Residential treatment?
I spoke with stressed out adoptive parents today. They had questions about the boys' ranch where we sent two of our sons. It brought up many things to think about.
Chuck and I spent quite a while talking this morning about the ranch, about parenting styles, about whether the ranch helped us or not. It is a hard thing to talk about. There is so much guilt and sadness for me about not having been the parent I wanted to be. Things were so difficult then, and we had exhausted our resources. I was losing perspective and becoming abusive.
Still, the abandonment they each had to feel as we dropped them off at this place is something I can't imagine, and I so wish I had been able to find other options.
How do you figure out these things? Sometimes I wonder, if we had heard about 'Beyond Consequences" parenting sooner would the ranch have still been necessary?
There are times when I am at peace with our decision to send the boys there. I know it hurt them. I don't want to minimize that. I have to weigh that in with the fact that I was also making things worse for them at home during that time. I did not know what to do.
And we had to consider the effects of life as it was on our other children. Too often there was chaos and out of control anger, and afterwards, I was drained. I leaned on them too much, probably.
We can't know how things would have been if we had known more, or done things differently.
Chuck and I spent quite a while talking this morning about the ranch, about parenting styles, about whether the ranch helped us or not. It is a hard thing to talk about. There is so much guilt and sadness for me about not having been the parent I wanted to be. Things were so difficult then, and we had exhausted our resources. I was losing perspective and becoming abusive.
Still, the abandonment they each had to feel as we dropped them off at this place is something I can't imagine, and I so wish I had been able to find other options.
How do you figure out these things? Sometimes I wonder, if we had heard about 'Beyond Consequences" parenting sooner would the ranch have still been necessary?
There are times when I am at peace with our decision to send the boys there. I know it hurt them. I don't want to minimize that. I have to weigh that in with the fact that I was also making things worse for them at home during that time. I did not know what to do.
And we had to consider the effects of life as it was on our other children. Too often there was chaos and out of control anger, and afterwards, I was drained. I leaned on them too much, probably.
We can't know how things would have been if we had known more, or done things differently.
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