Frustrated parents are calling emergency services to get help with their disobedient juveniles

DIALING 911

By DAVID CLOUSTON

Salina Journal

"Salina 911, what's the location of your emergency?"

"(Woman's voice) A teenager who won't get up off of her floor and go out and get in the car. Her mom has to go to work. I have to go to work. We don't know what to do. We both have to leave this house and the teenager will not get off the floor.

"How old is the kid?"

"She just turned 16."

"And where do you want her to go?"

"She needs to either go with me out to my place of work, or she needs to go over to my dad's house and stay there until we get off from work. Or she needs to go to the hospital -- we don't know what to do with the kid. We don't know what to do."

"Is she being disobedient right now?"

"She's just on the floor."

"O.K., we'll get someone over there and see what we can do."

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One of Salina police officers' duties is to catch bad guys -- not to take on their role. This is why some parents who call 911 out of frustration with their belligerent, defiant children concern Deputy Police Chief Carson Mansfield.

"They don't want to be seen as the bad guy. So they try to get someone else to bring structure into the household," said Mansfield.

The emergency services dispatch log identifier for such calls is "disobedient juvenile." It can -- and all too often does -- falls upon officers to try and settle such family grievances as a child's failure to do homework, or get out of bed to go to school.

Lately, due to increasingly tight budget constraints, dispatchers and police are doing more to screen calls to determine when and where an officer's visit is appropriate, Mansfield said. If it's a case of alleged battery or criminal damage to property, "we'll respond."

More than 900 such calls pertaining to disobedient juveniles were received at the dispatch center in 2008. It's difficult to determine precisely how many incidents there were because some cases involving juveniles get logged in another category, such as battery or criminal damage to property, if it turns out there's an underlying crime, Mansfield said.

"We want to get the word out that we don't want to go to these if it's not criminal, meaning no law has been violated," he said. "We're looking at a lot of different areas to save money and still provide service."

It isn't child abuse

Sometimes parents afraid of being accused of child abuse call the police instead of punishing the child. Yet not all physical discipline, especially for young children, amounts to child abuse, said Central High School police officer AV Plank.

"A swat on the behind or two is OK, but they can't grab a belt and start whaling away and leaving marks," he said. "Sometimes parents don't realize they can take away privileges such as the TV, and cell phones and so forth."

Plank says he gets calls "all the time" from parents frustrated, for instance, with the battles over getting their children to go to school. When he speaks with the youngsters, he talks to them about the consequences of their behavior, such as them being referred to truancy court.

Sometimes, though, the calls to police are about less serious behaviors. Plank said he tries to give parents and kids other options than calling on law enforcement.

"We've gotten calls about kids not getting dressed fast enough," he said.

"There's not really any right or wrong way to raise a child," Plank said. "SRS (the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services) has some programs, like family preservation, that are helpful. A lot of these kids go to schools and talk to counselors. And they talk to me and ask me questions."

Challenging the parents

The defiant child or teenager is common, so much so there's even a behavioral anomaly named for it -- Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

Children classified as ODD challenge their parents and others with aggressive behavior when they learn it can make them feel powerful.

John F. Taylor, author and an expert in the field of child behavior and mental health, says parents who try to control their defiant children by forcing them to comply -- by arguing, screaming or negotiating -- are merely making their child's resistance stronger.

"These children are modeling the exact thing you don't want them to do," said Taylor, an Oregon-based family psychologist. He's the father of eight children, and he coaches child care professionals at seminars nationwide.

"Wading into an argument, or a power struggle, is not the solution. They feel a great deal of power in a power struggle with their parents."

Often, Taylor says, the solution lies in working with, and giving the child a measure of power and control over solving problems that unchecked, lead to family arguments.

Nagging and scolding a teen about a messy room, for example, Taylor said, is less effective than putting a hamper in their room, and letting them decorate it to make it attractive to them, or helping them choose and install or arrange bins to help them store and organize their belongings.

A key to handling defiant children is gradually expanding their range and ability to make personal choices, geared to their age and social readiness, Taylor said.

"There's the 17-year-old who can't cook anything but canned soup because the parents have hogged the kitchen and he doesn't know how," Taylor said. "You have these horror stories about parents who give their children too much or too little power."

The good news is more communities are focusing attention on parent education, and more schools and institutions are offering free evening classes aimed at helping parents sharpen their parenting skills, he said.

At the same time, more dual working-parent households, and more single-parent households, Taylor thinks, are affecting children's mental health.

Emotionally healthy children are aided by homes where parents are present a significant amount of time and the home is isolated, to a great degree, from undesirable influences, he said.

"One should expect more misbehavior from children in any culture that allows the family to deteriorate to the extent we have in our culture," Taylor said. "We can't expect government to clean up the mess."

Scare tactics don't work

Starting in February, Vicki Price, education director for Child Advocacy & Parenting Services of Salina, is scheduled to teach a three-week class for parents based on training by Taylor and one of his books, "Defiance to Cooperation."

Price teaches parenting courses throughout the year through CAPS. She's had parents tell her in a couple of instances that they turned to the police for help when there seemed to be no other options for dealing with their offspring.

"What you're doing is you're just trying to scare (the child) into whatever it is (you want them to do)," Price said. "By that point there's a lot of things that need to be healed."

One of the hardest parts in parenting is modeling, i.e., how to model respect when your child isn't respectful, she said.

When it gets to that point, the best thing to do is let both individuals take a "time out."

"No one can solve a problem when people become volcanoes, ready to blow," she said. "It teaches kids a great life skill -- that I don't need to ram my fist through a wall, or hit someone or talk so ugly you can't believe it. How you handle the anger is the important thing. That's what we want to teach kids. Punishment distracts -- it just gets the kid focused on avoiding punishment."

n Reporter David Clouston can be reached at 822-1403 or by e-mail at dclouston@salina.com. Hear actual police 911 calls from Salina's Emergency Dispatch Center with the Web version of this story at www.salina.com

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