In a Guardian column published this morning, an anonymous woman has discussed her decision to have her 17-year-old daughter “kidnapped” and sent to a tough boot camp in Utah.
As she explains, she’d always had high hopes for her children but, as a teenager, her daughter started hanging around with a bad crowd. She developed “an attitude”, her grades dropped and then she declared her intention to drop out of school, and become a hairdresser. As her mum wrote:
“I was distraught. There is nothing wrong with hairdressing, but I wanted her to get a proper education first, so she would have choices.”
Desperate, knowing that once her daughter turned 18, she wouldn’t be under her control any more, this woman researched and found a boot camp for troubled children. She signed her daughter up, paying$16,000 (11,380) for seven weeks. Then she hired a “private service” to pick up her daughter in the middle of the night, and take her there whether she wanted to go, or not.
The boot camp sounds pretty intense….
“They lived like cavemen: they didnt see a roof the whole time, took care of their sanitary waste, learned survival skills and did physical labour; some cut off their hair because they couldnt bathe.”
…But while we imagine that we’d be pretty angry with our parents if they had done something like that to us, this woman explains that her daughter – although annoyed at first – soon understood her mum’s decision, and wrote letters asking for forgiveness, telling her she loved her and that she’d made mistakes.
When they were reunited, apparently her “attitude” was gone, and she has since graduated high school and completed a master’s degree, and now works in the legal sector.
As her mum said:
“Both my kids joke that Im a psycho mom, but they forgave me and we remain close. Its the most difficult thing Ive ever done. Could they have got where they are today without such drastic action? Perhaps, but it wasnt a chance I was willing to take. I believe the more we suffer in life, the more we grow.”
What do you think? Would you have been as understanding if your parents had done this to you? Let us know in the comments!
You can read the whole article over at The Guardian.
Read more: http://www.hellou.co.uk/2016/03/woman-explains-why-she-paid-to-have-her-daughter-kidnapped-85616/
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