Don’t Blame Teen-Ager for Parents’ Shortcomings
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In working with youth during the past 20 years, I have rarely encountered a troubled adolescent who didn’t have even more troubled parents.
Programs that specialize in such treatments as dragging teen-agers out of their homes, locking them in windowless basements and “behavior modifying” for months cannot demonstrate long-term success because they fail to address the root causes of youth problems.
No parent should be able to commit a child to a locked treatment facility until a court-supervised assessment of the causes of the problems has been done.
MIKE MALES
Los Angeles
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