The Trouble With Evan
I walk into class at 9am only to find that we are going to be watching a movie in class. At first I wasn't sure how I felt about this. After a few moments of thinking I came to the conclusion that a movie was definitely a good thing, for one reason only, I would be able to take a 2 hour nap. As the teacher was giving us an outline of the movie I was fluffing my winter jacket to make the perfect pillow. Unfortunately for me, the movie wasn't the type that one could sleep through. Let's just say that I spent the following 2 hours with tears streaming down my face. The movie was a documentary by the Fifth Estate made in 1994 'The Trouble with Evan'. Evan was an 11 year old boy who lived with his mother, stepfather, and 6year old sister, Kimberly.. He was caught stealing, lying, bullying his peers and even putting paint in his teacher's coffee. His parents wanted to know why he was acting up like this so they allowed the Fifth Estate to put camera's in their home and observe them in their daily lives. What the video captured was shocking, absolutely horrifying. His parents didn't know how to deal with Evan's behaviour so they resorted to screaming and threatening. If something was missing or broken they would sit Evan down and scream at him for at least an hour before they even knew forsure Evan was responsible for it. One morning his mother counted all the change she kept in a jar on the counter. That evening when she came home she recounted and noticed a dime was missing. She called Evan down into the kitchen and her and her husband screamed at him for over and hour. Evan claimed to have not taken any money, they just kept on calling him a liar. It turns out the mother miscounted the change in the jar and there was no money missing. She did apologize to Evan for her mistake. The next day she accused him of stealing her key to her bedroom. Evan again denied it and again another hour long lecture. Later in the evening his mother found her key. "It dropped from the sky," she said. Evan was continually verbally and physically abused by his parents. The house was complete and utter chaos. I can't even begin to explain how awful it was. I wanted to jump out of my seat and strangle Evan's parents. It's no wonder Evan acts the way he does! Are they blind? His parents decided to take a parenting course. The course offered many strategies on how to deal with a difficult child. They decided to give some a try. These strategies worked for a few weeks. Evan's behaviour seemed to be getting better. His parents were learning how to deal with him efficiently! After a few weeks Evan was caught stealing a pack of cigarettes from his stepdad. His stepdad couldn't take anymore. He completely blew up. His parents sat him down in the kitchen and told him that they decided he was no longer a part of the family, they were through dealing with him. He was allowed to live in their home but they would have nothing to do with him. He could go to school if he wanted to, but he didn't have to. He was allowed to eat, but he had to make his own food and was no longer to eat with everyone else. He was not allowed to go on vacation with them. The front door was locked at 9 and if he wasn't home by then he would have to find somewhere else to stay for the night. The list goes on. At one point his mother was so stressed out she left the kids with their step father and drove to Mexico and stayed there for a few months. During this time his stepfather went to court and received full custody of the children. When their mother came back she wanted to leave her husband but now that he had full custody of her children she felt she was forced to stay with him. She became to depressed she drove her van into a bridge hoping to die. Fortunately she did live through the accident. Now of course all of these problems in the family MUST be Evan's fault. As the movie went on we discovered that Evan's stepdad was abused as a young boy so it was the only way he knew how to raise a child. He began to cry as he talked about is childhood. I could not help but feel sorry for him. If only he could realize all the pain he is feeling because of his father, he is passing down to Evan. Once the movie was aired on television Evan and his sister were immediately removed from the home and placed into foster care.
Evan was only 11. As Evan grows up and has children of his own he is likely to raise them the same way he was raised. Now that you know his story, you'd feel sorry for him right? At what point in the child's life is it when people stop feeling compassion for them? When they turn 15? 20? 40? When he 35 and is abusing his children, no one feels sorry for him then. After thinking about this I came to the conclusion that I don't want to strangle Evan's parents. I feel sorry for them if anything.
When I decided to become a CYW I don't think I knew exactly what I was going to be getting into. I knew I was going to be working with abused children. It is one thing to hear that a child has been abused and a totally different thing to actually see the child being abused. The look on Evan's face broke my heart. He had become to accustomed to the abuse he had no emotion on his face. He just sat back and took the abuse, when his parents were finished with him he would just go up to his room and go to bed. He seemed so lifeless. He became severely depressed, which is what caused his bad behaviour.
