Programming a Child While With Other Parent?

[scraps66]

Two years ago at the beginning of the school year I had an incident with our S10 that highlighted something that I now notice happening with frequency. 

It was a nice day out, first day of school, and S10 was laid up on the couch with his nose in a book.  ExNPD/BPD had really gotten him into reading - "her" thing for him.  One of them.  This particular day it was very nice out, pleasant, and I wanted to see S10 outside.  This was a period when getting S10 to do any activity aside from Minecraft was at best, challenging.  I want him more active.

I forced him to go outside this day and he proceeded to go down the street, one thing lead to another and he had an impulsive moment and grabbed the neighbor's child's nose.  He began bleeding.  Mom came outside fuming at me. 

At the same time ex was feeding the kids bad information about my use of daycare for them, and S10 was behaving bad in before care.  He was no doubt caught in her conflict.  So this day I tell her what happened eluding to the fact that her messing with him about daycare may be impacting his behavior with other kids - the bloody nose.  I tell her that he was reading at the time and I wanted him out of the house.  Her response, "I can't believe you stopped him from reading."  I've now learned to recognize these statements to translate, roughly, that I will be, or need to be, punished for what I did.  Stopped him from reading and ex was the one that enstilled his interest in reading.

Ever since then S10 demands having a book with him.   Most times his mother gets him books that he brings to my house.  Many times I have taken him top the library for books and he is either disinterested in going to the library, or ends up not reading the book that "I" have taken him to get.

We had gone to the library yesterday to get the next Harry Potter book.  It was not there.  When I pick him up today mom had gone to another library and got him the book.  Maybe with the knowledge that I had tried, and failed, and now she's through her actions letting S10 know that she got the book, and I didn't.

So I have this feeling, and I have noticed this in other ways, especially due to the fact that ex or her boyfriend pick the kids up from school even on my days.  So she gets to do whatever to them before I pick them up.  What I am seeing is that she somehow wants him doing what she wants shim dong, when with me and she's using the books to achieve this goal.  Could I be crazy/paranoid about this?

S10 will walk in the door and go straight for the couch and stick his nose in the book.  His actual reading is another concern.  He goes through these books at an unbelievable clip reading a 500+ page novel in two days.  I watch him and he walks through page after page quicker than I can read.  But when asked he really can't, or won't, answer questions about the books content.  My take, and I have other examples of this, he is parentified to the point he is faking his reading prowess to meet his mother's expectations.  This part is a huge concern for me.  That he feels obligated to meet someone elses expectations. 

   

 

[livednlearned]

Hi scraps66,

I can really identify with raising a Minecraft-focused kid, and also the reading. My ex is no longer in the picture, and the issues you're describing (at least partly) are still there. You've described your son in ways that sound similar to what S13 is like.

S13 is in a social skills class with a counselor who kept urging me to read about Highly Sensitive Child. These are kids who are not necessarily ADHD, Asperger's or autistic, although they can have some of those traits, and especially sensory processing issues.

I think S13 has a sensitive genotype and the book says these kids tend to be in the large minority -- more solitary, less outgoing (altho they can be), able to get in a "flow" state more easily (like being on the computer for hours at a stretch).

Your son may naturally be inclined to read more than the average kid, and be less interested in doing things that take him out of his comfort zone because he gets more stimulated than regular kids. It's also likely that he is using the conflict between you and your ex to try and assert what he wants (aligns with his mom), and lacks the skills to do this without it coming across as defensive.

It has taken me several years to change my parenting style to really "get" S13. He was diagnosed ODD at age 9 and I can't imagine that diagnosis would show up if he were tested again. The more I try to tune in and understand what his reality is like, the less conflict we have.

If there is a highly sensitive parent (some people suggest that BPD parents are highly sensitive types who had deeply invalidating childhoods), then there is a higher than average chance the child will have these sensitive traits. I'm trying to correct the "goodness of fit" issue between me and S13. I'm much more physical, athletic, balanced, social, extroverted, whereas he is more like his dad.

So two seemingly opposite things can both be true. Your son may genuinely love reading. AND your ex may be trying to create a drama triangle. S10 would then (being a kid) try to exploit whatever alliance he could to get his needs met (i.e. wanting to read).

One of the principles of the Family Connections program is to interpret things in the most benign way possible. That would mean accepting that your son wants to read, and accepting that it is better to get along than to be right when it comes to his preferences. It does mean changing the way you parent, though, which can be challenging.

[whirlpoollife]

scrapp66 you are not crazy or parinoid. Whether it be books or sports , pick ups , your x is competing with jealously to you as a parent. I understand it as my xh does the same thing, even when we were married and living together.

