Frustration

I originally went to graduate school to better understand typical teenagers. I was so sick of the bad rap that they got. Most teens are good kids. They are not having sex all of the time, they are not criminals, they are not all drunk or on drugs, and they aren't always talking back to all adults. Those bad kids get the spotlight. I wanted to know what "normal" kids are like. That's what developmental psychology is all about.

When I went to Purdue and I started taking my classes from some really bright developmental psychologists, I realized that I didn't recognize "typical" development. I have always felt like an outsider. Even as an undergraduate I found psychology fascinating because I didn't know that people worked like that. I thought it would be different when I started studying how we grow up. Psychology is a science of averages. What does the typical person look like? How does the typical person change over time? There are always exceptions to our rules. I tell my students that statistically people are full of error. That being said, when normal people start learning about developmental psychology, they see themselves. They at least recognize stories that their parents have told them about themselves. I didn't. Part of it was that I was forced to grow up too fast. Part of it was that I was suffering from mental health issues at an early age, and part of it was associated with my giftedness. I'm not like most people. I'm like two percent or less of people. Honestly, that made learning developmental psychology more interesting because I wanted to know what this organism "human being" was like since it wasn't me. I tell my students that I think of psychology as the zoology of people. I feel like an outsider studying a specific species. People are just infinitely fascinating to me.

The reason I am writing this here is that having a non-typical child also makes parenting much more difficult. I know what's supposed to happen and then Dermot doesn't follow that course. I know how to change his behavior, but it doesn't work. This affects my perfectionism and I feel like a failure as a parent. I should know better. Hell, I have a Ph.D. in child development. I could charge money to tell other parents what to do, and I'd probably do a pretty good job. But, I can't figure out anything in my own home. Dermot doesn't mind being punished. I refuse to spank him, but I take things away, I verbally correct him, I talk to him about why he should and shouldn't do certain things, I praise him for correct behavior, etc. I do everything that I should be doing, and yet Dermot's negative behaviors don't change. He's so involved in his own world, that he doesn't mind that his actions affect us negatively. I also think that we've gone so far overboard in building up his self-esteem and letting him know that we love him, that he knows he can't really push us away. That as bad as he can be at times, we will still love him.

Now I grew up getting the belt daily and really not thinking my parents loved me, so I would rather have this problem, than having him hate me already, but it's frustrating. When I think of the behaviors that drive me craziest, I realize that I had variations of the same behaviors. When I think of how my parents controlled me, I know that it was entirely by fear. Even then, I was so willful that I still knowingly disobeyed at least daily, and usually more. But I grew up to be a good kid who was overly empathetic. My fear is that Dermot doesn't really seem to be all that empathetic with us. He's extremely so with the cats (at times) and with other kids. So it's not a lost cause. When he gets hit with empathy he gets hard, but he doesn't feel it as often as I would have expected. Now he's only 7.5, so it might still increase. I remember 10-18 being my hardest years about really feeling everyone else's pain. But those are long term concerns. For now, I just want him to quit burping and farting at will. I want him to stop hitting himself or the couch or yelling when he's frustrated. I want him to put away his toys. I want him to turn off the TV and the lights when he leaves a room. and I want him to sit in a chair and eat at the same time as we do. I don't think that's too much to ask a 7 year old. If he only knew what was expected of me at 7, he would freak out.

I'm not really asking for suggestions, because I really have tried most things. I have a friend with an adult child who was even worse than this. She said that she couldn't punish him at all. He always found a way to either ignore it or turn it into something positive. He's turned into a great adult. So that's my hope. I think that Dermot will be fantastic in the future, and I feel like shit waiting for things to get better because it means that I'm not fully enjoying 7-year-old Dermot, and I should be. I don't know if I need to be harder on him or if I need to just learn to let things go. It's probably a mixture of both or somewhere in the middle. That's also something that psychology tends to tell us. Whenever there are two views or theories, eventually we find out the truth is a mixture or in the middle. I need to keep that in mind.