My husband has overheard our youngest, adopted 17-year-old daughter talking on the phone to her boyfriend. He fears she is going to beat someone up and if she does she will very likely face a custodial sentence.Yes, clearly, all the concern is for the out-of-control child and the potential effects on her future. You really couldn’t make it up, could you?
She has a long string of fairly serious offences behind her and is close to the edge of a magistrate's tolerance.As we know, that’s almost limitless – and giving her leeway and sympathy and second/third/fourteenth chances is clearly not having the slightest effect.
I’m once again reminded of that ‘Simpson’s’ episode with Ned Flanders’ hippie parents proclaiming ‘Help us, doc! We’ve tried nothing and we’re all outta ideas!’.
But she’s the real victim in this, poor lamb!
She is also vulnerable and volatile and desperately in need of help that does not seem to be available to adopted teenagers, certainly not where we live.
My nightmare is that if she is placed in custody she will self-harm or explode and the damage already done to her as a young child will be compounded.So foster mum cuddles and cossets and wheedles her charge (with the ‘help’ of her friends, including one ‘Tina’ who we discover has her own issues…) until she calms down:
"I know, I don't know why I do it." The constant refrain, the perpetual inability to understand or control her feelings.Fairly typical these days, because discipline and self-sacrifice and patience have gone the way of the dodo, to be replaced with unshakeable self-esteem, materialism and entitlement.
And maybe foster mum needs to look at the area she’s living in and the people her foster daughter is hanging around with…
This is the same Tina who tried to beat up my older daughter three years ago, who has a stepfather in jail and an aunt who recently smashed a door down in my house and stole over £500 worth of goods.Nice place. Nice people. Maybe that’s the real problem..?
Hmmm...
ReplyDeleteI live far too much of my life on Facebook, monitoring my two daughters' lives.
Yes, you might just be right there.
I wonder if this is a real story? And I also wonder if "Jane Green" intended to tell us how poor a communicator she is?
Bunny
ReplyDeletePerhaps actually disciplining the little bitch and stopping her being friends with scum might help. My parents never referred to me as their adopted son, just their son, perhaps that is part of this girl's problem, that her adopted parents are as useless as the bloody breeders who had her in the first place.
"Perhaps actually disciplining the little bitch and stopping her being friends with scum might help."
ReplyDeleteMaybe foster mum doesn't know how?