Choosing Mike: Raising a Special-Needs Child in a One-Size-Fits-All Culture

It's funny, isn't it, how people think they know everything about raising your children, because they have a child, know somebody who has one, or even just because they were once a child, and know exactly how they would do the job if it were theirs to do. All parents have probably experienced that, the nasty looks, the comments, the suggestion that if the parent were a better parent, the child would not be throwing a tantrum in the cold cereal aisle, annoying all the other shoppers. But some of us find ourselves the target of this armchair-parenting more than others. I am the mother of "Mike," a special-needs teen adopted during his teenage years. Most of his special needs are related to his past experiences, and the experience of changing families midway through growing up. As a parent, I get a lot of nasty comments from those who presume they know what's best for Mike, and that they should impose their will upon me. We, as a family, have had to leave churches and schools over this, jobs have been threatened, and we have lost family members and friends, because we do not parent Mike as though his needs do not exist.

Let me share with you some of the private details of Mike's history. Mike grew up in a family where sexual abuse, favoritism, abuse of humans and animals, and control issues were not only allowed but encouraged as appropriate. He suffered substantial and permanent physical damage during his upbringing with his family of origin. He grew up craving love and affection, and yet believing that it was not safe, good, or even permissible, or else his parents would give it to him.

Around age 10, Mike learned to protect himself from others by developing a habit of control. He controlled his emotions until he no longer experienced any. He controlled food, causing an eating disorder. He could not control his nightmares of the now-past abuse, so he controlled his sleeping situation, refusing to sleep unless he was alone in a locked room, with all the lights on, wearing jeans instead of pajamas. He controlled his future by jettisoning all hopes and dreams, and pursuing only that which would bring him financial security, so that he would never have to live with another person again. He controlled his parents by restricting his conversation with them to only what they wanted to hear, lying and saying anything he had to, to become the perfect person they seemed to want.

In short, Mike learned that if parents were in charge, or anybody else for that matter, he was in grave danger. As adoptive parents, it is our job to undo that teaching, and replace it with teaching about healthy family structure. To do this, we must claim as much control as we can over Mike's life. His ability to have a happy, healthy adult life depends on his ability to learn that he can, in fact, be safe and have his needs met without controlling everybody around him. We must make decisions for Mike that most teens can and should be making on their own. He does not have the luxury of doing these things for himself, because he doesn't know how to make choices that are best for himself. He only knows how to make choices that maintain his control over himself and others, in order to keep himself safe from future abuse. And, as stated, we have had to give up family, friends, organizations, and job security in order to provide for Mike. It's absurd that this is the thanks adoptive parents can look forward to, for having the desire and strength to give a family to a child in the foster care system, who desperately needs one.

But, never fear, for I believe I can solve this problem with a simple experiment. And even better, this experiment costs only the time it takes you, the reader, to finish reading this article.

You know those dolls they make, for use in teaching high school kids about parenting? We've all seen them. The doll randomly starts crying, and you have to rush to it and hold it, placing a key in the doll for a variable amount of time, to simulate caretaking. The doll records how quickly you respond to it, and whether or not you do things to the doll that, for a human baby, would harm the baby. That's a brilliant idea; but we need to imagine certain modifications to it. Let's build a doll that's around five feet tall. We'll give it a TV monitor in its belly, in the style of the Teletubbies. There's a point to that, trust me.

Now, let's program that doll to represent Mike. The doll insists on sleeping in his own bedroom, with all the lights on, and the dresser barricading the door. Three to five times a night, it will randomly begin screaming. You must then rush into the doll's room and sit on the bed. This is where the TV monitor comes in handy. You will sit on the bed, running your fingers through the doll's hair, while it plays one of five randomly-chosen videos of a child giving a statement about the sexual abuse he endured at the hands of his father, uncle, brother, or similar relation. Some facts may be warped, to emulate the way a nightmare isn't always true to memory. You must not only listen, but watch the video, particularly the eyes of the child, and you must constantly remind yourself that you cannot soothe the child, and you cannot tell him it's only a bad dream, because it wasn't. After 30 to 45 minutes, you may return to bed, and await the next random screaming. After nine hours of this, because you go to bed early in hopes of getting enough sleep, you must get up, take the doll to school, and go on to work. Later in the day, you'll get a call from the school insinuating that you don't put the doll to bed early enough, because it's taking a nap in the nurse's office. Again.

