Adults will have to work as a team to help troubled child

I am a 60-year-old grandmother in poor health. My 33-year-old son moved back home with me with his 2½-year-old son. My son is filing for divorce and has no other place to go. His credit is shattered by breaking a lease with a local apartment. The crisis is (that) his toddler son has absolutely no manners. He tells me to “(expletive), Grandma.” He throws things at me. If SpongeBob is on and the program goes to commercial, he screams and throws a nuclear tantrum.

We cannot take him to a restaurant, grocery store, anywhere, without him screaming and throwing a tantrum. My household is in a horrible crisis. I also have a 30-year-old daughter with whom I share the house, who also went through divorce this past spring. Before my son came to live with us, we had a quiet, peaceful home. Now it is an insane asylum. Filled with hours of screaming and crying. We tried timeouts, withholding favorite toys — nothing works. We desperately need help. My health is failing with all this stress.

Is there a children’s behavior center here in town to get the toddler evaluated? He is the son of two bipolar parents with chronic depression. — L.M., Las Vegas

It breaks my heart that a 2-year-old even knows the F-word.

In a very short window of time — the past 75 years or so — the way our culture does “family” has done two complete flip-flops. Not once but twice!

Multigenerational families once were common. And, if grandparents were not actually living with their adult children and grandchildren, they were proximate neighbors. Either way, grandparents were part of the daily or at least regular task of childrearing.

Then things changed. Economic shifts made America become more and more urbanized and mobile. In one capricious cultural blink, we normalized the “nuclear family” — one husband and one wife raising one or more children. We began to think and behave as if God had ordained this model for children on the day of creation. “No one else is going to raise my children,” modern parents say proudly, completely missing the irony that raising children this way is without historical precedent in any culture, time or place, not to mention impossible.

Grandparents jumped aboard the new model, too. The assumption was that competent parents would raise competent children who would move out and live competent lives. An “old saying” arose, which was actually quite a new way of seeing things: “Children should live close enough that you don’t have to pack a bag but far enough away that you have to wear a hat.” Campers and Winnebagos sported bumper stickers that said defiantly, “We’re spending our children’s inheritance!” A modern grandparent’s new job was not to raise their grandchildren but to visit them, spoil them and hand them back to the nuclear family.

And now, we’ve reversed field again. L.M., you are part of a burgeoning population of grandparents who find themselves raising grandchildren … and sometimes find themselves still raising their adult children! Sometimes the factors are merely economic. Often it’s the consequence of runaway divorce rates. And, increasingly, our adult children are taking longer and longer to become competent adults.

So, multigenerational families are back in vogue but out of context. More as a response to crisis and less as a way of life.

Your grandson’s behavior is extreme. I recommend that your first move is to a pediatrician. The doctor can assess issues of temperament versus possible medical issues (blood sugar, diet, allergies, neurology, etc.) The doctor then, I’m sure, can give you a referral for psychological assessment and/or family therapy.

While I’d take seriously the mental health history in your grandson’s life, I’d still hesitate to “explain” these symptoms with a bipolar diagnosis. If your son is willing, I’d urge you and your son and your grandson to bite off four to 12 sessions with a skilled “family systems” therapist. These types of therapists don’t begin by diagnosing a 2-year-old. Instead, they inventory and assess the dynamics of the family, then begin to “tinker” with those dynamics which, when successful, modulates the behavior of the identified patient, in this case, your grandson.

For now, the family unit is clearly you, your son and grandson and to some extent your daughter. I urge the three adults in that equation to pull together to present to your grandson a pattern of constancy, structure, containment and encouragement that will make his world more predictable, safe and sane. Which, in turn, might make his acting out behavior less necessary.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Las Vegas Psychiatry and the author of “Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing” (Stephens Press). His columns also appear on Sundays in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Contact him at 227-4165 or skalas@reviewjournal.com.