Montana Academy
Letter from Lost Prairie
A Community of Parents
Contemporary socio-economic blather puts such emphasis upon the individual that
some people can’t help but imagine that they live independently, that they need to count
on no one else, and that they need not be accountable to anyone else, either—and so live
entirely in emotional isolation, careless about the needs and happiness of others. By their
behavior such people betray their conviction—and so teach their children—that the good
life is every man for himself.
It’s hard to miss that this is not what the adults at MA believe. It’s not how they
behave, nor what they teach. A few encounters with other parents at a work-shop, or a
few of your son’s or daughter’s accounts of team-mates’ parents, will quickly
demonstrate that we have made an assiduous, conscious effort to choose students whose
parents don’t think or behave that way, either. Why? Because we do not choose
individual teenagers to treat in isolation, or families to help one at a time. With every
enrollment, we are creating a community. We learned long ago that in significant part
the constructive change that happens to individual students and their families at Montana
Academy results from a collective impetus—it is a function of a common culture—to
which every student, staff and parent contributes.
What does this mean in practice? It means the effort to help a student shrug off past
misbehavior, wriggle free of developmental obstacles, and grow up, psychologically, into
a competent, confident young adult is a shared parental effort. It means that every parent
helps every other parent—by sustaining a collaborative, friendly, affectionate culture that
recognizes teenagers clearly and by setting limits for them consistently and firmly. Every
parent keeps the circle close and closed, and together we hold all the community’s
children, and hold them all accountable. Every parent is supporting all the staff and all
the parents’ children when they embrace MA’s cultural norms, accept the community’s
constraints and clan requirements, participate in community rituals, and defend the
community’s common rules—accepting them even at the cost of inconvenience, and
showing the children that, when you choose to join a community, all of its rules apply to
all. When we all lift together, the community feels light, and sharing in the structure of a
common culture with integrity feels right to teenagers, too.
But this requires us all. It’s immediately noticeable, given how interconnected we
are, whenever a student lets go of her team-mates, or of his parents, and willfully refuses
to participate. It is palpable when a parent lets go, and fails to help support other MA
parents and other parents’ sons and daughters. Every other student and parent feels this
breach, and the whole community feels a bit less safe and wholesome. Some of these
rare events took place recently, as you may know, when a student nearing eighteen
caught sight of her boyfriend on FaceBook, sneaked a furtive phone call, against the
rules, and then demanded her right (on her birthday) to walk away from her team, from
the community, from her siblings and her parents. After considerable discussion, and
over the strenuous objections of her team, she then did so.
Upsetting to the ranch community as this was, it was the more disturbing once it
became known that her departure was abetted by the parents of the ex-boyfriend back
home, miles from Lost Prairie, who had taken it upon themselves to encourage their son
to interfere with her parents’ legitimate prerogatives. Worse yet, another MA student (on
a different team) colluded in texting plans to the boyfriend, who showed up in Montana
on her birthday to pick her up. The colluding student’s mother made her own cell phone
available for this purpose and colluded with her daughter also “not to tell MA.”
I mention these details, because they are in the public domain at MA. Possibly you
already know of it, and perhaps were upset to hear about it, as of course we have. Yet my
point is not to suggest that this breach of student and parent solidarity is entirely unique,
or to dwell further upon its particulars,i but rather to make this issue one that we can all
think out loud and talk about. Certainly it’s not new that one student may “help” another
student to run away, or to break the rules. Such incidents are to be expected in a school
in which such misbehavior is the occasion for many of our students’ enrollments. It is
more unusual for a parent to betray other parents, or to disrupt another son or daughter’s
treatment, but it’s certainly happened, over the years, that a parent in ways small or
(occasionally) large, betrays the MA community of parents by breaking MA rules,
violating pass “agreements,” failing to supervise a son or daughter on a pass, permitting a
16-year-old to drive a rental cars, and without a license, or to sip Daddy’s martini in a
public restaurant. In my second book, I alluded to such breaches of parental solidarity
and considered why otherwise-intelligent parents find effective limit-setting difficult:
Some parents are reluctant to set limits because . . . they’re ashamed or
guilty about a marital failure, sorry about what divorce has cost the
children. Some recognize their own defects as parents and know they
should control their tempers better, come home sooner, drink less, and pay
the bills on time. Some are humiliated by past failures (to conceive) . . .
and worry they may not be able to bind an adopted child to themselves. .
