Mom or «teacher»: where is the line and is it needed?

She called me to arrange a consultation with her son, a teenager of 13 years old. She immediately said that she suspected her son of a serious mental illness and was ready, if necessary, for his hospitalization.

She entered the office and resolutely sat down across from me, preparing for our conversation. The son sat on the sidelines and even moved his chair a little more. It was evident that she was not only very confident in herself, but also wanted to emphasize this. And the son looked closed, even squeezed and tried to keep a distance from his mother, and not only in the literal sense.

Emotional contact between people is felt by the way they look at each other — even if only briefly, how they listen to each other — just by tilting their heads. But mother and son behaved like strangers, who also got into an uncomfortable situation.

Mom began to speak, but I politely stopped her and, apologizing, said that I wanted to talk to my son first, and asked them to switch places. She did so reluctantly, and he sat down beside me with a wary expression on his face.

I started with the most general questions — about his hobbies, relationships with friends and classmates, about what he likes to read and watch movies, about school, but without an emphasis on academic success, but about his favorite subjects.

I wanted to enter into a dialogue with him, shared my own memories from my childhood, expressed my assumptions, commented on his answers and tried to evoke a lively reaction from him to my remarks. It was not a psychotherapeutic technique — I was really interested, and he felt it. He suddenly began to speak freely and with enthusiasm. I liked him more and more.

Mom tried several times to cut him off and direct our conversation to a discussion of their problematic relationship. She demanded that he tell how he ignores her advice and orders, how he reacts irritably to her fair remarks, how he starts a scandal and almost tantrums out of the blue.

She was indignant: her son (and she is an honored teacher!), often has low grades, so she is ashamed of him, and with the triumph of a whistleblower, she recalled several of his conflicts at school. These conflicts were typical of adolescence, but in the eyes of my mother, they testified to mental illness.

And then the behavior of the son really changed. He began to respond to her with hostility and aggression, regardless of my presence. And she turned to me with a feeling of strange triumph: “See what he really is!”

I calmly asked my son to come out and calm down. I told my mother that I did not see any signs of mental illness in him, but I saw that their relationship needed to be corrected. That her position of absolute dominance and confidence in her rightness excludes the possibility of discussing any problems with her son.

It would be bad for her future son if she won a complete victory in this fight of theirs, because it would mean that she broke him as a person and he could not withstand the inevitable difficulties and stresses of life. The worst thing is that he receives such “training” from his own mother, whose support and understanding he needs so much.

She listened to me, got up and said before leaving: “He is, of course, ill, and I will find a doctor who admits it.”

Mom wanted her son to be recognized as mentally ill! I was not afraid, I did not cling to the hope that this was a mistake, but I wanted it! And to achieve the goal, she was ready to challenge the opinion of a professional psychiatrist. And then I remembered her profession.

I’ve seen this before with some teachers. They subconsciously perceive conflicts with their own children as their professional failure, which greatly undermines their self-esteem. Let him be sick rather than admit his mistakes in his upbringing. They need to explain that the relationship with their own child is not identical to the relationship of the teacher with the students.