[quote=eavesdropper]
This has been pointed out in several of the posts…in fact, I think the blame goes more to the enabler. A child (even an adult one) cannot act any differently than the way he’s been taught. If he/she has never been taught basic life skills or made to bear personal responsibility for wrongdoing (in essence, been taught that mom and dad are their personal servants, and they can do anything they want without personal repercussions), how can they be expected to act otherwise?
However, this begs the question: If you have realized that you’ve made serious mistakes and made genuine efforts to undo the damage your “parenting” (or lack thereof) has done, are you “helping” them by allowing them to continue using and abusing you, or simply continuing to enable their escalating deviant behavior?
[/quote]
If you think there’s equal blame for the enabler, then the question becomes, what type of person is the enabler. Is he/she own up to their mistake and try to fix it at any cost or do they just say f* it, I’ve tried hard enough to fix it and the problem is not going away so I’ll throw in the tower and kick the kid out. If you’re an enabler parent for 18 years, at the very least, I would think you should spend the next 18 years trying to fix the problem you cause in the 1st 18 years before you can truly say you tried hard enough. Behavior takes a long time to change.
