We are most afraid of losing our own child. But what if he secretly dreams of escaping and is preparing for it? Psychiatrist and psychotherapist Maria Leibovich talks about why children do this and how to avoid it. And our readers share their stories from childhood.
The other day, Moscow volunteers and police officers were looking for a 12-year-old girl who had run away from home. It seemed that we were witnessing an almost detective story: the teenager was clearly preparing to escape, threw the SIM card out of the phone, asked his friends to erase the correspondence in social networks … The story ended well: the girl was found alive and unharmed.
In St. Petersburg in 2019, after 9 months of searching, they found an eighth-grader who had been hiding all this time from relatives and the police and lived an “independent” life, thinking through her every step.
Psychologists and social services deal with each such case. We, reading such news, can only guess: for what reasons do children run away from home, even if their family seems to be prosperous?
Around 100 children go missing every year around the world.1, and some of them decide to voluntarily leave their relatives or the walls of a social institution. In 90% of cases, police and volunteers find missing children.
Maria Leibovich, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist working with adolescents, tells about the reasons for these escapes and how we, parents, can prevent such incidents in our family.
Who are the «runners»
To understand which teenagers are prone to runaways, let’s first define some terminology. There is a rather severe psychopathology — dromomania, when a person has an uncontrollable tendency to escape. This is one extreme. There is also another — parents runaways from home are situations when the child stayed somewhere to spend the night and did not warn them.
I propose to talk about situations when a teenager consciously decided to leave home due to some external circumstances, and we are not talking about endogenous pathology.
Of course, not everyone runs. Much depends on the character. Some children, even in the most difficult situation, will suffer and endure. They may have self-harm or suicidal thoughts, but they don’t run away from home. These are those who have anxiety traits, possibly depressed. Such teenagers are shy, think more often about others than about themselves, try not to disturb others, easily begin to feel guilty and ashamed.
That is, responsible, obedient children are less likely to commit such acts. They run stubborn, wayward, prone to impulsiveness and violent manifestation of emotions, but also to independence.
As for the psychological profile of the “runners”, any teenager, due to his age and the hormonal, physiological, biochemical changes taking place in his body, is emotionally very vulnerable, he still does not know how to defend himself from stress. He experiences very strong emotions, they manifest themselves in flashes, constantly replacing one another.
The growing man has not yet learned to cope with them. Sometimes he is so violently going through scandals with his parents, he feels such unbearable impotence that he considers leaving home the only way out.
Escapes refer to deviant, «deviant» behavior. Most often it is associated with problems in the family. Often, the same teenagers who run away from home may use alcohol and drugs, engage in promiscuity. Not all, but many of them demonstrate such a complex of deviant behavior.
The younger teenager will be actively sought. But the older he is, the more survival skills he has. This means that he is able to hide longer and more carefully, and he has less chance of returning to his family.
What families run away and why
Let me give you an example from practice. I had a girl at the reception who ran away from home several times. She bluntly said that she could not live with her mother, stepfather and their one-year-old child, because they quarreled every day. Quarrels often come to fights and assaults, and if she is nearby at the wrong moment, then her stepfather can hit her too …
When she runs out of strength to endure or the situation worsens, the girl leaves home. The father who brought her to the consultation honestly says: «I’m a drinker, so when she runs away to me, I can sometimes take care of her, and sometimes I can’t.» That is, we are talking about a socially disadvantaged family.
Most often, children do not run away from families that are at least outwardly prosperous, with a high social level and prosperity, fearing to lose all this. Teenagers are well aware that their parents provide them with a standard of living, and, as a rule, do not cross this border.
Children run from helplessness, from hopelessness, from impotence, they are sometimes unable to withstand anger and rage at their parents.
If we talk about the type of family, then these are families where people are used to expressing their emotions noisily — bright cries, violent quarrels. This is usually mixed with the unwillingness of parents to see and hear their teenager, unwillingness to respect his interests and requests. Then, feeling helpless, the child may well make an escape.
There are “quiet” families in which they are silent about problems, are offended, and do not talk. There, teenagers would rather lock themselves in their room, sit and suffer quietly.
Can someone from the outside persuade a teenager to run away if everything is fine in the family? My opinion is no. In all my practice, I have never seen a teenager run away from a family where they hear him, see him, respect his opinion and are ready for dialogue. Unless, of course, he has an organic pathology.
Is relapse possible?
If a teenager ran away, this is a signal for parents: the child sees no other way out of the situation. And if adults do not make attempts to understand and eliminate the problem, there is a possibility of relapse. Fortunately, my experience shows that running away makes the parents pay attention to the teenager, and subsequently the parents and the child manage to find a solution together. Although not always, unfortunately.
As a positive example, I will tell you about my patient, who left home and lived with a friend for some time. It turned out that the parents are ready to talk and negotiate with her. Negotiations were held with the participation of a psychologist and a family consultant. As a result, it was possible to redistribute roles, change relationships. The girl returned home.
She received from her parents a little more respect for her needs and interests, more willingness to listen to her. And at the same time, the experience of living in a different family with different rules turned out to be uncomfortable. Therefore, we can say that this teenager has a low risk of re-escape.
1 https://sledcom.ru/Vnimanie-deti1