If kids and I were having time together or talking xh would take whatever it was over . Not just including himself for the good and enjoyment but totally taking the kids away. He would then , not say how bad I was at whatever it was but he would repeatldy boast how great he is doing the whatever. So kids hear over and over how super he is. 

Or if he was watching tv and kids and we're doing something else he would make noises and laugh extra loud , until kids left me and went to him ... .then he got quiet.

I was golfing with kids with an ameteur  putter. He saw that , I saw the look on his face, not good. He took the kids immediately to the sport store and bought an expensive putter and took over the game. He sent me away to do something else for him.

I was riding bikes on the block with kids. He then told kids that he will take them to the trail to ride not just on the block.

Last year I took kids to the coast , then he took kids to the coast in a different location .

Afterwards I had to hear kids tell me how much better dads vacation area was.

This wasn't just a now and then type of thing as in the examples above but a constant stream of it from xh. 

I would question myself thinking I was over thinking of what was going on.

But it increased over time as the kids got older.

I had wished so much that, he could just be a regular dad without the competing.

So ... it's not going to end any more than the PD is going to end.  That's where lnl 's perspective comes in.

What I said back to kids concerning vacation spots, I said each has its qualities. That they got to see two new areas of the states that they didn't see before etc.

I hope that played it down of "how much better dad thinks he is" thoughts planted into kids head. ( my own thoughts to myself were quite different)

[scraps66]

Thank you.

I really need to investigate this sensory issue more thoroughly.  This has arisen with phone calls from school on numerous occasions after playing the game tag.  S10 gets tagged and he thinks he's getting hit. (Not sure if this relates to a few instances when a child when ex hit him in the face and qualifies as a traumatic event.)  He doesn't like being hugged either.

S10 was originally diagnosed ODD, then autisitic, then Asperger's, now by the DSM "unspecified disruptive, impulse-control, and conduct disorder, r/o anxiety disorder."  my feeling is that this last one most typifies his recent behaviors.  Ex "likes" Asperger's I believe because it has an intelligence component.

Reports from school tell me that the books may actually be a self soothing tool for him.  I also do not think he is really reading the books, but maybe just looking at the words page after page soothes him.  If ex is trying to enstill this in him, her interest in reading, he will do this to appease her.  I believe this is also going on.  I also notice things like, him not wearing the clothes I buy him, wanting the foods that mom buys him, but on the other hand he doesn't do thing things he likes, like bike riding, when with me.  Won't read the books he picks up from the library when with me.

And yes whirlpool, I have tolerated the competition between households.  Try to ignore them and let the kids figure it out.  What happens at the baseball games, I bring water.  No ice, like all the other parents.  Ex and the bf show up, they've got water - with ice, or, fresh ice cold lemonade, popsicles I a cooler, and snacks.  Then, there's the big advertisement of having sunblock.  Then there are the reply all e-mails to the coaches, "Thank you coach, you are an answer to my prayers for S10.  I have been praying for someone to work with S10 like you have." Or, "I plan on buying a gift for Coach X, please let me know if you'd like to contribute. blah."

     

[livednlearned]

S10 gets tagged and he thinks he's getting hit. (Not sure if this relates to a few instances when a child when ex hit him in the face and qualifies as a traumatic event.)

     

Wow -- this exact same thing used to go on with S13. It started when he was about 8. He interpreted the most benign things like they were acts of war.

It showed up in a different form in middle school (no longer playing tag) when a couple of his friends discovered he didn't like having his neck touched. It was a complicated thing to untangle (it was at the beginning of his latest bout of depression). He seemed to know that they were not bullying him, but I think it was also deeply invalidating to him that they didn't understand how sensitive his neck was, and he interpreted this as aggression against him.

There are books out there about sensory processing, and they were helpful. For S13, they are mild (compared to what some autistic or Asperger's kids experience) so the solution in many of those books is occupational therapy, which seemed to miss what I needed, which was to understand his temperament. The book, Highly Sensitive Child was a little more helpful because it was a bit more "whole child" instead of just the sensory issues.

I realize now that S13 is often more flooded, more overwhelmed, more stimulated than I previously understood. The two things that helped were validating him. I even apologized for not fully understanding what it was like for him. The other part was doing some of the parenting things in the book, like preparing S13 for things in advance or making sure he had time to decompress. Before all this, I believed he needed to stay busy all the time, which is actually the worse thing for him. He needs to self soothe and recover from feeling stimulated more than other kids.

Having said all that, I do think your ex is trying to alienate your son. That doesn't mean he has been alienated, though. He sounds defiant like S13 was, and in some ways that means he has his own mind about things. It could be, though, that she is validating his experience by recognizing that he is struggling with something very fundamental that he can't change. And that makes him want to align with her, if only to exploit things so he can get his needs met.

