Sending children away to relatives

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oliver_denom
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Sending children away to relatives

Post by oliver_denom » Mon Jan 01, 2018 6:54 am

Over the holidays, my sister in law talked about how her parents would routinely send them away to live with relatives when she or her siblings showed any signs of disobedience or rebellion. In turn, those relatives when then send them off to other family as well.

For a stretch of time in her junior year, she didn't stay in one place more than three months. This sounded crazy to me because of the absurdity, but also because there were so many of that family who enabled it and considered it normal.

Is this a Utah thing? Is it culturally accessible to send children away as punishment or to separate them from friends? That sounds completely insane.
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LaMachina
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Re: Sending children away to relatives

Post by LaMachina » Mon Jan 01, 2018 10:50 am

I've seen a number of my relatives do this and we're up in Canada. Seems like it may be a popular strategy amongst certain religious families (reminds me of the Duggars attempts to deal with their boy).

I don't know if my family members would describe it as a "punishment" but in each case it was definitely an attempt to "get their head screwed on straight" and get them away from certain peer influences. The youngest to have it done was about 10. In each case I personally didn't think the kids were that out of hand (eg include dating someone the parents didn't like and another was some general sass) but I wasn't privy to everything. One common theme in each case is the parents are super uptight.

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wtfluff
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Re: Sending children away to relatives

Post by wtfluff » Mon Jan 01, 2018 9:07 pm

oliver_denom wrote:
Mon Jan 01, 2018 6:54 am
Is this a Utah thing?
In my ~50 years in Utah, this is the first time I've heard of anything like this.
Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions. -Frater Ravus

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SeeNoEvil
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Re: Sending children away to relatives

Post by SeeNoEvil » Thu Jan 04, 2018 7:09 am

I had a good friend do this. DD about high school age started acting up so they shipped her off to her TBM aunt in Utah. Also, two families in my Midwest ward did the same thing when their kids were teenagers. Kids were acting out, didn't want to go to church, etc. They were shipped off to relatives in Utah. The DD of my friend stayed in UT and never returned home. She is very close now to the aunt who took her in and not so much with the mother who sent her there. Guess the "therapy" worked because she is very uber TBM now with a whole boat load of kids. I never heard what happened to the other two because I moved away. On the flip side as an adult I "started acting out" and not going to church after going down the history rabbit hole when an opportunity I could not pass up opened up and I ended up moving to Utah. Uber TBM DD was excited and said Utah would be just what I needed to get me back to church. Within a year of moving there I resigned. :)
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2bizE
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Re: Sending children away to relatives

Post by 2bizE » Fri Jan 05, 2018 6:28 am

I've seen this done a few times, usually with a young girl who is pregnant.
~2bizE

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oliver_denom
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Re: Sending children away to relatives

Post by oliver_denom » Fri Jan 05, 2018 6:42 am

SeeNoEvil wrote:
Thu Jan 04, 2018 7:09 am
I had a good friend do this. DD about high school age started acting up so they shipped her off to her TBM aunt in Utah. Also, two families in my Midwest ward did the same thing when their kids were teenagers. Kids were acting out, didn't want to go to church, etc. They were shipped off to relatives in Utah. The DD of my friend stayed in UT and never returned home. She is very close now to the aunt who took her in and not so much with the mother who sent her there. Guess the "therapy" worked because she is very uber TBM now with a whole boat load of kids. I never heard what happened to the other two because I moved away. On the flip side as an adult I "started acting out" and not going to church after going down the history rabbit hole when an opportunity I could not pass up opened up and I ended up moving to Utah. Uber TBM DD was excited and said Utah would be just what I needed to get me back to church. Within a year of moving there I resigned. :)
This sort of thing feels very wrong and topsy-turvy. To pull this off you have to be able to place your love for the church's mission to spread into the next generation above your own natural parental instincts.
“You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.” - Vonnegut

L'enfer, c'est les autres - JP

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wtfluff
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Re: Sending children away to relatives

Post by wtfluff » Fri Jan 05, 2018 11:06 am

wtfluff wrote:
Mon Jan 01, 2018 9:07 pm
oliver_denom wrote:
Mon Jan 01, 2018 6:54 am
Is this a Utah thing?
In my ~50 years in Utah, this is the first time I've heard of anything like this.
Now that I think about it, I knew a girl in high school who "grew up" in Arizona, and moved to small-town Utah to finish up her high-school career away from "bad influences" in Arizona. She moved to Utah with her mother though, with her father staying in Arizona for his employment.

So I guess both mother and daughter were "sent away" in that example, eh?

oliver_denom wrote:
Fri Jan 05, 2018 6:42 am
This sort of thing feels very wrong and topsy-turvy. To pull this off you have to be able to place your love for the church's mission to spread into the next generation above your own natural parental instincts.
If there's one thing that LDS-Inc. is good at, it's exactly this: Getting parents to put the Corporation ahead of their children. I have watched it play out in my own family for 30+ years, and I hear stories of it constantly.

It's a huge reason why many "NOM" folks like us don't "come out" to our families. I'll continue "Hiding In Plain Sight" for as long as humanly possible, or at least until both of my parents are dead. There are some idiotic mormon-milestones coming up in the near future though. Those will probably force me to quit hiding, and it will probably kill my mother.

Is it any wonder that I'm just a stich angry at LDS-Inc. for lying to me and my family for almost 200 years?
Faith does not give you the answers, it just stops you asking the questions. -Frater Ravus

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HighMaintenance
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Re: Sending children away to relatives

Post by HighMaintenance » Sun Jan 07, 2018 8:37 pm

This topic pinged a memory from jr high/high school.

Background: There was a family with a couple of kids I went to school with and the father was one of our teachers. In 8th grade there was a kid with a different last name that lived with them and then in 9th and 10th another kid with a different last name lived with them. I didn't give it much thought at the time. Both were really nice guys and, basically, they were school mates for a short time and then they were gone.

Now I wonder about the situation. Were they in foster care? Were they distant relatives from out of state that their parents sent them away to live in a "better" environment? I mean, neither of these two kids were troublemakers and they were (surprisingly) well accepted into our small-town, highly-cliquish school, when most kids that moved in from out of the area were treated with some hostility - especially the kids that moved from the big city of Salt Lake and liked to tell us how backward small-town SE Idaho was. :shock:

I hope whatever the reason they were there was overcome and that they have good memories of their time with that family.
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