Re: sad story - sadder comments

There were at least a few enlightening comments about the deficiencies of bureaucracies like DSS, but no one suggested the obvious and sensible solution: letting children decide for themselves where they want to live. The social workers say their hands were tied and they couldn't take Erin out of the home, but what would have happened if they had shown up, seen the obvious problems in the home, and told Erin "We won't make you go with us, but we think these conditions are very bad, and we can help you find a better family to live with"?

Therein lies the rub. We had such a situation present itself, though the circumstances were a bit different. The youngster was 15 rather 11, though on the socially expected scale he was likely closer to 11 on the maturity level, and he was given a choice of living with us rather than going to a juvenile detention center, but there are more similarities than not. One person will react to a situation one way, the next will react another. This one that we took in reacted in the fashion of modeling his attitude and actions after the undesirable individuals that he had for a family.

Now that the base explanation is out of the way, I'll get to the reason I chose to bring it up. He knew how bad his situation was at home: his "mother" was stealing from him, addicted to prescription pain killers and did anything that she could to get them as well as being blitzed out of her mind over half the time from being on them. His "father" didn't actively make his life miserable but did so passively by refusing to do anything about the "mother". The "son" was treated very poorly but I won't go into all of the specifics of it.

How he came to be choosing between us or jail was convoluted. The "mother" was pissed at him for one thing or another, blitzed on her pain pills again, and decided that the thing to do was to beat him with the buckle end of a belt. She had decided to follow him into his bedroom to do this when he had gone there to avoid confrontation. When she did this, he finally had enough and pushed her away to try to stop her beating him and thanks to her being less than steady on her feet from the drugs, she fell and hit her face on a piece of furniture. She then went next door to their relatives' house and told them that the bruise on her face was from him attacking her and punching her in the eye. (Note: law enforcement agents that got involved said that the bruise could not be positively declared to fit either story, but the overall elements of the actual story itself that I won't be sharing lend credibility to his story and not hers.) A relative - the boy's "sister" - immediately reacted to being told that he had done this and called the police to report it.

So this is how it came that he was given the choice of living with us or jail. He chose us, but always wanted to see or talk to the family that had been so useless to him and treated him so poorly. It worked out for the most part, until the summer was over and school began. Once he realized that he was expected to actually give at least a half-assed effort to do well in school with us, he started complaining about wanting to go "home". Then his "mother" started promising him a new car when he turned 16 (which she could not possibly afford and while he admitted knowing that she was very unlikely to actually come through on) and he began causing even more problems with us. In the end, though I won't go into the specifics of the arrangement, he eventually returned to living with his "parents".

The moral of this massive wall of text is that giving an individual a choice, they are not necessarily likely to make the right one. This is true whether the individual is an adult, adolescent, or child. Given the conditions of their life up to that point, unfortunately an adolescent or child can be especially prone to explicitly making the wrong choice simply because it is all that they know. Of course, if his family and other adults that I have known are any indication, adults are no less prone to making such poor choices and at times can be even more so.