We can all learn something from Ellie!
Ellie (not her real name) is on the very brink of a complete nervous breakdown; she is physically ill due to stress and is subject to violent nightmares every time she slips into sleep. Her every waking moment, between those ever decreasing moments of sleep, is devoted to worry about her 16-year-old son Kyle; where he is, what he's doing, if he's eating, if he has a place to sleep and how long it will be before that call or knock comes that will force her to go somewhere and identify Kyle's body.
Kyle is a runaway, which is, by itself, a tragedy but the greater tragedy is what his mother is doing to herself (note that I did not say, "what Kyle is doing to his mother").
As Ellie does, most parents tend to blame themselves for their children's misbehavior or delinquency. These parents seem to feel that a child's failure to meet his parent's standard of behavior is an indictment of their parenting skills and, what's worse, they feel that they, and they alone, are their children's moral compass. This might have been true for pioneer families (for example), where the only input a child had was his parent's voice and his or her only reality was: you either do what they say when they say it or you get punished. For the typical modern American family, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Today's child has almost unlimited opportunities to learn about all aspects of life from the internet, the news media and the entertainment media as well as from the more traditional sources: friends, family, school and church; opportunities that lead to questions (Why do I have to do everything I'm told to do? and What happens if I don't?) and alternate realities (Hey, they can do that, why can't I?) questions and alternate realities that were not available to those pioneer children.
Another factor in Ellie's mental anguish is the sad fact that she lived her life only for Kyle. Ellie worked, but she only worked to provide for Kyle's needs; she allowed herself to have no friends so she could spend as much time as possible with Kyle and when Kyle was out of the house with his friends, she would sit up and worry about some inevitable tragedy. Kyle, you might say, was Ellie's worst nightmare before the nightmares actually began.
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