Parenting a challenging kid. Am I doing this right?

Lizardly
Tue, 22 Sep 2015 11:20:37 +0000

This Scouts digression: when my kids were in elementary school, me and a few moms started a Cub Scout troop. It was a huge huge success, who knew there was such a pent up demand for scouting at that school. But there were a few moms with difficult kids who saw Scouts as a place to put their difficult kids while they took a break. We struggled with what to do. We were sympathetic to the moms who wanted a little time off, to the boys who needed examples of good behavior and this activity, but we didn’t have enough people to put an adult on each of these kids, which is what we needed to do. (These kids would roam or become destructive if not watched.)

Our solution, though imperfect, was 1) to keep everyone busy all the time; we over structured the actives, and 2) to split into two troops to keep the parent/child ratio down.

I hadn’t thought about that troop in years! My co leader was a woman with two very difficult kids herself who was incredibly gifted at raising boys. One son was gruff and rather aspie, the other was ADHD. Mom had grown up on a farm. Her way of handling young boys was to keep them outside and active. There was a lot of tree climbing, tadpole catching, skateboarding. She had a high tolerance for dirt and for risk taking.

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