Fail Forward

Last week I went to a business seminar on innovation for work. The topic was around business competitiveness and setting the pace in your industry by staying innovative. But a lot of what was said really spoke to me as a parent of a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder. One of the terms the speaker said that became my new favorite phrase is “fail forward.” Accepting failures as part of the process and that you learn from them. Make the failure meaningful and find opportunities to come up with new ideas or opportunities to move forward.
I think, as a general rule, good parents carry around a great deal of unnecessary guilt. I know I do and I’d like to think I’m a good parent. I’m always trying to make sure I do all I can do to give Penelope the best chances at a happy life. Any errors I make are not just a waste of that precious time but counter-productive – a slip backwards that now has to be regained.
We’d like to think we have more control over our kids than we actually do. I came to the realization a while ago that I can’t make Penelope do anything. I can change the way I do things that may make her more likely to do what I want, but that’s the limit of my control. I think that is where some of the guilt lies, in that when our child makes that poor decision, we feel like we are the ones that failed because we weren’t able to prevent it.
With Penelope and her RAD, the hurdles to make better choices are much larger. So I tend to obsess over what I can do to help her. Then I think about how she has to work hard at this too, and then I debate in my head if she is capable or if she is just unwilling. That leads me back to the beginning of this ongoing cycle of what I can do to help her.
The approached I’ve learned works best for Penelope is the Love & Logic parenting model. It makes her own her behaviors and be responsible for her choices. It’s especially helpful for combating some of the developmental delays that are common with RAD. The challenge in this method is giving up the power. Again, power or control we really do not have.  But the premise of this parenting method is that kids need to make mistakes and get in trouble as part of their learning process. Let the action and subsequent consequence teach the child, not the parent.  The parent’s role is to set the boundaries and be the child’s support through these experiences. It applies to your average kid, but also to the extreme behaviors of of child with RAD.
These kids can go well beyond normal mistakes and bad choices. Even with that, I’ve learned that Penelope tends to make the biggest strides when she has to deal with the repercussions of her mistakes. Some of these mistakes are ones I can live with. But there are a few that I wish never happened. Even so, the more severe here action resulting in a larger consequence, the more she has moved forward.
Even though I still struggle with letting go of control and deal with parental guilt, I’ve learned that her mistakes are one of my greatest tools to help her. Looking at these events and challenges that pop up as opportunities. So I like this phrase “fail forward.”

Mutant Child

I use the word mutant because I feel like Penelope mutates every six months into a different child, similar to the one before but with new strengths and weaknesses, new challenges requiring new approaches to parenting. I use this term instead of evolves. Maybe that’s just how I feel at the moment because we are in a step backward momentum right now. And maybe it’s not even a backward momentum she is going, but a revelation of where she truly is at in this journey versus where I thought she was.

A couple weeks ago, right before spring break, she went out with her friend to a teen night club. Her phone was acting up so I switched cell phones with her for the evening. We’ve done it before. I’ve even gone through her phone before. But it’s a smart phone (as is mine) and maybe I just didn’t look through all the apps and all the folders but this time I found close up naked pictures she had taken of herself. Fortunately she didn’t include her face in the photos. The photo album I found it in was titled one of her Apps. It was a chatting App. She had shared these pics with a couple boys she "met" somehow. I do not believe she knows them, they do not seem local. Of course, they had sent pics of themselves as well. On top of that I found porn in her search history.

Of course, she lost her cell phone privileges, and in good RAD parenting fashion, I didn’t punish her or yell at her. All consequences were related to the behavior, removing the phone was primary, and all the freedoms having phone access to her went with it. I told her how sad it was that she didn’t hold herself to a higher standard in her relationships (or attempts at relationships). I love her too much to allow her to hurt herself and her self image that way. She was very angry and said "You don’t understand!" (What mother does?) "Boys don’t pay me any attention at school. I get what I can get where I can get it." Yikes. Not terribly surprising. Her self-concept has always been such a huge challenge. It’s one of the few constants. How it rears its "ugly" head is what changes it seems.

One of the other interesting pieces to this whole thing is that in the past she would volunteer how there are kids at her school who would do this, do that, including what she did with her chat app, and she would never do it, because she thinks it’s gross or she doesn’t want to end up with the same problems her mother did or some very relatable answer. Did I buy it all hook, line and sinker? No. But it gave us the opportunity for us to talk about these topics and try to be on the same page as to why these high risk behaviors would be poor decisions. This is a bit different then her usual RAD lying in that typically it’s Penelope creating a fantasy world (boys that like her and fights that never happened) or telling me about something she wished happened to her or she did.

My initial approach to this problem was to establish some tasks that she must do in order to demonstrate her level of responsibility in order to get her phone back. I fundamentally didn’t feel like it was enough, not really addressing the main issue but also wanting her to have this typical teen accessory. It didn’t matter because this approach went nowhere. She dug her heals in and blocked any discussion about potential tasks but instead started saying how she knows better now and how right I am, and that she is making her BFF stop chatting with boys like that too because it’s wrong. BLAH. Do I have STUPID written across my forehead?

That was about 2 weeks ago. A couple of days ago, we were chatting about something at school and I suggested using Facebook for online came up and she said "It’s not like I am allowed to go on there!" Then she shut to whole conversation down. She feels like she is never getting her phone back. I told her "I’m not sure how you are to get your phone back when anytime the topic comes up, you ‘don’t want to talk about it.’" That night, I couldn’t sleep and went to get some water around midnight. When I passed her room I saw a glow coming from under her covers. When I went in to inspect, I found she had taken back her phone, from my PURSE. It was in my purse earlier that night. I don’t know what she was doing because it was on the main screen when I took it from her. All I could say was "Wow. What am I suppose to say?" And went to bed.. well, after I calmed down a bit I went to bed. After I went through her phone trying to figure out what she was doing. She had been looking at porn. The chat app was gone, as a lot of other things on it. But then I learned she had taken the external SD card from it. I also found out that she had a secret email account and some social media accounts attached to it. Me, not a happy camper.

