HELP, AND HOPE, FOR DEFIANT TEENS

They've Tried Social Workers, Psychiatrists And Even The Police, To No
Avail. But Now, Patricia Chisholm Reports, Parents Of Children Off The
Rails Are Turning To Each Other For Help

Susan, a widowed consultant and mother of two who lives in a Toronto
suburb, is exhausted by the confrontations with her sons that started in
earnest when the older, now 20, was in Grade 8.

Defiant and hostile, he began to use drugs, skip school and verbally abuse
her. Once, he wrote, "A bitch drives this car," in the snow on her
windshield. After she found him using the family cellphone to do drug deals
in their garage, she told him to leave. He was 16.

Confident and successful in other areas of her life, Susan reflected on the
personal costs of living with chronically defiant teenagers. "It felt like
an endurance test for a long time. I had support from my friends, but there
was still a lot of pain and unhappiness."

Verbal assaults, truancy and addiction are daily realities for most parents
in her predicament. Some describe unprovoked violence, trashed cars,
repeated visits from the police. Others chronicle more passive, though
equally distressing, rebellion: kids who won't work or go to school,
booze-soaked house parties while parents are absent, repeated theft of
family property.

Most say their children were fine until the teen years hit. Most can't
fathom where they went wrong. And in their desperation, more and more are
turning to each other. Susan is working on her problems with the help of a
parent-support group that meets in Mississauga's sprawling Square One mall.

The Association of Parent Support Groups in Ontario Inc. (APSGO) started in
the early 1980s when a handful of informal groups in the Greater Toronto
Area banded together. There are now about 400 members in 15 chapters from
Oshawa to Burlington.

These are parents who have tried just about everything they can think of --
social workers, psychiatrists, intervention by schools and the police -- to
pitifully little effect. Children are not allowed at these meetings and
it's not hard to see why. Parents are taught to attend first to their own
needs, mostly by backing away from a fruitless effort to control a wayward kid.

A similar group in Calgary is credited by Christine, a stay-at-home mother
who joined early in 2001, with keeping her sane while her daughter, now 17,
descended into a morass of truancy, drug use and trouble with the law.

A stable, middle-class couple with two younger children, Christine and her
husband, a manager for a national retail chain, went into shock when their
daughter's problems began. "We were absolutely bewildered," she recalls.
"All of a sudden, our little girl was a crack addict and a prostitute."

Her daughter stole thousands of dollars from the family to support her
habit, emptying out piggy banks and pawning the family electronics. She
would announce that she was going to the bathroom and then disappear from
the house.

Christine says friends and relations began to shun the family, convinced
the parents were to blame. "It was an absolute descent into hell. There
were times I wanted to crawl into a hole and never come out. There were
times I hated her."

What she and Susan have gone through has become increasing common in the
past few years, APSGO co-founder Helen Jones says. Parents are seeking help
for behaviour that is more acute -- more violence, more verbal abuse, more
outright crime. As well, the age of acting out is dropping. "It's not
unusual for them to be calling about 10- and 11-year-olds, and that's new,"
Ms. Jones says.

Most major urban centres now have at lest one parent-support organization,
and the teen-defiance trend seems consistent. Peggy Austen, a social worker
and program co-ordinator at the Western Ottawa Community Resource Centre,
says parents are hungry for almost any kind of help for problems that in
some cases amount to "emotional terrorism."

Social worker Joan Bever has run the Parent Support Association of Calgary
for 14 years. For the first time, she says, kids may well be more
knowledgeable about the world than mom and dad. "That changes the role of
the parent. We have less authority, because kids can get their answers
elsewhere."

Toronto psychiatrist Harvey Armstrong has spent many years trying to help
teens and their families and says children's newfound freedom often
exacerbates the problem. Many parents he sees are in mourning, distraught
over behaviour changes that have made their children strangers to them.

About 14 per cent of teens exhibit some kind of conduct disorder, he says,
adding that he also has noticed the behaviour is becoming more extreme,
including among girls.

Ms. Jones, who helped to start APSGO after facing problems with one of her
three daughters, insists that "you cannot parent this generation in the
same way as other generations and have a reasonable expectation of being
obeyed."

Kids are much more sophisticated, she explains. They grow up faster, they
see more and they are more savvy. It is virtually impossible to insulate
them from our hyperkinetic, no-limits culture. Most tellingly, they know
they don't have to do anything they don't want to. That leaves parents with
few options.

A broken bond between parent and child is astonishingly difficult to
repair. Most APSGO participants consider themselves to be good parents, and
describe domestic situations that fit squarely within the conventional idea
of a good home: strong support for achievement in school, financial
stability, little or no physical punishment, daily involvement.

For example, Susan, the widowed consultant, has a comfortable home and was
able to supply her sons with computers, cellphones and the other things
that go along with an upscale, middle-class lifestyle.

Her ordeal with her older son was bad enough, but last year, like a
recurring nightmare, her younger son, now 17, started a headlong slide into
the same kind of anti-social behaviour. By last fall, he had been suspended
from school for chronic lateness and absenteeism. Drugs and alcohol became
a big part of his life.

"I was just terrified of failing twice, in spite of everything I had been
through," Susan says.

A family friend told her about APSGO, which, she says, was her first
reprieve in years. Like many people, she found it a huge relief just to
know the insanity at her house isn't unusual.

