Children Who Use School As An Escape Route From Home By Stormi Willis A child may be getting high grades and a lot of praise to escape for a while, from home and their true feelings. Nobody will think that a child like this could be a child with very serious problems. Depending on how intelligent they are, and how cleverly they learn to manipulate, they may coast by in school. Sometimes, unfortunately, they will take on many characteristics of their parents. People behave as they have learned to behave, whether they like it or not. For some of them, learning to take responsibility for their actions is a hard, because it doesn’t come out of their life experience. Responsibility has to be taught. Another problem in school is the inability to concentrate. Quite often their thoughts will be directed to fantasies created to make life okay, or to worrying. They probably want to pay attention, but how can they especially if they have been up all night listening to their parents fight or party. If they need help, they know better than to ask for it. Many are threatened to be quiet about what goes on in their houses. If by chance someone was sympathetic to them, maybe a teacher asked,” Is something bothering you?” they will say,” No, everything is fine” and walk away, wanting desperately to cling to that teacher and to say, ”Oh my God, it’s so terrible at home… I’m not really sure what is wrong. Please, please help me.” They want someone to understand without their having to tell them, but they really don’t believe anyone can. They keep their feelings inside. So, school, which should have been a haven, becomes a kind of hell. Some misbehave thinking that maybe if they get into trouble, someone would pay attention. They may think that everyone else’s lives are perfect like the families on television. What is real and unreal gets very distorted. Most children in these situations know that their parents love them. The love may have been distorted, but it was real, so their reality gets distorted. Therefore, their sense of self is distorted. From the time I was a little child in a Christian kindergarten, then thrown into the world by parents who couldn’t afford private school and had no knowledge that making that one turn down a path from where God had placed me (in Christian School) to the path of least resistance (Public School) caused many trials not only in their lives, but the lives of their children (my brother and I) and in turn, in my own children’s lives. God tried many things to get us back on that path and it took me years to figure that out. I still forget sometimes, or choose not to remember that everything my husband and I do will affect our children’s lives and the outcome of their life. I try to tell myself they will make their own choices regardless of our raising them in Church (which we try to do) or if we had continued to raise them in a home where we drank almost daily for years, or somewhere in between.
Our children are growing so fast, and they have made me feel so blessed. They are blessings I do not deserve, but I am glad God has seen fit to give me this time in Eternity to raise them and love them.
