Playing with fire

The situation described below is a mixture of a few experiences that I have accumulated over fifteen years, regarding students, both boys and girls, and families from different schools. It refers to no one person in particular. The name I have used is fictional, but the events are not.
Long before he set fire to a few objects in class, Diego had been in and out of my office, in and out of probation, in and out of the school's psychologist's office many, many times. He had started to veer from what his family and school expected from him pretty early on during his elementary school years. By the time he reached the Middle School, he had created a reputation for himself that caught the eyes of teachers, students and parents alike. It started out with showing opposition to teachers in the classroom. It moved on to speaking in an aggressive tone to classmates. It was coupled with academic irresponsibility and low grades. Diego soon became a verbal bully, participated in vandalism and even theft.
As a result, parents started forbidding their children to spend time with him. At school, classmates grew weary of interruptions during class. They didn't like it when their things went missing either. It was clear that they were tired of the homeroom teacher speaking about problems in the classroom when they knew that they were not personally to blame.
Diego's resistance to change was impregnable. Even the most experienced teachers became exasperated with him. His parents were at a loss. His friends started to jump ship on him, one by one. The more he was pressured into changing his attitudes and actions, the deeper he became rooted in his ways. Insolence was his common attitude towards teachers. Defiance and threats characterized his relationships with classmates. Diego faced disciplinary sanctions with disdain; detentions and suspensions seemed to be of no consequence to him. By age 13, Diego had joined a gang and started going to school with gang emblems. One evening he was taken home by the police after having wrecked a car with a baseball bat.
How did Diego get to such a place, to such a state? How was a student allowed to get so far? How come intervention from the school had little or no effect? The truth is that, extreme as it may seem, it's my experience that Diego's situation is not an isolated one. Two key factors were at play here. One, Diego's teachers gave up on him quickly and sought his expulsion very early on. From the start, Diego understood that there was nothing he could do to reverse his own situation. He did what he though was the only thing he could do; he intensified his opposition. The second factor was the real trigger though; his parents didn't listen to the school during the elementary school years. Instead, every time they were called in, they fought the school, contradicted teachers and reinforced in Diego's mind the notion that teachers were against him and that they, as parents, would advocate for him, no matter what. So years of conflict accumulated. Diego believed himself to be untouchable. His parents developed an animosity towards the school that transpired into Diego's own opposition to norms and appropriate social behavior. When his parents realized what had happened and how they had contributed to the scenario, it was already too late.
While in Seventh Grade, Diego had begun to drink and smoke outside school. He had at least one very tempestuous boyfriend-girlfriend relationship which ended in heartbreak for him and disgust for her. In Diego's mind nobody understood him, nobody cared, and he had nowhere to go. He had lost the safety net that had been his parents because they were no longer willing to cover for him or to justify his actions.
On the last day of school Diego was spotted painting the walls of the school by leaving his handprints in bright colours. Though he had been expelled, he returned to vandalize the school the following school year. He later started crank calling former classmates and threatening them on the phone. He was no longer at school, but students feared Diego. Parents knocked on my door demanding even more action.
The years of parental inconsistency had produced a tardy response to Diego's needs. As early as the Third Grade parents were urged to seek professional help. His parents blamed the school and refused to take him anywhere. When the situation had reached the office of the Principal, there was little to do or say but demand that Diego's parents should coordinate efforts with the school, that they accept there was a problem and that they stop covering up Diego's vandalism and even criminal behavior. Teachers were asked to, what I call, "press the restart button" on their relationship with Diego and show him their kind side. Diego was assigned a tutor and was called in to the Principal's office every week to monitor progress. Further situations of theft and vandalism shut the lid on Diego's case and the school ended up applying the most severe sanction possible, besides prosecution, which is expulsion.
The line between listening to your child and healthy skepticism is not a fine one. I have met many parents who start off their interviews with me by saying "I believe my child", leaving no room for dialogue. Believing one's child is important. Believing blindly is negligence. Checking and verifying a child's capacity to be dexterous with the truth should become a permanent parental task. One reason for this is that, as children grow, they learn that things are not necessarily either 100% right or 100% wrong, but that there are shades to each colour. It becomes necessary to periodically re-draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate. Also, especially in the tween years, boys and girls increasingly find themselves in the moral dilemma of having to choose between values: honesty or loyalty, kindness or tolerance, assertiveness or altruism. Adults need to show the way.
Parents need to see their relationship with their child's school as a partnership. The minute the relationship turns into a tug-of-war it becomes imperative to press the reset button. Anything short of starting fresh is playing with fire.