Getting out of bed...

I don't remember there being a more prevalent reason to be upset with my son when he was a little boy than his persistent unwillingness to get out of bed on time to go to school. At a very young age he was already conjuring excuses, stories, and methods to seduce me and my now ex-wife to allow him to not go to school. I was the stricter one, so his success rate at getting me to give in was much lower than with his mom. It became such a problem that this was the main reasons that I took the "morning shift" taking care of the boys and my wife took the afternoons.

Me being an engineer, and a nerd at heart, I had even put numbers in my head calculating the success rate of our "get him to school" task. All in all I held a proud record of higher than 95%, but unfortunately his mom was a much different story. My job sometimes would take me away from home for a few weeks at a time in which time frame it was his mom's job to do both morning and afternoon shift. During the earlier years I remember coming back home to find out that at least once a week he would swindle his way out of attending school during my absence. During later years I would come back to find out that her success rate was almost always less than 50%.

I want to be fair and not give the impression that I was by any means a better parent than my ex-wife. No, the truth is she was doing the best she could with a child that was just too clever, stubborn, and difficult to handle. Yes my stick was longer and reached deeper into his fear of consequences, but in the end it truly made no significant difference. Currently I hold a less than 10% success rate at getting my teenage son to do anything I want him to do, much less attend school on time.

I won't get into every detail as to what we tried, but sufficiently said, you should know that we must of read a dozen books in this subject, tried everything in the books to no avail. We searched for advice from experts, friends, and family for years. Eventually I felt like we had more negotiations going on with my son than Bill must of with Hillary during their "I did not have sex with that woman" days.

The bottom line is basically what one of the counselors told us in our quest for knowledge and tools to deal with this issue..."if the child has not learned to get up and go to school during the first few years of elementary, chances are he will never do this right at all..." There was very little consolation with that cold bucket of water thrown in our face. But we found out this to be one hundred percent accurate. Currently my brilliant teenage son has lost two complete calendar years of high school because of his attendance problem.

Not getting out of bed to go to school is just a symptom of a much bigger problem. This much bigger problem did not just show up in my home, it has been creeping up a little bit at a time throughout the years. We have looked for help by going to counselors, doctors, psychologist, psychiatrist, attended classes, read books, dug insatiably through the Internet, and so much more. I don't want to get all technical and bore you to death, but what I do know is that what I have learned is that this is more of a neurological problem than it is a discipline problem. The frontal lobe of our brain keeps us mostly out of trouble and doing dumb or dangerous things. The pleasure center of our brain is constantly trying to keep us smiling by offering all kinds of tempting cookies for us to eat, and the frontal lobe has the job of making us consider the consequences of too much indulgence. The frontal lobe is not really that smart when we are younger, but in time if matures and does a decent job keeping us out of trouble unless we are under the influence of certain drugs like alcohol, marijuana, etc. For most younger people the pleasure part of the brain does a pretty fancy dance to seduce the frontal lobe out of doing it's job. If you don't believe me, go check out the statistics on how many young people consistently wear a condom when having sex. One recent study showed that more than 66% of young people between the ages of 15 and 21 did not wear a condom the last time they had sex.

Now imagine how complicated and messy things can get if on top of being a teenage boy your frontal lobe might be wired differently. There are no surgeries to fix this topsy turvy problem and the condition in itself makes it extremely difficult for the young person to be responsible enough to consitently take any kind of medication that might help. This is assuming that you can find a medication that might help, a task that we have not been successful at. The boy is wired so differently that the part of his brain that reasons with consequences for his actions, just does not take it's job seriously at all. You and I think about it twice about being late to work, running a red light, eating something that would make us sick, and this is because our frontal lobe is doing it's job as it should. His frontal lobe is more in the "oh crap, I shouldn't of done that" mode, in which consequences are of little value until he is paying for them, if at all.

Honestly, I don't expect any parent that has not dealt with this particular type of situation to truly grasp how serious this problem can be. Why should they? For the average parent all that they have to do is take away a toy, threaten, reason, bribe, spank, or simply allow the child to fail once, and then the problem is probably mostly fixed. For us parents that are dealing with children that have this issue, none of the above ever truly works. In fact, some of the above actually makes things worse. So this post is probably not for the average parent unless it helps you understand the few of us that are walking down this road of constant frustration. This post is really for the few of you who just don't seem to catch a break while dealing with kids that have this type of condition. You need to know that you are not alone, and that as frustrating and heart breaking as it is to see your child go down that path that seems destined to failure, this is still your child and you cannot give up. I confess, so many times I have wanted to just lift up my arms and scream "ENOUGH, I GIVE UP!!!" In fact, I have done this more than once in the privacy of my own room like a crazy maniac pacing around and grabbing and pulling my hair in desperation. But eventually I fall down to my knees and say a little prayer and somehow find the strength to compose myself and go on another day. Really, it is not sympathy that I am offering you, it is "knowledge." The knowledge that you have not been a bad parent and that what is going on is not your fault. Tonight, before you go to bed, do the same thing that I have learned to do every night...thank God it is not worse because believe it or not, it can always get worse!

Dad

P.S. - A dear friend of mine has a very enlightening article with respect to Teens and Sleep, if you feel like learning something interesting go visit him at:

www.squidoo.com/teens_are_not_lazy