I took the next day to think about it. I wanted to be strategic about it. Regardless, the phone is gone. Deactivated. But that’s just a speed bump in the bigger challenge.

So that evening, I went home with the mindset that I’m not even going to address the phone. It’s such a pea size issue at this point. We need to look at why this is such a compulsion for her, what she gets from it, and what she can do to replace it that is more rewarding, more satisfying and appropriate.

I began that conversation with her. She said that she got bored with chatting with the boys, that it eventually didn’t do anything for her. She feels like life is boring. Her life is boring. She does the same thing day in and day out. Why can’t demons and vampires be real? She wants to be a demon or vampire (or mutant child). She wishes there was an apocalypse so people can be scared and she could be a leader of a gang and chop people up. I said "Do you here what you’re saying?" I repeated back to her what she said. I wanted to clarify "You want people to be more scared? More scared in general? Or scared of you?" She said "I want them to be more scared of me." When she says this, you can see the shame on her face. By this point, she is sitting on the floor against the wall farthest from me holding a pillow to her chest. She said "Everyone has more power than me, I want to be stronger. I want them to be scared of me."

Basically, she wants to feel safer. She feels that if they fear her, she will be safer. She is tired of being scared of them instead. I told her that it’s a perception she has, and that no one has any more power over her than she has over them. But I get it and want her to feel safe and it’s something we are going to work on together.

Taking what she said out of that context is unnerving to say the least. And I'm still having that type of reaction regardless. I keep thinking "I think I lost a year of my life in that conversation."  It's not something I'd ever hear come from her at this point in our journey. Chop people up? The conversation tore me up, to imagine she feels this way just demonstrates how scared she is and always is at some level. At least I can see that in that conversation. At the same time, I thought lack of wanting to get out and do things was more to being hypersensitive to stressors that cause her to be scared. But that has led her to feel her life boring and monotonous.

I still think it’s all based on her lack of self-esteem. It’s all related. If you don’t have the confidence to put yourself out there because you are scared of what could happen, you are a prisoner within the walls you have built. Life would become rather boring I guess.

The other issue I’ve identified is that she spends way too much with her head in fantasy and sci-fi based shows, videos, books, and just overall thinking. She is trying to escape her reality. This is not new for her and I’ve told her that I can’t allow it. It’s not healthy for her and it won’t fix her problems. So, she has been cut off of anything fantasy or science fiction based. She is also going to spend more time disconnected from technology. I can’t cut her off completely as it’s too much a part of her school work; homework, texts, are mostly electronic. But she is scaling back to the minimum.

This conversation happened on Thursday. That night and Friday morning she was completely sick to her stomach. I ended up keeping her home and having her Papaw pick her up and take her to his house. I certainly wasn’t leaving her home by herself. I hadn’t had time to brief either Papaw or Grandma on the evening prior. Grandma thought it would good for Papaw and myself to sit down with Penelope at their house when I pick her up to cover everything. It’s good to loop Papaw into this even though I’m not sure what he can do beyond just be a reinforcing family member for Penelope. That in itself is a big deal.

Standards

Penelope has come such a long way. In so many ways, she appears like a typical teenager. She has similar teenage dramas and social problems. But RAD is a part of her, regardless of how much try to push it out. How am I suppose to determine the difference between RAD behavior and typical behavior? But that's really not the right question, is it? It's not about the behavior, rather the thinking behind the behavior. Until she just starts spewing every thought that enters her head, the only way I can know what she is thinking or feeling is through her actions. But even then, it still leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
What also complicates this interpretation is my own issues. A fear reaction to the future implications of her actions. An anger reaction to being tricked into giving her too much freedom or responsibility. A guilt reaction for not having the ability to prevent it from happening. A shame reaction for allowing myself to distance my feelings towards her because of her behavior. I've been able to recognize that some if not all of these reactions do not help me address the behavior in the best way, but there is a bit of a delay in getting my mind organized enough to do something.
So, Penelope has had a cell phone since she was 14 years old. I may have written about it in the past because I found this great website with phones for kids that have a ton of parental controls. The downside to this website is that because they only offer monthly plans (as a control feature), you have to pay the full price of the phones. Well, after about 1 year, her phone stopped working. I wasn't going to buy her another phone. Grandma offered to put her on the family phone plan, which was the cheapest option. Because it's through a well known mobile service, there were free phone options. There wasn't one phone with no camera. Her old phone had a camera but a parental control prevented being able to send the pictures anywhere. Grandma talked to the sales rep and set up parental controls on the new phone. The problem is, her new phone is a smart phone giving her access to Apps. I didn't think anything of it, when we were assured.
Well, you know where I'm going with this. She had an app that allowed her to chat with strangers. I had checked her phone over time and nothing but then her battery stopped working unless plugged in. She was going out with a friend so I traded phones with her. I didn't even look at it until the end of the night, going through her photos and found an album with this particular's app title. They were pictures of naked boys and pictures she had taken of herself - close up photos of certain body parts. Nothing identifiable but I know it's her. I went to the app and found conversations with boys, or so called boys, and where they had exchanged pictures.
We had talked about this type of activity, interest teens have in it and the potential consequences - not the punishment kind as much about what it does to your self-image, privacy, and safety. She would volunteer without prompting about other girls that did these high risk behaviors and other high risk behaviors and how she would never do it for this reason or another.
Lie, lie, lie. All lies.
She feels justified in her actions. "No boys at school care about me. At least I'm getting attention somewhere." And things like that. Trying to figure out what I can do to help her as her Mom have higher standards for herself.