. . Some adults are themselves ill or disabled, and sorry about what
they’ve been unable to provide . . . [and so] they wince at the idea of
holding a son or daughter to account (To Change a Mind, pp. 88-91).
There are other reasons. Bitter divorces earn special mention, for sometimes one parent,
competing with the other for a son’s or daughter’s favor, will fight with MA, as if MA
were yet another antagonistic rival. Other parents may not know how to set a limit, and
haven’t bothered to learn, it being easier to delegate this sometimes onerous task to others
to preserve a cozy permissive illusion of parental wonderfulness. Other parents can be
too narcissistic to accept limits for themselves, so why require a son or daughter to accept
any rules, either?
Here I am not trying to be exhaustive as to all the reasons a particular parent may fail
to parent, but rather I am trying to call attention to the corrosive effect of such failures
upon the integrity of the parent community, where responsibility for each and all children
is shared, and no family lives on an island, entire of itself, and where every parent is a
piece of a shared adolescent continent, a part of the main. And if we don’t share every
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detail every time a parent makes a mistake, in this regard, yet we want you to understand
the underlying reason that we take such matters seriously, both at admissions, and afterward, and sometimes, to preserve and protect the MA community, we take firm steps.
The reason is: that we all need the community’s magic. And we know, from experience,
that it only takes a few parents—who join in sneaky, sketchy behavior with a daughter or
son, who bully our staff, or excuse themselves from the rules, or even the law, or “pull” a
son or daughter prematurely, and without regard for the impact upon other students and
parents—to break the spell.
Someone said “it takes a village.” Most of us know this. So it probably hardly needs
to be said, in closing, that this is not just an MA issue; it is a national problem. Every
Mom and Dad in every “village” in the nation struggles to rear sons or daughters without
knowing for sure that other teenagers’ mothers and fathers can be counted upon to help,
particularly around limit-setting. It is an American commonplace that some adults fail to
supervise, and may not let you know about your children’s risk-taking or misbehavior.
Some provide drugs or unsupervised bedrooms, as if they thought they had the right to
just be “pals” and fellow teen-agers—and so put other people’s children at risk.
I expect I am not telling you anything new. Yet I want to emphasize that at MA we
have the opportunity, for the brief time your sons and daughters are resident here, to do
what often seems otherwise impossible in the “real” world your children refer to. In this
select community of parents, we have the chance (not to say the obligation) to collaborate
closely in the care of your children, sharing a common culture and an explicit set of
limits, which we all need to follow. Such an adult consensus is felt with relief throughout
the adolescent community. And we, the adult community of staff and parents, know and
feel that we are all in this together—JAMcK
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Perhaps I should add, albeit this is somewhat beside the point, that the boy did show up on campus
unexpectedly. Rosemary sent him packing. With her parents’ knowledge and permission, the student’s
therapist and team-leader took her to Kalispell and dropped her off at the “homeless shelter.” There the
boyfriend picked her up. The student who colluded was dropped back to earth clan, and still now endures
the opprobrium of the girls’ community. Rosemary confronted her mother, and wondered out loud
whether she was capable of participating responsibly in this parent community. To her credit, her mother
offered a confession, a full apology, and made it clear she was humiliated to have been gulled by her
daughter and to have let down other parents, realizing in retrospect how appalled she would have been if
any other parent had done something like this with her own daughter—and so she will stay, and hopes to
recover her rightful place in this adult community.
Some have been troubled to learn that a “boyfriend” could and did just drive onto the MA ranch campus.
In the event, he behaved reasonably well, but the point has been taken. None of us thinks it desireable to
turn the ranch into an armed fortress or gulag, and in sixteen years this is the first boyfriend or girlfriend
ever to show up unannounced and uninvited. The irony was that, after Rosemary asked him to leave, and
he departed, even before I could get to the ranch from McGregor Lake, his mother called from another
state to say that, not being able to reach him on his cell phone in Marion, she worried that we had locked
him up or harmed him—and threatened to call the police. Just to be clear, however, albeit we think we
are not much at risk, we do plan to review our sitaution again with our Sheriff, just to make sure we all
know how we can get help of that kind, should we ever need it.
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