Whitewater Rafting and Disciplining Your Child

You've seen pictures of large rubber rafts moving swiftly though raging rivers, dipping down and shooting up. Inside, a crew wearing helmets and life jackets hold on as their craft steers with the current, avoiding boulders and other dangers below the frothing surface. Experienced rafters who shoot the rapids don't paddle against the current but steer with the flow to reach their destination.

This struck me as an analogy for parenting oppositional, defiant teenagers a few years ago after our daughter returned home from a girls correctional school - about three months earlier than we expected. She worked in a local fast food restaurant and, while walking home one night along a busy street, started yelling at two boys in a car who pulled alongside her. The driver eventually became her boyfriend and the father of her daughter. And he's even given me a few hugs and called me "dad." When she entered her teen years, we tried desperately to find ways we could get her to complete homework assignments in her sophmore biology, English, history and Spanish classes. Then we tried two subjects, then one subject and eventually we discovered she wasn't going to do her homework no matter how hard we tried to cajole her and there was no way we could force her. Her temper and lack of interest was too strong.

Our family counselor told us to simply try and maintain a relationship. She wasn't going to do an actual task like school just because we asked her. She also talked incessantly on her "chirp" even late at night after we had gone to sleep. One time she was gone for more than 24 hours so we reported her missing to the local sheriff's office. Then she returned around 10pm nonchalantly. We told her we had reported her as a missing person. She shrugged. So we called the sherrif's office so they were going to come interview her. She waited and waited and then eventually grew bored and started walking down our street. She could have cared less if the police were going to interview her. So I walked off after her, simply to follow along with her to find out where she was going. It was my way of whitewater rafting discipline. No way could I paddle against her current.