Cassiopeia
New Member
Hello everybody, I've been reading these forums for a while and would like to get some perspectives on our situation. I have a 16 year old daughter who was adopted as a 7-months-old. She always struggled with being adopted, and feeling rejected and abandoned by her birth mother. We would talk about it a lot, and it was also addressed at the heritage camps we attended, and she was in counseling for a while. She's always been a smart, hardworking, and genuinly nice kid.
Then we moved, she started at a new school and we started seeing behaviors we've never seen from her. She made friends with a group of kids who are essentially a bad influence. Started skipping school, talking back, starting arguments over basically nothing... we tried stopping her from seeing these kids but she snuck out. No kind of punishment seemed to convince her to change her behaviors. And almost daily phone calls from school.... I started dreading answering the phone. We've been through detentions and suspensions. Eventually at the end of the last year we got a notice for an expulsion hearing (daughter hacked the school computer to change her grades - she was failing a lot of classes because at that point she was barely showing up). We managed to get through that without a formal expulsion on her record but she still had to leave the school.
So this year, we decided on a fresh start and enrolled her at a private Christian school where the principal is a family friend. They just reopened and daughter is again skipping school and spending time with that same group of kids. Counseling doesn't help. Punishing her doesn't help. It's like she couldn't care less.
Last week we found a small nylon bag of white powder in her room. I feel like she's getting involved in more dangerous things and it's as if there's nothing we can do to help. Right now we've reazlied that we just have to get her out of this environment, she's not improving here and things are just getting worse. We considered therapeutic boarding schools but I'm worried that would lead to her being stigmatized in the future with college and jobs. Another option is to send her to live with our relatives but then what if she just does the same things over there?
Not knowing what to do feels horrible. I know she's suffering and I just don't know how to help her.
Then we moved, she started at a new school and we started seeing behaviors we've never seen from her. She made friends with a group of kids who are essentially a bad influence. Started skipping school, talking back, starting arguments over basically nothing... we tried stopping her from seeing these kids but she snuck out. No kind of punishment seemed to convince her to change her behaviors. And almost daily phone calls from school.... I started dreading answering the phone. We've been through detentions and suspensions. Eventually at the end of the last year we got a notice for an expulsion hearing (daughter hacked the school computer to change her grades - she was failing a lot of classes because at that point she was barely showing up). We managed to get through that without a formal expulsion on her record but she still had to leave the school.
So this year, we decided on a fresh start and enrolled her at a private Christian school where the principal is a family friend. They just reopened and daughter is again skipping school and spending time with that same group of kids. Counseling doesn't help. Punishing her doesn't help. It's like she couldn't care less.
Last week we found a small nylon bag of white powder in her room. I feel like she's getting involved in more dangerous things and it's as if there's nothing we can do to help. Right now we've reazlied that we just have to get her out of this environment, she's not improving here and things are just getting worse. We considered therapeutic boarding schools but I'm worried that would lead to her being stigmatized in the future with college and jobs. Another option is to send her to live with our relatives but then what if she just does the same things over there?
Not knowing what to do feels horrible. I know she's suffering and I just don't know how to help her.