Lying

So I gave my seventeen-year-old son the driver's wheel on his high school education. Not because I wanted to, but because what I was doing wasn't working. Supervising him closely and catching all his missing assignments for him to complete just caused him to lie to me and let me be his safety net. With the counselor's agreement, I took my hands off the wheel, and he is succeeding or failing on his own. Initially he became uber-responsible, skipping lunch at Arby's with his friends so that he could go to the library and catch up on work. He came home a week ago saying he no longer had an F in History. I asked him how he managed that. He said he… [more]

…Buy yourself a cupcake. The start of this New Year has not been an easy one around our house.  With two daughters in full-blown RAD mode, our family life has not been chaos-free. One prevalent behavior of Reactive Attachment Disorder is lying.  All children fib and stretch the truth, but children suffering from RAD have perfected the art of lying to such a level, the lies should be hanging in a museum. Elle, my 13 year old RADish, is so proficient at lying I’m not sure she knows how to tell the truth.  The hard part about the lying is you know they are doing it because your built-in lie detector is flashing red.  But how are you going to prove it?  Should you try? … [more]

When I became a parent, I never knew a useful skill would be managing a rollercoaster ride.  One day Elle is having a bad day and she is at the bottom, but Bunny is riding at the top.  Twenty-four hours later, Bunny is scraping the bottom and Elle is flying high. But, it’s not only the ups and downs of one child versus the other; it’s the pendulum swing back and forth in a single child.  For seven years, we’ve dealt with RAD’s effect on Elle.  There were times that we were so far down on the bottom of the rollercoaster; I thought we had permanently derailed.  There was a time I was convinced we would only see her during weekly visits to… [more]

I always take a little time at the end of a year to reflect on the past year and to ponder the possibilities of the year to come.  For my family, this has been the year of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD). RAD rules our house.  It factors into every fiber of our lives.  If it isn’t front and center of every day, it is always lurking in the shadows.  At the beginning of 2010, Elle’s RAD was gaining momentum, and I began to despair it would win.  But with the help of our therapist, a lot of hard work on my part, my husband and Elle’s, we started to turn the tide. We also attended a camp for families with RAD children.  The… [more]

A long time ago, I heard a story of an enterprising mom who grew very weary of her son’s constant lying. One day she caught him in yet another lie, and she told him, “I owe you a lie!” Some time passed, and one day he approached her about having a bunch of his friends over on Saturday night. She readily agreed, and he invited his friends and planned his party. A short time before the party was to begin, his mom looked at him and said, “Remember that lie I owed you? I’m paying you back right now. There will be no party.” This young man had to call all his friends and make whatever excuses he made to cancel the event. Beth is approaching 11… [more]