OT: Need ideas for coworker with troubled youth. Options

[sww914]

I was that young man.
My uncle grabbed me and moved me out of Riverside, up to the San Luis Obispo area, waaayyyy out in the country, 40 minutes to town, and made me work really hard on a ranch that he lived on. He kicked my ass a couple of times too, and I was left with no options other that to do the right thing, mostly.
That was 23 years ago, I haven't even really seen any drugs for 20 years, and now I'm a devoted husband and a father to a wonderful special needs 9 yr old boy.
It can happen, don't give up hope. He needs to lose some options for awhile, until he can make decent chioces.
I'm 41 now, and I'm finally not that angry anymore. It takes a long time.

[cooltimes]

In the event that anyone listens to what experience of hardknocks has shown others.

When you isolate, you will can instill a few good traits but when you roll the rebel child back into the public streets, where people point out anything they do and call it bad, even though guided by a guardian tutor, the hands again become fists.

Changing one person is not really going to change the long term problem. It's the public that this kid resents because he sees it as a stonewall that denies him his terms of choosing authority based on his own ideals. Not others.

Everyone, young or old want to be in charge of their own emotions without someone telling him that he is wrong every moment. Nobody wants that. You have to involve the young people where they make their own decisions, not someone else calling all the shots, right or wrong, but all in accordance to their own logic of how they fit into the whole plan of the social life we call society.

The only way the kids will change is when we all change from being judges of others.
It's very prevalent, the few who judge who is only important to them even in a small group like this 914 group. Don't expect change to suit you alone. Change to be suitable to all. Become a friend to all that you don't try to understand and the problem won't exist.