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My oldest daughter was in an IB program that was housed within a single wing of a much larger, regular Chicago public high school. Many parents try to avoid sending their child to a regular public high school in Chicago if possible, which is one of the reasons the IB program exists… it allows the school it’s attached to to inflate its graduation rate, ACT scores, attendance rate, etc…, all while physically isolating the advanced students in the building. Without that isolation, many of the parents of the advanced students would just take their children elsewhere… not risking their child’s safety and education by having them included with the regular school population.Yes, I know that sounds elitist. If you ever had to walk through a Chicago public high school when students were there, you’d understand why parents with options almost always opt their children out of that environment.Anyway, there were three times when I, as a parent, thought to myself “you can’t be serious…” when interacting with my child’s school.The school posted a “sign in sheet” for parent/teacher conferences that wasn’t a sign in sheet at all, but a statement of support for the school’s teachers’ union, who were renegotiating their contract that year.The school had a mandatory parent orientation night for parents of incoming freshmen. It was about 90 minutes long, and about 60 minutes of that was about ways to get free things from the government. Not just for our children or to benefit the school, but free things in general.The school refused to release my daughter’s report card to me until I filled out their free/reduced lunch request form. Except I didn’t want to request it. The form required a disclosure of income, which I did not want to give to the school, but they would not give me her report card until I signed the form. So I did just that… signed the form, but left all of the questions blank and wrote on the side “I do not want to be considered for this.”I should say that my interactions with my daughter’s teachers were almost always very pleasant, and my daughter got a great education and is now doing very well as a junior in college. But the administration at her high school… the whole system it seemed… was only designed with impoverished students in mind. Or students with issues at home. The administration seemed genuinely annoyed by my reluctance to even ask for government assistance, which we didn’t need and wouldn’t have qualified for anyway.

The Good News: If your teenage children do not yet have Borderline Personality Disorder at ages 18 and 16, they cannot get it now. BPD and the rest of the personality disorders start in early childhood before the age of 5. Of course, they are likely to have other issues if they have lived with an emotionally abusive mother.In general, the following is usually helpful to young people who have experienced a chaotic, unstable, and abusive relationship with a parent. You can provide the following:Stability—Stability without rigidity contributes to people feeling secure. Have predictable house rules, such as when they have to be home, when dinner is, bedtimes, etc.Availability—Teens do not usually want to be told what to do, but they tend to confide in parents who are available, interested in listening to them, and who are relatively nonjudgmental about what they hear.Interest—One of the ways we build self-esteem and a sense of who we are is based on whether we feel that our parents are genuinely interested in us. This can translate to taking an interest in your children’s interests—their hobbies, going to see them play sports and cheering them on (no pressure on them to excel, please), and going to their parent-teacher conferences.Helpful—Be willing to help with whatever they need help with, especially if they ask you for help. It can be tempting to brush off their requests when you have a work project due, for example. If you cannot help, explain why not.Boundaries—Have reasonable boundaries that you stick to. This is especially important if the other parent was unpredictable and one moment something was a “no,” and the next moment that same behavior was overlooked.Love and Acceptance—If one parent has a personality disorder, that parent usually cannot provide unconditional love. As the other parent, you can demonstrate that you love them all the time, even when you are displeased with their behavior or they have failed a class in school.Psychotherapy: When children grow up with an abusive parent, they are likely to need some appropriate psychotherapy at some point to sort out their feelings.Punchline: Personality disorders are already more or less in place by the teen years, even if they are not usually diagnosed until at least the late teens or adulthood. If your children do not have one by then, they cannot develop one because their personality is already formed.However, if they grew up with an abusive parent who had a personality disorder themselves, they are likely to have developed quite a few problems as a result. There are a number of things that you, the other parent, can do to help them, including being reliable and helpful and creating a stable and supportive home for them. It is likely that they will benefit from appropriate psychotherapy as well.A2AElinor Greenberg, PhD, CGPIn private practice in NYC and the author of the book: Borderline, Narcissistic, and Schizoid Adaptations.www.elinorgreenberg.com

I was by myself as a boy in school, instructions ganging up against me, information melting off the blackboard, notes infiltrating my self-contained world requesting parent-teacher conferences: “Greg is a polite boy, unto himself, sinking.”Take a cat, spin him in a dryer, hurl him on stage and demand he dance the lead in Afternoon of a Faun. Let’s call that math.Bungee jump into a black, fathomless well: science anyone?History and the rest of it bashing against my uncomprehending head like bats without sonar.I have no idea what’s wrong with me. But something is.Most shut-ins withdraw from the world in quiet little steps, like mice avoiding house cats. First, you’re alone with people in front of you. But there’s a slot to fill, a dance for you to do, so you get up, go to school, to work, whatever, and play act the social animal. You take your dumb, lonely fingers and knead your plasticine face into something you hope resembles the usual thing. Words form and you spit them out of your mouth in response to the other words that other people eject.You’re a marionette with frayed strings, exhausted, trying not to snap.Drugs help until they don’t: charm is a slim book of free passes, but sooner or later you’ll find yourself staring at a front door thinking you’d rather drop into oblivion than face any of it again. So you give yourself a day off.Then another.Then another.Then going back is out of the question.You choose to be alone because you choose to avoid trauma. Who the hell wants to walk into the gnashing jaws of humanity? But you miscalculated and a week has gone by and faking normality is no longer an option. You made the mistake of looking down and you fell off the tightrope. So now you slip out at at three in the morning to buy food at a convenience store and arrive home wet and trembling.Phone power off, mail piling up, belligerent bills, buried in cigarette ash.The incessant nag of sexual need, a blur of bodies through drawn curtains, faces blobbing around on a muted TV like ghosts flickering in a chilly blue tank.What do people do with each other?The sun comes and goes, occasionally someone you once knew bangs on the door, shouting a name you once responded to.Music is the only thing that makes any sense.Suicide is a series of small decisions, stretched over years. Ok, you probably knew that. How about: a gun in the mouth is a period at the end of a long, long, sentence you wish you were never required to utter. A blast of smoke, the end of pain, an honest communication at last.An apology.What’s the longest time I’ve spent alone? Three months I think, at the worst of it. Or maybe it’s 59 years and counting.