Working With 'Problem' Kids..

A number of years ago my wife and I spent a few years as House Parents at a residential facility for “delinquent” boys from 11 to 18 years old. These were boys who had already spent time in “lock-up” but were still in the custody of the courts and had been moved to a place where they were allowed more “freedom” as long as they deserved and earned it.

Each “cottage” housed up to 10 boys. There were 5 bedrooms (2 boys to a room), one large bathroom, a kitchen, dining area, and a very large living room. The separate (but attached) living quarters for the house parents consisted of a studio apartment complete with a bathroom (but no cooking facilities).

The first week we were in the cottage we had one of the relief staff working with us and About two hours into the evening, one of the boys got mad at something he’d been told to do and went over and started pounding his fist into the wall – the relief staff jumped up to stop him and I got up and said, “Mind if I take this?” She looked at me with a bit of surprise and said, “Go Ahead…”

I got up, walked over to the boy, (whose name was Bela) stood there for about 5 seconds watching him, then slowly reached out and took him (gently) by the arm. He looked down at me (he stood about 6 inches taller than I was) I turned and started walking for the hallway, “come with me…” I walked him over to the hallway and picked a place out of sight of the living room and said, “okay, this will be fine…” He looked at me and said, “What?”

I said, “Well, the paint on the wall in the living room looks pretty new, so I don’t want you to bloody up the wall, but back here, nobody’ll notice it – so… have at it…” He looked at me for a second and said, “you’re crazy…” I said, “Some people think so” and went back and sat down.

One of the new “rules” I set while working there was that every night all of the boys had to sit down for an hour and copy word for word from a book. It didn’t matter what kind of book (one of the boys was surprised when I told him yes, he could copy from a comic book…) but the results started showing a few months later when their grades in school started improving.

One day two of the boys got extremely mad at each other and were about to “go at it” with each other. I called all 10 boys together and we went out into the front yard, where I had them form a circle. I put the two in the center of the circle and had them assume “wrestling” positions, then told the boys to wrestle – I made sure they played fair and if one got an advantage over the other I pulled them apart – the object wasn’t to win – just wrestle – 10 minutes later they said they’d had enough, shook hands and were friends again.

From that point on, when any of the boys got mad at each other, they’d come and tell me they wanted to wrestle and we’d go outside and they’d go at it – what really surprised me was when the boys from other cottages started coming over to our cottage and ask me to supervise their matches…

One day one of the boys commented that none of the boys themselves ever had any say over what was going on and I said, “Well, maybe we should start a council?” We put together a council of 2 boys from each cottage who started holding weekly meetings and they came up with some really good ideas.

They even started a “court system” that allowed the boys to have “hearings” and even pass punishments down (the staff always “reviewed” anything they came up with, but it’s amazing how well things worked when we worked with the boys…)

The last day I worked at the Ranch, I remember Bela (the boy who punched the wall) who when I started working there was known for being the worst of the worst – very antisocial, poorest grades in school and extremely uncooperative, had 3 years later become a council member, had the highest grades in school and was at the moment playing basketball down on the court with the rest of the boys – something he’d never do back when we started. He came a long way – makes me wonder how hes doing