On Jun 07 22:01 96, Judy Pineda of 1:115/552 wrote to Jerry Schwartz:
JP> It's good to write to someone who is familiar with what you are going
JP> through. Does the frustration ever go away or ease down? Just when I
JP> start to feel that things are going better for Jessica she does a
JP> flipflop and goes back to what we thought was corrected. At 10 years of
I'm afraid at this point the frustration is increasing.  When an 8 year old 
acts like a 5 year old, you can tell your self he is immature and you can 
limit him without much trouble.  But the disparity increases with age, at 
least with my son.  This is a kid whom we don't let out after dark, don't let 
have friends over when we aren't home, make come straight home after school, 
etc. - and he'll be old enough to drive in three months!
I find it very difficult to deal with problems which have no solution - by 
nature I'm a fixer of things.  But you can't fix a person.  I tend to 
withdraw from situations like that, which is very bad.  Fortunately my wife 
deals pretty well with him.  We just don't know what to do, we can't trust 
him to do the things a kid his age should do and yet we feel rotten when we 
restrict him so tightly.  He's getting restive, too, so more and more our 
attempts to control him are met with evasion.
We explain to him over and over again that if he acts in a trustworthy 
manner, we'll start to trust him more; but that just doesn't "take" in a deep 
enough way.
Jerry Schwartz
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