Parenting Pointers: I Hate School But I Love School (Kids in Abusive Homes)

By Steve Simpson

I’m always stressed about what grade I’m going to get on my next test. There always seems to be a hassle with at least one teacher. There is constantly drama with some other student and half of the time I don’t even know why. I’m tired when I wake up in the morning and I dread going. I can’t stand half the kids and don’t even like the building. The only thing worse than going to school and dealing with all of this is not going to school and dealing with the abuse and drama in my house! I never look forward to holidays and the summer is like one big holiday. More time home, more time with my abusive parent, more chances of at least getting verbally abused if not worse. And for some reason my non-abusive co-dependent parent thinks its okay to tell me about all the problems and worries, not to mention the horrible things that might happen to us. I wish I could just go into suspended animation for the summer until the new school year starts or just plain get off of this world.

These are some of the thoughts that many young people who live in abusive or dysfunctional homes think this time of year. I was one of those abused children and these were my thoughts exactly with the love/hate relation of school. The end result almost equivocally ends with thoughts of suicide or running away, to which I tried both. This is why I have spent my adult life speaking and writing books on these topics. Even students who seem fine in school can return after the summer a different person, ready to give up after a long summer in an abusive or dysfunctional home.

Author Steve Simpson covers these and similar topics such as suicide, child abuse, being a child of an alcoholic, self-esteem, bullying and surviving the holidays in a dysfunctional home in The Teenage and Young Adult Survival Handbook which is found in all of Steve’s novels Who Am I?, The World is Wrong, Runaway and Child’s Island.