like hell to turn into functional adults.
I eventually left him. We are divorced and I was the person who asked for the divorce.
While people who know me via Internet seem to desperately want to believe that I was simply endlessly kind and understanding and forgiving of my child's bad behavior and his Grinchlike heart eventually grew three sizes and he magically behaved better because I was non-stop kind to him no matter how he behaved, my son says things like:
1. You left dad, so I know you won't put up with me if I just want to be a jackass all the time.
2. Until you were bedridden and incapable of getting up at 2am to cook for me, I only got told "I'm sick and trying to sleep here." when I was a little shit all day everyday. I didn't have to be a good kid for you to dote on me, but if I behaved badly enough, the loving generosity stopped and I learned to behave because I needed that devotion given my health problems.
3. That incident was my nicey nice Mom telling me "You will lose harder" if you don't quit this crap.
I'm a doting, kind and generous mom but they knew I expected them to behave and they had it clearly communicated that while I have a legal obligation to take care of you until age eighteen no matter what you do, after your eighteenth birthday, you are legally responsible for yourself and I can give you a thirty day notice of eviction and move you out of my home if you simply don't want to straighten up and fly right.
I typically said that jokingly while rolling my eyes over something he had done -- "For your eighteenth birthday, you are getting a thirty day notice of eviction." -- but my kids did get the consistent message that the rules change when you turn eighteen and that your mom will not simply feel sorry for you and endure abusive behavior from you forever "because you have special needs."
I'm a pragmatist and I don't believe punishment per se works. I'm solutions focused and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Not letting my kids develop bad habits was generally easier and more effective than letting them do whatever and trying to punish them or imagining that "natural consequences" like jail or something would somehow cure them.
I don't think that's how people typically operate.
If a child has an issue that makes it harder than average for them to meet certain social expectations, helping them close that gap is better than letting them fail repeatedly and establish socially unacceptable coping mechanisms.
I don't typically lie. I'm someone who values the truth but I'm also keenly aware that there are safety challenges and other pitfalls involved in trying to be consistently honest and open.
I've spent substantial time thinking about how to handle certain details of my life to meet a standard of honesty without cutting my own throat. I've worked on figuring out how to be both diplomatic and honest and what I have found is that it's necessary to set boundaries and establish a policy of refusing to deal with certain things otherwise everyone insists on "free therapy" with ridiculous expectations where I'm supposed to fix all their personal baggage in the name of being diplomatic or make them feel good about intentionally behaving badly in the name of politeness and manners.
And I think this is where we get certain ugly memes, like the ridiculous idea seen all over the Internet that Southerners aren't really polite and well mannered and instead are all secretly toxic, nasty people using nice-sounding phrases as cloaked insults.
If you are habitually sincerely polite, well mannered and respectful, you need coping mechanisms for the fact that many people aren't going to be equally polite, well mannered and respectful and will impose on your good graces in an abusive fashion.
It makes no difference how often I repeat certain things, it fails to get results with most people who are already adults to say x, y and z over and over.
Actions speak louder than words. I got divorced rather than continue having the same fruitless arguments repeatedly with the man.
I don't hate my ex-husband and I am not going to pretend I was easy to live with, but whatever happened in his childhood, whatever disabilities he may have been born with, I think I deserved better than he gave me. And I think he was capable of better and chose to make excuses rather than try to figure out how to do right by me.
So I left him. And did so under very difficult circumstances that could have been easily used as justification to stay while other women told me I should stay.
That made a big impression on my kids and informed their decisions about how to behave if they want me to remain a part of their lives. That's consistent with my general approach of setting the example and getting with the woman in the mirror and dealing with her problems.
I think a lot of parents are judgemental and controlling and they try to dictate things to their children because they are unhappy with their own lives and hoping to protect the kids from making the same mistakes they did.
Figure out how to stop being miserable yourself and the kids will learn from you that they can try to be happy and how to pursue that.
One anecdote I read is mom got laryngitis and was puzzled at how peaceful and quiet the house was. The therapist or whomever writing the piece was trying to make the point mom typically yelled at the kids and then was frustrated that they were noisy and ill behaved.