I know it starts to sound like blah blah blah after a while because it gets mentioned here so often, but validation is truly the black belt front line defense. It's not natural to dislike a parent -- there is no evolutionary basis for that. So there has to be a counter move to the alienation that is too fundamentally important to our kids' survival, and that's us accepting and acknowledging that what they're perceiving/feeling is real. It tells them they belong, and that even if the rest of the world doesn't understand what it's like for them, we do.

Validation won't solve everything. It has to be there, though. My take on it is that it makes difficult things less difficult for S13, and for our relationship.

Sorry for the long post on this -- it's a topic close to my heart. Serious behavioral issues started to show up when S13 was 8 and it took me a long time to figure out how to help him. I'm still trying to figure it out, but I think we've made some progress, just by me believing that his sensory issues are real.

[goateeki]

Two years ago at the beginning of the school year I had an incident with our S10 that highlighted something that I now notice happening with frequency. 

It was a nice day out, first day of school, and S10 was laid up on the couch with his nose in a book.  ExNPD/BPD had really gotten him into reading - "her" thing for him.  One of them.  This particular day it was very nice out, pleasant, and I wanted to see S10 outside.  This was a period when getting S10 to do any activity aside from Minecraft was at best, challenging.  I want him more active.

I forced him to go outside this day and he proceeded to go down the street, one thing lead to another and he had an impulsive moment and grabbed the neighbor's child's nose.  He began bleeding.  Mom came outside fuming at me. 

At the same time ex was feeding the kids bad information about my use of daycare for them, and S10 was behaving bad in before care.  He was no doubt caught in her conflict.  So this day I tell her what happened eluding to the fact that her messing with him about daycare may be impacting his behavior with other kids - the bloody nose.  I tell her that he was reading at the time and I wanted him out of the house.  Her response, "I can't believe you stopped him from reading."  I've now learned to recognize these statements to translate, roughly, that I will be, or need to be, punished for what I did.  Stopped him from reading and ex was the one that enstilled his interest in reading.

Ever since then S10 demands having a book with him.   Most times his mother gets him books that he brings to my house.  Many times I have taken him top the library for books and he is either disinterested in going to the library, or ends up not reading the book that "I" have taken him to get.

We had gone to the library yesterday to get the next Harry Potter book.  It was not there.  When I pick him up today mom had gone to another library and got him the book.  Maybe with the knowledge that I had tried, and failed, and now she's through her actions letting S10 know that she got the book, and I didn't.

So I have this feeling, and I have noticed this in other ways, especially due to the fact that ex or her boyfriend pick the kids up from school even on my days.  So she gets to do whatever to them before I pick them up.  What I am seeing is that she somehow wants him doing what she wants shim dong, when with me and she's using the books to achieve this goal.  Could I be crazy/paranoid about this?

S10 will walk in the door and go straight for the couch and stick his nose in the book.  His actual reading is another concern.  He goes through these books at an unbelievable clip reading a 500+ page novel in two days.  I watch him and he walks through page after page quicker than I can read.  But when asked he really can't, or won't, answer questions about the books content.  My take, and I have other examples of this, he is parentified to the point he is faking his reading prowess to meet his mother's expectations.  This part is a huge concern for me.  That he feels obligated to meet someone elses expectations. 

   

 

My dBPD ex wife does the same stuff.  It's like she's attempting to win the breakup (she won't, no one on earth is better at that particular endeavor than me) by being in the kids' faces 24/7.  My T suggested that there is another dimension to this -- it's a way (my ex's way) of getting near me and being around me while I am adhering to NC and really being a champ at it.  Mine shows up to the kids' therapy on my days, and the kids' therapist has remarked to me that this does not seem appropriate, that she "really has no idea why [my ex] shows up."  It's a way of extending her influence into my domain with the kids. 

I will have none of this.  I don't regard my ex as a skilled parent.  I think she's a fruitcake.  When the kids are with me, they do what I think a parent should be doing with their kids, like being outside adventuring, catching fish, exploring, climbing trees, gardening, riding bikes, hiking -- in short, all of what I've always thought is great about being a kid (and life generally) and my ex would never do. 

So, yeah.  What you're experiencing is a real phenomenon. 

[scraps66]

I know it starts to sound like blah blah blah after a while because it gets mentioned here so often, but validation is truly the black belt front line defense. It's not natural to dislike a parent -- there is no evolutionary basis for that. So there has to be a counter move to the alienation that is too fundamentally important to our kids' survival, and that's us accepting and acknowledging that what they're perceiving/feeling is real. It tells them they belong, and that even if the rest of the world doesn't understand what it's like for them, we do.

Validation won't solve everything. It has to be there, though. My take on it is that it makes difficult things less difficult for S13, and for our relationship.