The approach taken by parent groups can vary, but most seem to use some
version of that favoured by APSGO, which is based on the ideas of reality
therapy guru William Glasser, a California psychiatrist and author of For
Parents And Teenagers: Dissolving the Barrier between You and Your Teen
(2002). Similar methods can be found in the writings of other popular teen
experts, such as How to Deal With Your Acting Up Teenager by psychologists
Robert T. Bayard and Jean Bayard.

However, as with most theories, it is the application that is most
difficult. Soon after joining the group, Susan tried dealing with her son
in new ways. She instituted some basic rules: no drugs or alcohol in the
house, no friends while she was not present, no requests for money. No
cellphone. Doors were always to be locked when leaving the house and keys
always carried (he habitually lost his or left them at home).

When the rules were broken, she learned to be unbending about the
consequences. When he forgot his keys, for instance, he was outside until
she returned from work, even if the weather was bad and he had no coat: She
stopped rushing home to let him in or offer him her spare. He started
wearing his coat, and remembering his key more often.

But not always. One day, she came home to find the door frame bent and the
door open. He denied any knowledge, but after being questioned by the
police, he admitted to having forced his way in. This time, he had to pay
for the repairs.

The results of this new campaign, in place for about nine months, have been
mixed. After repeated truancy and poor performance at school, she finally
told her son he would have to attend a private wilderness residential
school or leave the house.

He did leave for a few days, but then tried to return, camping outside on
the sidewalk one night. They drove around in her car talking until 4 a.m.
when, still unable to get back in, he finally agreed to try the school. He
has been there since April and is doing well, even acknowledging that the
experience has been a good one.

But whether that solution is a lasting one, Susan says there has been at
least one permanent benefit: She has learned how to step back emotionally
when her son provokes her. "I never would have done that before," she says.
"I allowed them to make me angry and then take advantage, because I wasn't
in control of myself."

Not everyone is convinced that the self-help model works best for families
with messed-up teenagers.

Marshall Korenblum is chief psychiatrist at the Hincks-Dellcrest Centre for
children in Toronto and associate professor in the department of psychiatry
at the University of Toronto. He has also been an expert witness at several
coroner's inquests into teen suicides and spent seven years as a
psychiatric consultant to area high schools.

Dr. Korenblum says he appreciates the lure of parent groups, but worries
that they may try to help families with too many different types of
problems. Studies show that parents feel much better, he says, which "can
be great, but it doesn't get to what is going to work for the kid."

Peer support can be very valuable, he says, but it should not be used as a
substitute for professional advice. In some cases, for instance, kids
suffer from "co-morbidity" -- they have two problems at the same time. They
act out, but also suffer from true depression. Lack of professional
treatment could create a dangerous situation and increase the risk of
suicide. But the groups can be a good thing, he adds, if used along with
professional advice.

Dr. Armstrong, meanwhile, supervises small group-therapy sessions that try
to help parents of teens by exploring the sources of the conflict and how
it can be reduced. Too often, he says, the parents are very highly
stressed: On a scale that he uses to assess his clients, about 70 per cent
fall into the 95th percentile for stress. "When people get to that level of
stress, they can't think, they can't function," he says.

The fundamental dynamic of professionally supervised group therapy -- as
opposed to self-help groups run by volunteer individual counselling -- can
be especially helpful for parents grappling with such kids, he says.

Ending the isolation and getting positive feedback is of course helpful,
but Dr. Armstrong believes there is another, more pragmatic benefit. "The
behaviour of the parent in the group often reflects their behaviour with
the child," he says. "Confronting the parents with the ways they
miscommunicate, and having them change that at the group, allows them to
change at home."

Sounds simple. If only it were.

Where to turn

The Association of Parent Support Groups in Ontario Inc. (APSGO): A
self-help group with no professional association. It has 15 chapters in
Southern Ontario and an award-winning website. It provides help finding
groups in other regions.

(416) 223-7444, 1-800-488-5666, http://www.apsgo.ca

Western Ottawa Community Resource Centre: The centre, which has a
substantial professional staff as well as many volunteers, offers an
evening information seminar for parents of 10 to 13 year olds entitled
"You've had Pre-Natal, Now Get Pre-Teen." The seminar is aimed at keeping
problem teens out of the justice system. It offers advice on the early
warning signs of trouble, what is "normal," risk-taking behaviour and a
parent's legal rights.

(613) 591-3686,

http://www.communityresourcecentre.ca

Parent Support Association of Calgary: It is similar to APSGO, but the
programs are supervised by a social worker.

24-hour help line: (403) 270-1819, general information: (403) 270-1809,
http://www.psa.calgary.ab.ca.

Parents Together, Boys' and Girls' Club of Greater Vancouver: It offers
practical advice for solving problems with troubled teenagers. Groups meet
weekly. The program is supervised by a social worker. (604) 325-0556
1-866-560-1430,

http://www.parentstogether.ca

Parent Abuse: The Abuse of Parents by Their Teenage Children: Published by
the National Clearinghouse on Family Violence, Health Canada, this is an
overview paper that describes the problem of physical and psychological
abuse of parents. It includes an extended bibliography.

http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/hppb

Patricia Chisholm is a Toronto writer.