Comments on: Dealing with a Sneaky Child – Correcting the Problem https://www.professorshouse.com/dealing-with-a-sneaky-child/ Sat, 15 Feb 2025 17:14:34 +0000 hourly 1 By: Mrs https://www.professorshouse.com/dealing-with-a-sneaky-child/#comment-31403 Fri, 02 Aug 2019 05:56:40 +0000 https://professorshouse.com/relationship-category/dealing-with-a-sneaky-child/#comment-31403 Find an area of interest, soccer has great Xbox games that are wholesome. If he has a good group of guys they could do some slip and slide weather permitting. Look on utube to find activities that big boys like. Actual soccer or baseball, basketball game organizations that you can get involved in & sit & watch as a family builds good bonds. Fishing is an all time favorite. You’d be surprised what might come up in casual fishing conversations. Bonding is what he needs. It’s also what you will love. God Bless

]]> By: Infiniti25 https://www.professorshouse.com/dealing-with-a-sneaky-child/#comment-24416 Thu, 01 Feb 2018 15:16:03 +0000 https://professorshouse.com/relationship-category/dealing-with-a-sneaky-child/#comment-24416 How would you recommend that we build trust with a child we have that is in care?
I am the main carer and we have had our boy who is now 14 for 13 months. He is academically bright, but socially and possibly developmentally behind for his age in my opinion. He goes through phases where he clicks his fingers a lot and when confronted doesn’t know why or more recently fakes a reason.
When people say ‘Hi, how are you’ he has a regimented response of ‘fine, yes, thank you, how are you?’.
The one main issue of trust we have is related to a legal requirement for him not to have unsupervised contact with relatives. To this end, at home we have no internet access available to him unless supervised and often when offered time on the internet he is uninterested. However at the youth club where we attend he has unfiltered internet access which we cannot check unless we sit and watch him for 3 hours straight. We do not monitor this so he can feel free when attending the youth club and we figure that if he is making contact that he would soon ruin his placement like his previous placement.
For his birthday a few months ago, we got him a Monqi smart phone, but we told him the reasons why and that over time we would derestrict his access schedules, app choice limitations and manually approved contacts as and when allowed or we feel we can.
He has informed me of a number of workarounds to bypass or reset schedules locally on the device and I have been fortunate enough to be in contact with the developers to make them aware that the issues being fixed would strengthen the image of the secure and robust nature of their product.
Recently I checked his device for possible ways to open a web browser that would bypass app restrictions allowing him onto website versions of certain platforms.
While I was checking I noticed he has some saved WIFI network connections, one of which could be related to a device my partner’s child has where it appears he has been tethering. Another network stored was for the barber shop he attends.
I haven’t broached this with him yet because I have deleted the stored network details and I want to see if they reappear so I can address the issue with more evidence.

The positive childhood shared experiences don’t exist for us and our teen; though we have tried to provide quite a lot of positive experiences from day one, including giving a degree of autonomy, there seems to be a lack of trust even though opportunities are given where he can show us without knowing it that he is trustworthy.
We have rules for screen time that he breaks infrequently (maybe 2 times in a 30 day period) and we have a talk about him not self regulating, yet it happens again.
I find he wastes his own spare time even when screen time is available to him like he has no default setting for ‘Do this if I have time spare’, he’s either on a screen or playing with cats and when the cats have gone he will stand and throw a cat toy in the air for 10 minutes.

Where could we focus our energy, time or conversations to have a lasting impact?

Thanks 🙂

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