This is good stuff and I need to become better at this.  Our now ex-coparent counselor drilled a phrase into my head, "connect before correct."  Basically, saying something positive and validating before being the least bit constructive or disciplinary with the child.

As time goes on I have a growing hypothesis that S10 is continually being invalidated.  By his mother.  She is continually maneuvering and suggesting, subtly, that he take up the things that she wants him to take up.  My trigger, when I hear things like, "S10 said he wants to take viola." 

The bad invalidating stuff, when ex talks to S10 about his school aid, the one that she wants to get rid of as a statement that S10 is improving.  Not that his behavior is actually getting better, but it will look better, maybe for her, if he doesn't have an aid.  Not necessarily that his behavior is getting better.  So a conversation like this, "S10, you really don't want an aid, right?  You want to be free of someone hovering over you, having you under a microscope all day, right? "  Then S10 goes to school and repeats very similar things directly to his aid, "you're annoying, can you shut up... .you're insulting me and my friends, go away... ."  I have many examples of this, S10 is seen by the principal walking down the hall and intentionally bumping into "a friend."  Ex's rationale (she's a teacher and now cert'd. in special ed.), "... .that happens in all schools, everyday."  Those are the same words S10 said to me.

I think the kid is invalidated every time it's suggested to him that he behave a certain way.  He's no longer choosing, he's trying to play out something that someone else is putting in his head.  Like the reading, he thinks he needs to be able to read a 500 page novel - in two days!  So he makes it "look like" he's reading the whole book, but in actual fact he's not really reading and can't even recant the basic theme of the book.

Now I'm sorry for the longwinded response, but I think a lot of what is going on, originating from a sociopathic, high IQ mind, is so subversive but is totally credible.     

[livednlearned]

Our now ex-coparent counselor drilled a phrase into my head, "connect before correct."  Basically, saying something positive and validating before being the least bit constructive or disciplinary with the child.

This is exactly what I'm trying to do. My son's T told me to "strike while the iron is cold" when it comes to correcting him. Because some of S13's behaviors were similar to N/BPDx, I found I would end up in the red zone emotionally, almost like I was reacting to N/BPDx through S13. My T said to give myself a time out, and even tell S13 what I was doing, "I don't know why, but right now my feelings are running pretty high, so I'm going to take a time out. Let's talk about this when I'm in a better place."

As time goes on I have a growing hypothesis that S10 is continually being invalidated.  By his mother.  She is continually maneuvering and suggesting, subtly, that he take up the things that she wants him to take up.  My trigger, when I hear things like, "S10 said he wants to take viola." 

It's almost guaranteed that she is invalidating him. He is an extension of her, she sees him as an external part of herself. Without a stable sense of self, she cannot validate someone else, much less her child, because she projects different parts of that unstable self onto him, and tries to process feelings externally. S10 is his own person with his own needs and wants, but they are in development. So his struggle is to develop his own sense of self with a mother who cannot even imagine what that means, or what it's like. He is part of her -- an extension. That's why even if she seems to be concerned about him, it may seem like there is no empathy. We feel empathy when we put ourselves in someone else's shoes. If the other person is an extension of herself, then having empathy makes no sense. She is cycling through schemas and you never know which one is landing at any given time. Punitive parent, lonely child, angry child, etc.

Validation -- especially the validating questions -- is there to cut through this. Somewhere inside is a kid who knows what he wants and thinks. You might be the only person in his life who truly matters who can validate him. And wow, is this hard work as a parent, especially when there is alienation going on. Plus, your son is in the cross-fires with school services.

He's not going to respond to normal parenting, not if he's anything like S13. I had to really shift, not only with the validation skills, but also getting S13 involved in working out the consequences for things. When the iron was cold, we would talk about the behavior and I would ask him what a reasonable consequence would be. "I know you're deep in this game right now and it's hard to step away from things that are fun. I like seeing you have fun. You also need to clean your room. How can we make sure you have time for this, and also put your clothes away?"

Then he comes up with a plan, usually involving a timer to help remind him. And we also talk through consequences that he helps design. For example, if he doesn't have his clothes put away by noon, the computer goes off for an hour. Or it goes off until he has everything put away.

With kids who are defiant, they need to be heard. And they need to be a part of the plan, as well as coming up with the consequence for not following the plan. And then we have to stick to the plan, and make sure that structure and oversight is there, otherwise they'll run circles around us, knowing we aren't consistent.

All of this really exhausted me, to be honest. I wasn't raised this way, and S13 is a smart kid who seemed to always present something I wasn't sure how to handle. It's taken 4 years, but he's a different kid. Still struggling, still very sensitive, still experiencing anxiety/depression, so we're not out of the woods. But there is less conflict because he has some skills now, and I learned to validate him and praise him when he's doing well, even for the smallest thing.