AHH I just want these next few years to pass so I can get out there and just give all of the Evan's a giant hug.
Evan was only 11. As Evan grows up and has children of his own he is likely to raise them the same way he was raised. Now that you know his story, you'd feel sorry for him right? At what point in the child's life is it when people stop feeling compassion for them? When they turn 15? 20? 40? When he 35 and is abusing his children, no one feels sorry for him then. After thinking about this I came to the conclusion that I don't want to strangle Evan's parents. I feel sorry for them if anything.
When I decided to become a CYW I don't think I knew exactly what I was going to be getting into. I knew I was going to be working with abused children. It is one thing to hear that a child has been abused and a totally different thing to actually see the child being abused. The look on Evan's face broke my heart. He had become to accustomed to the abuse he had no emotion on his face. He just sat back and took the abuse, when his parents were finished with him he would just go up to his room and go to bed. He seemed so lifeless. He became severely depressed, which is what caused his bad behaviour.
AHH I just want these next few years to pass so I can get out there and just give all of the Evan's a giant hug.
posted by naomi at
11:16 PM
19 Comments:
I'm proud of you
if u would like to what evan has been up to email me @ John_ass@hotmail.com he a very good friend of mine
ya, a heartbreaking story for sure. so hard to deal with where responsibilty lies when we live in a world of victims of victims and abusers who come from abusers. is there a time where we actually decide, given our life experiences, when we feel we have the choice to transcend that and live in something we've never known? i'm not sure, but if not we're all in alot of trouble. thanks for the thoughtful post.
hey, i know you don't know me...i'm izzy, a highschool student in minnesota. and i've been doing some research on that movie and my teacher and i have been trying to see what evan's up to and a follow up on his story. if you know where i can find any information, please email me at zlamb92506@hotmail.com. thanks so much!
Hey i'd just like to correct you on one huge assumption your making, that evan will mistreat his kids, i know evan and infact he is now 26 years old, married happily, and has two children, both of which he loves and adores.
I just saw the movie myself in my Monday night class. I was furious! There were a few people in the class that thought it was Evan's fault that he acted the way he did and said things like "I'd treat him the same way they did if he caused all that trouble!" They don't realize that Evan's actions were the result of his parent's parenting. I've searched for hours to find anything regarding what he's doing now. My first thought was, I would love to become a foster parent and give these kids some love and attention they so severly deserve! It was the saddest thing I've ever seen. I just want to make sure he's doing okay now and he's happy. I pray to God that he can get past his childhood! And, I hope those parents have someone getting in their face everyday of their lives!
I myself have seen this film, and although I agree with some of your statements made. However, there are far too many exaggerations in your story, you are writing from a biased prespective, and just making it seem as if poor Evan is being victimized. However, you cannot blaim this entire situation on the parents.
Often when kids have 'mental illness', it's due to child abuse. As an adult, I have had updates from fellow school children who were 'behavioural' and 'special ed' in my school, and almost all were abused in some way. They violate others rights because they themselves were violated. They have problems with authority figures, such as bosses and cops (or fear them) because they were abused by authority figures (called 'archetypes').
Evan is very lucky that they cameras figured it all out, because these are the type of parents that get their kid labelled 'mentally ill' or 'behavioural', when they themselves are the problem.
The whole stepfather thing is of concern too. Their child abuse stats are way higher than biological fathers are. In nature, the stepfather rats eat the mother's previous babies.
Does anyone have any updates on Evan? Thank you.
To "Smartass", I strongly disagree with what you're saying. I have grown up with ADHD and I know what it's like to get into a lot of trouble. I caused my parents GRIEF!! But even still, they never talked to me or treated me like Evan's parents did. I can understand where they would be frustrated and angry with him, but do you honestly think that acting that way is going to help the situation? He was eleven years old and no matter what a child does, there is absolutely no reason to be that abusive. There was obviously something going on with him and all they did was put him down and make him feel like shit. They disowned him from their family, they wrongfully accused him of doing things before finding out the truth, Mike was constantly saying that he was going to kill him, and the list goes on and on. I don't care how much grief a child puts their parents through, of course it makes things harder but there is absolutely no justice in treating your 11 year old child like that. It causes a great amount of mental damage and it sticks with them for life. His parents should have been parents and shown him love and actually taken the time to sit down with him and talk to him, ask what's wrong, ask how his day went. Yelling and screaming and constanty putting him down is not the way to fix anything.
