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The Troubled Teen Industry (TTI)

I suppose some kids are unable to refuse when sent "voluntarily" to military academies and boarding schools. Especially, as in the case of boarding prep schools, if this was the usual procedure in a certain social group. But I can see that contemporary parents might not have the authority to say "Tomorrow you are going to a boarding school" without the child going into screaming fits or running away. So they call in the snatchers.

A bit OT, but there was the famous case in the mid-19th century of a Jewish child in Italy being kidnapped by the pope because it was discovered that one of the servants had secretly baptised him when he was a baby. The "Mortara case."
 
I don't know what it is about the American psyche, they can get a bit hysterical and OTT when it comes to things like this. I'm sure it is religion based.
 
Big Tabs said:
You obviously care a lot about this subject, so I will leave you to it.
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Well, there’s abuse of children, then abuse of children by their parents, but parents paying someone else to abuse their children takes it to a whole other level
 
I've got a few, too many, friends with teenagers with "problems" that the parents have tried everything under the sun to solve for years. So perhaps it is not surprising if, in desperation and perhaps making a mistake, they resort to something this radical.
Not saying it is right (by whatever standards) but perhaps they feel that if there is an outside chance it is worth trying. I'm talking about kids who from puberty on spend all their time staring at a screen, don't talk, don't study, maybe take drugs or cut themselves with razor blades. It must be terrible for the parents.
 
PaulMB said:
I've got a few, too many, friends with teenagers with "problems" that the parents have tried everything under the sun to solve for years. So perhaps it is not surprising if, in desperation and perhaps making a mistake, they resort to something this radical.
Not saying it is right (by whatever standards) but perhaps they feel that if there is an outside chance it is worth trying. I'm talking about kids who from puberty on spend all their time staring at a screen, don't talk, don't study, maybe take drugs or cut themselves with razor blades. It must be terrible for the parents.
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Yes, you’re probably right. My problem is that any story like this makes me feel a bit sick for the kids. I can’t watch films, TV dramas about kids suffering. Probably a stupid idea to start this thread in the first place
 
PaulMB said:
I've got a few, too many, friends with teenagers with "problems" that the parents have tried everything under the sun to solve for years. So perhaps it is not surprising if, in desperation and perhaps making a mistake, they resort to something this radical.
Not saying it is right (by whatever standards) but perhaps they feel that if there is an outside chance it is worth trying. I'm talking about kids who from puberty on spend all their time staring at a screen, don't talk, don't study, maybe take drugs or cut themselves with razor blades. It must be terrible for the parents.
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Honestly, that sounds like a shit parenting issue, not a kid issue.
 
sq225917 said:
Honestly, that sounds like a shit parenting issue, not a kid issue.
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Not convinced. Friends of ours have 2 kids. Professional middle class family, normal upbringing. One kid is fine, good education, secure job, making their way in the world just fine; the other met a girl from a dodgy family when he was at an impressionable age and has gone completely off the rails. Drugs, dropped out, prison beckons, probably. Parents are distraught and tried everything to prevent this trajectory, at an early stage, but nothing worked.
 
My guess is that those blaming the parents have no children.

Some children go wrong, other children, from the same family, are fine. There seems to be no particular reason why this should be so. It's obvs a mixture of genetics and environment, but children with the same parents, growing up in the same home, can and do turn out very differently.
 
sq225917 said:
Honestly, that sounds like a shit parenting issue, not a kid issue.
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That seems a bit sweeping, and a bit callous. There is no easy formula for "good parenting," as one parent said to me once, "whatever you do, you are making a mistake." Too strict, too lenient, give them everything they want and you spoil them, give them very little and let them work for every penny and they become resentful of their parents. Get intimately involved with every problem they have, or maintain a dignified distance and let them work things out for themselves. I have no children, but from what I see among friends it must be a great joy when things go well, and utter hell when they go wrong.
 
Joe Hutch said:
My guess is that those blaming the parents have no children.
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Guess again.

Look at the numbers of kids self harming now vs the 70s. Barely more than two generations, the difference is naff all to do with an increase in genetic predisposition, everything to do with how environment and upbringing has changed in that period.
 
Pretty much what you said Paul, with all encompassing social media kids can never switch off. Parents in the 70s had to fight against 3 channels of TV, these days youre vying for your kids attention vs a million channels of mostly pointless tedium.
 
Trawling back through various branches of my family, I am amazed at how many major bust-ups there were; parents disowning children, not seeing them for years, or even decades. Usually, though not always, such rows were around religion; child of Protestant parents marrying Catholic spouses and vice-versa. In my father's family, his three sisters fell out with their father because they joined an even more extreme Protestant sect than the one he belonged to. Another ancestor was disinherited by his father, and booted out of the family home, for getting a woman pregnant then refusing to marry her or support the child.

(This was all before TV and social media, of course).
 
Joe Hutch said:
Trawling back through various branches of my family, I am amazed at how many major bust-ups there were; parents disowning children, not seeing them for years, or even decades. Usually, though not always, such rows were around religion; child of Protestant parents marrying Catholic spouses and vice-versa. In my father's family, his three sisters fell out with their father because they joined an even more extreme Protestant sect than the one he belonged to. Another ancestor was disinherited by his father, and booted out of the family home, for getting a woman pregnant then refusing to marry her or support the child.

(This was all before TV and social media, of course).
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Well with a family like that, who needed any TV series?
 
Ah, the good old days. My mother used to go on about how wonderful everything was back when she was a girl, interspersed with anecdotes about the bloke down the road who was in and out prison for knocking his wife about, or the children across the road who weren't able to go to school because their parents couldn't afford to buy shoes for them.
 
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