Read Online Lost Girls by Caitlin Rother - Free Book Online Page A

her three-year-old son into day care.
    One day when she went to pick him up, they told her that he had some emotional problems, that he was hyperactive and he should take medication to get along with the other kids. “He was too intrusive, a little bit too aggressive,” she recalled them saying—and worse, he’d bitten a little girl so they’d had to suspend him.
    When she and Li’l John got home, she asked what had happened that day, and he started what would become a pattern in his life—blaming someone else for his angry, inappropriate reaction. Crying, he said, “Mommy, the girl pushed me, and I was mad, so I bit her.”
    â€œYou can’t bite,” Cathy responded. Wanting to make sure he understood that his behavior was wrong, she didn’t say, “Oh, you’re bad.” Rather, she told him he wouldn’t get to go to school, which he loved, because he enjoyed interacting with the other kids.
    â€œIt scares the other kids,” she said. “It’s not nice to them.”
    Cathy didn’t like the idea of medicating her son, and neither, she said, did his pediatrician, who thought John Jr. was too young.
    â€œYou can’t make a determination when they’re that age,” the doctor told her, meaning that one biting incident didn’t necessarily mean the child needed to be constantly medicated.
    John Sr. felt the day care operators were overreacting to what he viewed as typical little-boy behavior, and he also wasn’t pleased that their son would be at home for a couple of days. So Cathy stayed home from work too, although she purposely didn’t do anything fun with the boy. Li’l John cried and was embarrassed that he’d gotten in trouble, but when he tried to get his mother to play with him, she simply said, “Mommy is busy.”
    Â 
    Â 
    There was only one other time his mother let him know she was angry with him, a less serious but still telling example of his problems with impulse control.
    Cathy and a friend were out shopping with 2½-year-old John Jr. when he saw a chocolate bunny and asked his mother to buy it for him. She said no, and turned away for a moment, only to see that he’d grabbed it off the shelf and had taken a big bite out of its ear.
    â€œIt took everything in our power not to laugh,” Cathy recalled. “I had to buy it. He was holding it and I was saying, ‘No.’ I had to pay for it, but he didn’t get the rest of the bunny.”
    After John Jr. turned four, his impulse control problems worsened, and complaints from day care operators escalated. She finally relented and agreed to put him on a low dose of Ritalin, but only while he was at school, where he had to pay attention.
    They moved to Palmdale when John Jr. was in kindergarten, which brought them closer to Cathy’s parents and also to the house where Deanna lived with her two girls.
    During this time and into the first grade, John was acting out in the classroom. He blurted out the F-word, going off on a teacher who had reprimanded him for calling her a “fat, stupid turkey” and had given him a time-out. This being a Christian school, the cussing that he’d picked up from his father didn’t go over very well, and Cathy got a call.
    â€œWe’re not really sure we want him to come back,” the school administrator said.
    John was throwing temper tantrums at the grocery store, which required Cathy to bring him outside to the car for fifteen-or twenty-minute time-outs, and his new teacher complained he was easily distracted, exhibited negative attention-seeking behavior and talked too much in class.
    Cathy agreed to increase John’s Ritalin dosage to fifteen milligrams a day in divided doses. However, this only caused him to have rebound depression in the afternoon, triggering more tantrums and then sobbing. “I wish I would die, because nobody likes me,” he said.
    Hearing this