When my adopted stepson was having a lot of behavioral issues, we were running out of ideas as to how to get through to him how important trust was, and how he needed to earn it, and to keep it. Having an unstable childhood and many adults in his life let him down, he did not trust others easily; well really he did not trust anyone at all. He was a very angry boy and was acting out in school, and at home.

Whatever rule was put down, he would do his best to find his way around it, either by finding a loophole in the exact wording that we had used to instate the rule, or by simply ignoring the rules, or his overall favorite would be to play dumb and pretend as though he had forgotten that he was not supposed to be doing whatever it was that he had gotten in trouble for. The latter is very frustrating when you are dealing with a child whom tests in the genius category!

At wits end we finally came up with taking his bedroom door off the hinges, restricting his privacy, until he could show us that he was trustworthy enough to have his private space back. He was very upset about losing his door, crying and quite angry. He was very used to being angry at that point, and secluding himself in his room was something that he had really gotten good at, and what he had begun spending most of his days doing. He wanted no part of the outside world, and was having a hard time in dealing with the fact that he was losing his cocoon of protection from interaction with anyone else.

Along with the no door policy, we also put him on restriction in the house, meaning whatever floor of the house the parent who was home on, was the floor of the house that he needed to be on. He became the shadow of either my husband, or me for a few weeks. We wanted to make sure that he was not getting himself into trouble, and were worried about how angry he was and at how much time he was spending by himself.

His reaction to having to be a living shadow of sorts went over much better than losing his door. While for the first day or so he was pretty quiet while following one of us from room to room, after that he began to open up and chat, enjoying his interaction with the family. I believe that he had wanted to be more involved with the family; he just did not have any idea on how to start being more involved. He had never had a very close knit family unit before, and didn’t seem to be too sure as to how one acted in a family environment.

Having him follow us around forced him into the interaction that he needed, which helped him to gain the much needed social skills to help clear up some of his behavioral problems that he was having in school with his peers. And while never really happy with having his door removed, it did certainly give him the much needed motivation, to work on being someone that we could trust. This was a huge breakthrough for us. As he was so angry and fed up with the world, that he had held no value in anything, which made consequences a hard thing for us, what do you do to punish a child whom seemingly holds not value in anything? While we were apprehensive to take the door away at first, because he was such a private child, it turned out that his privacy, at that time, was what he had valued most, and once that had been taken away from him, it gave him the jump start to turn his behavior around and work on being a trustful individual. He did end up losing his door again, but after having it back for only a short time, only to lose it again and go back to the ‘open door policy’ he quickly went back to following the rules and his second bought with no door was much shorter than the first.

He now has friends; he is involved with after school activities, and values many things in his life, besides just his privacy. And it is always funny to walk down the hall and see him sitting in his room with the door wide open now, it always makes me think back to the times when it was always closed, and to how hard he worked after losing the door, to get it back so he could go back to his little world of no interaction! He has really turned himself around, and while we hated to do it, losing his door for a time was one of the things that I believe really helped to motivate him to do so!