Kids and Teens – Park Ridge Psychological Services

To Boys Who Hurt Their Girlfriends

2 Comments / Desperately Seeking Parents, Dr. Dathan Paterno, Human sexual behavior, Kids and Teens, Sexual abuse, Violence and Abuse / By Dathan Paterno

Abusive boys,

We wanted to tell you what we think of you. Believe us, it is tempting to call you names. It is difficult not to just spew insult after insult at you, hoping to reduce you to tears

or even worse. Withholding our hatred and disgust takes enormous self-control. But we are not going to do it; in spite of what you have done and who you are, we believe that you deserve enough respect to be spoken to; we also do not want to mimic your abusive tendencies.

Abusing girls is not cool. It is not manly or masculine. It is not acceptable, civilized, a show of power. It does not earn you respect. In fact, it shows the exact opposite; boys who abuse their girlfriends by hitting, slapping, pushing, shoving, kicking, forcing sexual activity, restraining, pinning, violating boundaries, threatening, manipulating with money or divulging secrets, calling names, demeaning, devaluing, joking coarsely, and/or controlling a woman devalue themselves and prove themselves to be unworthy of respect. We want you to know that most men find abusive behavior to be deplorable and sickening.

We believe that you abuse girls for many reasons, primarily because you are weak and have been abused yourself. Neither of these excuses or legitimizes what you do to anyone else. A real man will rise above his experience and make it better for himself and those around him. A real man can look in the mirror, see weakness, and still love and respect himself. That is what real power can do.

We hope that you not only understand how your abuse isolates and marginalizes you; we hope that you decide to put away your abusive tendencies and commit to treating women—all women—with dignity, respect, honor, and sacrificial love. We hold hope that you can and will make the transformation from abuser to lover.

Sincerely,

Moms, Dads, teenage girls, teenage guys…basically everyone in our society

Dating The Enemy

2 Comments / Abuse Violence, Adolescence, Dr. Dathan Paterno, Kids and Teens, Teen Life / By Dathan Paterno

Why do young women date abusive boys*?

One reason some young women learn to tolerate abuse stems from their witnessing it in their parents’ relationships. Girls who witness poor treatment of women are for more likely to develop the sense that that sort of treatment is normal and acceptable.

Mothers, if you want to teach your daughters not to tolerate abuse, start with your own relationships. Are you tolerating abuse from your husband or boyfriend? If you are, don’t expect your daughter to behave differently.

What do I mean by tolerate? Tolerate means to loathe something yet no nothing to stop it. Hating the abuse you receive does nothing to stop it. Complaining about it to your friends, co-workers, children do nothing to stop it (although may also be invaluable for your emotional support). You must act to stop it: leave, speak out, confront, approach law enforcement…any and all of those things that you possess as leverage to change your situation.

Some adolescents tolerate abuse because they put too much stock in having a boyfriend. Most of you have heard the term “boy crazy”. It’s cute when a girl is 5 and talks about marrying her Daddy or her Kindergarten classmate; it’s not so funny when she is 13 and is willing to do anything to achieve “boyfriend/girlfriend” status. These adolescents tend to then tolerate anything—even abuse—in order to maintain that status. It is crucial that parents and others downplay the importance of dating at an early age. It shouldn’t be “cool” to date until later in adolescence.

A third reason teenage girls often tolerate abuse from boys is that they simply do not know how to assert rights and boundaries. They know they are being disrespected and can even see the relationship slipping into misuse and finally abuse, but they simply lack the tools necessary to assert their right to being treated better. The boy perceives no challenge to his abuse of power and continues headlong down the road to abuse.

Girls must be taught by their parents (fathers and mothers, when possible) how to negotiate relationships, especially when they begin to go sour.

The final reason some teenagers begin to tolerate abuse at an early age is that they are simply spending too much time alone with their boyfriend. Unsupervised time between a boy and girl under the age of 18 holds significant risk. It makes sense that if your daughter spends the vast majority of her dating time with or near a supervising adult, the risk for abuse will plummet. Allow your daughter to spend inordinate amount of time unsupervised with a boy and you are asking for trouble.

This is why I am convinced that one-on-one dating should not be allowed until 16. Call me a fuddy-duddy, but I know I’m right.

*Notice I do not refer to their dating partners as men; that is a term that I exclude from boys who verbally, emotionally, sexually, or physically abuse a woman. A real man would never do or even consider such a heinous and cowardly act.

Reason #68 Why ADHD Is a Baloney Disorder

4 Comments / Family, Kids and Teens, Mental Health, Parenting / By Dathan Paterno

by: Dr. Dathan Paterno

Sometimes I look at the diagnostic criteria for ADHD and just laugh.

The ADHD diagnosis includes a list of several behaviors that are bothersome to adults, including:

Often fails to pay close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, work, or other activities
Often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities
Often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly
Often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace (not due to oppositional behavior or failure to understand instructions)
Often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities
Often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort (such as schoolwork or homework)
Often loses things necessary for tasks or activities (e.g., toys, school assignments, pencils, books, or tools)
Is often easily distracted by extraneous stimuli
Is often forgetful in daily activities

First of all, “often” is not a scientific term. What is often: once an hour? Once a day? However often it takes to drive Mom to drink? Any symptom description that is so subjective should be rejected out of hand. This unscientific nonsense would be funny if it weren’t used to diagnose so many children with the baloney ADHD diagnosis.

Second, the geniuses who created the DSM-IV determined that a child must exhibit 6 or more of these “symptoms” in order to meet that magical threshold of a neurological disorder. Brilliant. So if a child has 4 or 5 of these, he doesn’t have a neurological disorder, but if that child also avoids or dislikes doing homework, THAT makes a neurological disorder? Even the most skilled science fiction writer couldn’t come up with anything this fanciful!

Third, since when is disliking homework a symptom of a mental illness? This is manifestly absurd.

Fourth, are not all of these behaviors trainable? Certainly a child who sometimes pays close attention or sometimes listens to when spoken to directly can (and should be) trained to do so most of the time. That is the job of the parent. The diagnosis of ADHD, however, suggests that the child simply cannot perform these tasks often enough, due to some imagined neurological deficiency. But research has proven that firm, consistent, loving, and reasonable parenting almost always results in significant improvement in all of these symptoms.

Finally, children who exhibit these symptoms almost always are quite able to perform them when involved in tasks that are enjoying to them, such as Legos and video games. So what happens—the neurological disorder just disappears when the child is in the presence of Legos? Baloney! The fact is that attention, concentration, and self-control are inextricably connected to motivation. With proper motivation, children can behave quite well.

This ADHD stuff is simply baloney.