This doll will also be programmed so that if you don't wake up and soothe it sufficiently, it will go into your kitchen, sit in front of the fridge, and eat everything it can possibly eat, including the last stick of margarine. If you're lucky, it'll take the wrapper off first. Within four to five of this type of event, you will need not only to do the grocery shopping yet again, but you will also have to take the doll shopping for all new pants and shorts, because the old ones will no longer fit.

You know that the doll's psychotherapist encourages you to let the doll sleep on an air mattress in your room, next to the side of the bed, or even in your bed if there is room. You know that if the doll slept near you, you could soothe its nighttime terrors in fifteen to thirty seconds, instead of half an hour or more, and you know that after a few weeks of this arrangement, the doll would begin to have fewer nightmares, and even get through whole nights without any. The doll would stop eating to ease fear, and would be in better physical health. Your grocery budget would go down drastically. The doll would have more hope of overcoming its eating disorder. The doll would stop falling asleep in class, and you would stop spending lunchbreaks sleeping, if you kept the doll near you overnight. But you cannot do that. If you do, the doll might tell its birthparents about this, and its birthparents will share this information with others, colored to paint you as abusive and dangerous, causing you to be thrown out of your church, your family, and have your boss question your ability to do your job.

Fortunately, will not record these events as abuse. This doll records them as reasons that the doll does not deserve a family, and should attack you verbally to get you to keep your distance, in order to protect your happiness. When it does so, the psychotherapist recommends that you respond by soothing and hugging the doll, to rebuild its doll's sense of being wanted, accepted, and safe. But, you cannot do that. If you do so, the doll will expect hugs, hand-holding, and nurturing any time it needs reassurance and love. If anybody sees, they will accuse you of having an inappropriate relationship with the doll. They will share information among themselves, probably call the birthparent dolls and report back that they were right about your motives being to abuse an already-vulnerable doll. You will lose another church, more friends, more family, and your boss will decide it's not safe to allow you to go to work during the upcoming Kids at Work day. You must take a vacation day, at your own expense since it's your own fault.

This doll attends school daily. It will call you randomly during the school day, anywhere from two to ten times a week. It may report that it has had a flashback or panic attack, and had to miss a vital quiz while having the frightening experience. The doll needs you to call the teacher and discuss the doll's problems, in order for the teacher to grant the doll a retake on the quiz. You cannot do this, however. A doll of this age should be able to get through the day without a breakdown, and you should not be trying to protect it from the consequences of covering over its ditching by telling some grand story about post-traumatic stress. As the parent, you should let the doll suffer the consequences of its actions. If you do intervene, you will be harshly reprimanded by any bystander who happens to notice, for bailing the doll out of his own mess that he made on purpose, and for causing the doll to learn that he can trust you to help him get out of any jam.

The doll may also call you to cry about a teacher accusing it of faking a breakdown during a mid-term exam. It needs you to contact the psychologist and schedule a meeting with the teacher and psychologist, to help the teacher understand the doll's special needs. Once again, though, you cannot do this. The doll must suffer the consequences of his actions entirely alone. After all, it is entirely his fault that he chose to fake a breakdown during a high-pressure day, just to get out of having to deal with the pressure of having to perform. Clearly, the doll is just trying to cover over that it didn't study sufficiently for the test.

