- Changing our family culture of individual irresponsibility
- Ezra is at Vantage Point for the present time after beating Noah up again.
- Alex and Enoch have both openly blamed the problem on Noah’s behavior and what they see as our lack of reining him in. They have two huge blindspots:
- They are ignorant of most of our efforts to correct Noah because we don’t advertise corrections publicly when we can help it.
- They are blind to their own biases as demonstrated by Alex telling me that sending Ezra to Vantage Point is a bandaid on the problem of Noah’s behavior at literally the same time as he is openly conspiring with Enoch to kick Noah out of the basement for being annoying while Noah is literally doing nothing wrong. (I was there at the time.)
- Noah continues, even after having been beat up, to flagrantly irritate others. (Laura and I have no illusions about whether he is contributing to the problem.)
- As far as I can figure out, consistently enforced isolation for even small infractions of behavior (to prevent the behavior from escalating) would be the best way to curb this culture.
- The problem is that such consistent enforcement would be exhausting even for a healthy parent and much of every day the only available parent is Laura who is already not strong and healthy.
- This is made harder by the practical realities that there are virtually always a minimum of 4 children that need direct monitoring and at least 2 of them at any given moment are sure to be trying to push the boundaries.
- Target behaviors would include anything that is:
- Crass or unseemly
- Threatening to others
- Swearing
- Roughhousing (and frankly, almost any physical contact)
Action Items
- Talk to Laura about talking to Becca to see if she has any ideas about how she would approach discipline in a 4 children to 1 parent environment because this effective discipline approach is in line with what the Warden’s did in a 1 to 1 or even 2 parents to 1 child setup.
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