Calling 911 on your own Kids?

photo credit: WHDH Boston News

This past Monday, a Salem, MA single Mom, angered by and fed up with her five bickering kids, called 911 to send the cops to break up the fighting. Her complaint: their throwing toys and games at each other led her 15-year-old son to punch her 8-year-old daughter in the arm while she was out grocery shopping, and she wanted them both “out of here— I can’t take this anymore.” Cops arrived on the scene, and the son has been summoned to juvenile court on domestic assault and battery charges. No medical attention was needed for the daughter.

Threats Gone Amuck
We often use threats as parents to cajole our kids into better behavior. From the classic, “Wait until your Dad gets home” to threatening to meet with our kid’s teachers to go over failure to get homework done, we often point to authority figures as a way to restore order. In this case, none of the children’s fathers want to be involved, and she went straight to the police.

Abdicating Parental Responsibility
It’s a complete sign of giving up when parents turn to significant authority figures to handle normal parenting tasks, like breaking up fights. It would be the equivalent of calling the principal to summon your child who refused to do his Tuesday night homework. In this instance, the Mom summoned the cops to take on her parental job – the sibling’s fighting clearly did not reach immediate danger levels as no medical treatment was needed for the arm punch.

Total Loss of Parental Control
By any definition, bringing police in on a family fight – where no weapons outside of toys and games were involved– represents an extreme response. Many intermediary steps exist including anticipating issues proactively and taking younger kids with you instead of leaving them at home as well as realizing that kids are in crisis and working with community resources like counselors and religious groups to get help.

Anger Turned into Public Punishment
A frustrated public lashing of out-of-control parent anger is something that we’re seeing more frequently, as we did with the Mom last year who punished her kids by selling their toys on eBay with a picture of them holding them up while crying. When done in anger public punishment represents the ultimate retaliation. There’s little hope of repairing the relationship or regaining a child’s respect or trust.

Support System Breakdown
In this case, the Mom clearly lacked a support system- which families often turn to in times of extreme stress or crisis: from relatives, to close friends, neighbors, religious figures, or school administrators.

Putting Your Family Under the State's Microscope
Not only does the son face criminal charges, but the cops have notified state welfare authorities - the Department of Children and Families, who will not doubt investigate what’s happening inside the family. This will include reviewing parental competence, and by her extreme action this Mom may ultimately face loss of her parental rights, in essence calling the cops on herself.

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Stacy DeBroff is a national Mom expert, parenting author, founder and CEO of Mom Central Consulting, and former attorney founder of the Public Interest Office at Harvard Law School.