The doll also must have weekly telephone contact with its original doll-family. During these weekly calls, you must listen in on a call in which the doll tries to talk about matters that are important to his recovery and to rebuilding healthy relationships with the parent doll, and the parent doll ignores them and refuses all discussion. You must listen to the parent doll asking your Mike doll if he is still being brainwashed by you, to hate the parent. You must listen to this, knowing the parent was convicted of abusing your Mike doll, and you must not speak a word. You know that this causes the doll to record your inaction as abuse, and that the psychologist suggests strongly that you refuse these calls, even make excuses for the doll's not being home when they call. But you cannot do that. If you do, it will be proof that you are brainwashing the doll, and controlling all access to the doll in order to create a sense of hatred and fear in the doll, for its birthparents. The entirety of the fear the doll feels for these people will be blamed not on their choice to abuse the doll for 14 years beforehand, but on your choice to refuse weekly 15-minute phone calls. They will notify your remaining friends and family, your boss, and your church (the third one since you took custody of the doll, if you're counting) of your manipulation of the situation in order to destroy the doll's family, which was clearly not harmed in the least by the tradition of abuse. These people will support the importance of allowing these weekly calls. After all, the doll is mature enough to say no to its former abusers, if it needs to.

On the day before and after these weekly calls, the doll will randomly eat the entire contents of one refrigerator shelf, wake up twice as often in the night, wet the bed, watch TV until 4am at top volume, cut his arms or legs, punch a punching bag until a a finger or hand is broken, or stand by your bed trying to talk to you until sunrise. You know that the best way to cope with this is to sit and hold the doll close, making it feel safe and protected, but once again, you cannot. You must obey the guidance of others, who know better than you, and who know that a teenage doll must not be held, hugged, or cuddled like a toddler. It's just unnatural. The doll must be forced to get through this on his own, without any assistance from parents or family. The time for such assistance and nurturing is past, and it is the doll's own problem that it didn't get any of the needed nurturing during that time. It is too late now.

The doll will be programmed to know that if it wants such nurturing, the doll must get involved in a romantic relationship with a female doll, who will dump him when she realizes that the Mike doll requires a parent-child relationship, rather than a dating relationship. The doll must simply keep finding new dating partners until one meets its needs. This is the only way that the doll can meet its need for parental love and nurturing. The doll is utterly terrified of female dolls, as one of them molested the Mike doll at a young age. But, this is the only option you can give him for meeting his need for affection and nurturing. The doll must learn that all affection and nurturing is sexual in nature, just like the sexual abuse he endured as a child-doll. If you demonstrate affection and nurturing in the context of an appropriate parent-child relationship, you will be the target of further condemnation for sexually abusing the doll.

Additionally, you must transport the doll to the psychologist's office twice a week, at a cost to you of $300 per week, out of your own pocket. The doll's health insurance covers such visits, but only the first 20 of them in a calendar year, which you burned through in the first 10 weeks. Mike's visits could be cut to once a week, or even every other week, if you followed the psychologist's recommendations for appropriate caretaking, but you cannot do this because you must follow the advice and demands of those armchair parents who clearly know more than you do.

Thankfully, for you, this is merely an experiment, and a mental one at that. You do not have to make the painful decision to forsake family, friends, business and social relationships in order to provide for your child's needs. You do not have to hide your parenting strategies in order to keep your family safe from persecution. You do not have to rush home at first sign of problem with your child, in order to provide for his needs in secret. You do not have to teach him that appropriate parental love is shameful and must be hidden, while under-dressed teenagers can grope each other in plain view, in public. You do not face the internal struggle of having to decide between raising your child to be healthy, in spite of the social costs. You don't have to continue this experiment beyond the reading of this article.

But I do. I challenge you to consider this little experiment, the next time you have opportunity to observe one of these parents of other people's genetic lineage, the next time you find yourself tempted to do a little armchair parenting. I encourage you, rather than condemning a parent's approach, to ask if the parent can loan you a book, or suggest one at the local library, that can help you understand that particular child's situation. I urge you to consider that the parent might actually know what he or she is doing, and that there might be unseen circumstances that require a whole different approach than the one you view as appropriate and normal. And if by some miracle, the thought of going through that much to take care of a child touches your heart, and you want to reach out to a hurting child even knowing all that can be involved, please, contact your local department of family and children's services, and ask how to become a foster parent. People like you are desperately needed.