After you’ve been screaming at and punishing your child for years, just dropping them in the shit won’t have them running to you for help: they already don’t trust you. They will think you’ll take pleasure in their misery and hide it, and things will get way worse. There’s a lack of trust, particularly if the teen is older.

The parents are gonna have to do lots of work and communication as they change strategies, and frankly, they’ve spent a child’s lifetime being control freaks, hovering around like damn mosquitoes with phones, social media, and dying for the approval of the whole world. There is not one cell in the child’s body that believes the parents care about anything but what the kids performance says about the parents image, and the kid’s not entirely wrong.

One cannot disentangle where the parent feeling judged ends and true concern begins, as controlling behavior quickly crosses the line into arbitrary, and parents use the phrases such as “because I said so” which is damning when this situation arises.