Choose Your Own Adventure: 11-Year-Old Runaway

A case for your consideration, ripped from today's headlines and based on a true story:

If you read the link above, you know that Kane ran away on Tuesday night. Kane is my 11-year-old son. He and his brother Donovan are twins. Briefly, their history is this:

• 2 years of neglect and abuse with their biological mother
• 2 years of foster care with their cranky great-grandmother
• 2 years of foster care with their great-aunt and uncle (my in-laws), with promises that they would be adopted permanently
  
• Almost six years with Melissa and I. They've been adopted and are here permanently.

So, Kane's going through an evil phase where he hates his biological parents, but they're not handy, so he makes do with hating us. He's threatened to run away many times, but last night, he went through with it. Right before a typical Illinois spring thunderstorm hit. To his credit, he did come back. And to be fair, Kane has serious cognitive and emotional delays from the treatment he received as a child.

Now, this semester has been a roller-coaster of grades. At the beginning of the semester, Kane was doing no work and was on track to repeat the 6th grade. When the last report cards came out, he had begun turning in his work and managed to make the Honor Roll. Last week, he came home all excited about the Honor Roll Party, which is to be held this coming Friday night. I told him then that he could go to the party as long as he stayed out of trouble until then.

Fast forward to this week, when he threw stomping, screaming tantrums in public, refused to accept being sent to his bed as punishment, then ran away from home when we persisted, and even after that continued to refuse to go to bed for the night--then went to school the next day and bragged to a teacher that he would "do something" so she wouldn't be seeing him at school the next day.

Tonight he asked me whether he would be allowed to attend the Honor Roll party on Friday. I told him that of course he would not, and that he should have known what the answer to that one would be. He was utterly shocked that I would dare keep him from the party. A whole new tantrum resulted, and I sent him to bed again.

Now, here's the interesting part: I told Melissa about this, and she told me that she'd had a similar experience. Today, she was telling her army of individual education aides the Saga of the Journeys of Kane, and one of her aides (a mother of two, mind you) was also shocked. Kane earned the party before he ran away, she declared, and therefore it cannot be taken away as punishment for other actions.

So what do you think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on young Kane's party?

I'm not going to change my decision, but I was surprised that an adult took that stance. I wonder if any readers will agree that I'm doing the wrong thing here.