Focused

As a parent, you want to give as much room to your child as possible, but at the same time you want to set limits.  In other words, when you take your child to a friends house for a visit, do you want to be asked back, or is your friend anxious and looking for a nice way to ask you to hurry up and leave so that they can put back all the things they had to take out of your children's hands that they weren't supposed to pick up to start with?  As often quoted by our grandparents, children should be seen and not heard.  In other words, "Here are some things I will allow you to play with and quietly so that I may talk to your mother, but beyond that, you may not play with anything you want in this house and you may not get so loud that I cannot hear your mother speak".  Rarely is that practiced today by parents and I simply can't wait for them to leave my house and God forbid they ever come back.  If a parent notices that their child not only is focused upon something, but becomes obsessed with it, that is not a good thing.  In the case of my son, afflicted with ADHD, not only did he focus on whatever it was at the time that by either removing the item or removing him, he became angry.  He became so angry that he "turned blue in the face".  Sometimes I would have to physically restrain him in my arms until he calmed down to let him know that "play time" was over.  This is the time to notice that there may be something not right with the child.  After growing up and "learning" what to do...lie, cheat, steal, defy...once focused, they don't change if they are not medicated.  In his case, at his high school he was introduced to the United States Army by way of a school "presentation".  The Army was in search of a new crop of soldiers.  They presented to the high school students just how much fun it is to be in the Army.  They did not present the fact that they have to follow orders 24/7.  They didn't present the fact that their uniform must be wrinkle free, or make their own bed, or organize their trunk, or even so much as respond with "Yes Sir!"  All my son was able to focus on was the fact that it looked like fun to join.  He signed up without my permission, but he was over eighteen at the time.  His birthday came after the start of school, so that's why he was still eighteen and still in high school.  When he began his shenanigans and I explained to him that I had had enough, I sent him back to his mother whom got rid of him in the first place because she could no longer handle him.  She didn't care if he got into the Army.  She was rid of him.  As a young child, he couldn't follow orders.  "Learning the legalities of what children can do after turning eighteen", he didn't have to follow mine either.  I gave him a choice.  The street or his mother.  He couldn't follow orders in the Army either.  He wound up with seventeen discrepancies of not being accommodating to a soldier and was later "less than honorably" discharged.  Something of which to this day he will deny because he no longer possesses all the copies of his DD214 that he once showed me.  They don't exist in his possession, therefore the charges did not happen.  He was focused on a girl while here, I explained would not be a good  choice for him.  After being sent back to his mother, he was so focused on her that he came back to marry her while he was in the Army.  She happens to be an illegal immigrant with thirty other members of her family that all live with her under one roof.  All of them illegal.  And, they are pumping out the anchor babies like it is going out of style.

If a couple is going to have children, they need to be agreeable parents, they need to concentrate on the future of their children, and they need to do what is best for the child.  In my son's case, had he been handled properly, medically, I believe his future would have been brighter.  As it is now, he and his family will be nothing more than wards of the welfare system.  I am of the opinion that parents really need to pay attention to the daily lives of their children, turn off the television, put down the cell phone, and interact with their children.  Even medicated, they can become something special as is the case with Michael Phelps.