I have had a hard time with my family as well, but with all the chaos and grief that we have gone through, I know in the end that my parents love me and would reach up and give me the stars if they could. All Evan needed was to be shown that he is loved and given encouragement. If you watch the video, you can see Evan sitting in the corner when he gets yelled at. He sits there and says all that he needs to say, he has no emotion on his face and the way his parents are screaming at him doesn't even phase him anymore. That's horrible and it disgusts me to see a child that empty inside that he doesn't even react to something as intense as what his parents were putting him through.
You might want to rethink a few things there buddy and take a closer look at the picture.
If a CYW is what you are planning to be, then you need to learn to be more objective. You are following your own assumptions and they can take you down the wrong path. NEVER. ASSUME. ANYTHING.
Because you saw a video on a tiny fraction of this boy's life (which I have seen as well) gives you no right to assume he will beat his children. Were you even watching the scenes where they filmed at Portage?
You infuriate me.
I am almost finished my schooling to become a CYW and I must say that this blog is actually quite lacking in intellect. The point of the video from our perspective is to apply what we've learned to their situation. There are so many perspectives you have left out and you are acting upon your emotions. To be honest, in this field you have to put your emotions aside to be able to handle a situation to the best of your ability, in your case if you continue to act at the low level of fusion, you're going to be burned out in less than a year. You have not looked at the possibility of Evan being smarter than his parents, that Karen's parents marriage did not last that she was alienated from her father, Mike is abusive, an alcoholic. The boundaries in this family are closed an inflexible, closer to entropic than anything else which gives no opportunity for the homeostatic balance of the family to enter into a positive feedback loop. Look at the subsystems. The couple formation is the most important developmental stage of the 8 and clearly it was not done properly, which leads into issues in other stages and looping back to the second stage. You also did not take into account Evan reaching out to his parents; making the dinner for them and asking Mike if he could watch the game with him [which Mike did not accept]. Evan also stated at the beginning of the movie that negative attention is better than no attention. During the period of time that parenting skills were put into practice from the classes, they did not take into account the possibility of there being more bumps in the road with Evan, they seem to have assumed that it had been working so far so why would that stop. The hierarchy is distributed between Evan and his parents which is then fought for between Mike and Karen. Not to mention there's a lot of transgenerational themes present with the parents. The parents have low level of Differentiation of Self which is then passed down to their children, and they target a specific child.
In general, put what you learned into practice or question aspects about the movie in your blog. Don't be biased. If you're going to have this type of outlook on children, youth and adolescents, you're going to be walked all over and torn down very quickly. Man up, study your crap and learn from your mistakes. That's the only way you'll succeed in this field.
does anyone have any idea where i can get this movie?????????
Listen to Dream Theater's song entitled Space Dye Vest. You will hear Evan there.
the part where the mother makes the kid stand on a chair while she apologizes is especially creepy. The kid understandably finds it awkward and doesn't want to do it but she forces him to, which means even in her 'apology' she was abusing him...
I agree with you @anonymous. No one can assume from a movie where a kid is 11 that he will grow up to abuse his own kids. My mother was abusive to me and I have a nine year old daughter that I love and cherish....and don't abuse either physically, emotionally, or mentally.
A lot of people from abuse do not go on to treat their children badly.
To the annoymous that started of as "I am almost finished my schooling to become a CYW and I must say that this blog is actually quite lacking in intellect ..." PLEASE.SHUT.THE.FUCK.UP -- THIS is a BLOG, not a senior level essay. She is offering her insight and her personal opinion. You just need to be compassionate human being with good articulation, not a Psych.D.
I want to slap Evans dad like he slapped Evan.
SmartAss. I don't think there was any exaggeration. And why would we blame Evan. And YES,HE WAS A VICTIM. We know that it was child abuse in Evan's case. And it became a trauma to him. He grew up with ACE - Adverse Childhood Experiences. The mother's mental illness and both the parents' physical, emotion, and mental abuse made him vulnerable as a child. Evan was a sad character who was blamed for everything he did. The negative and extremely bad parenting shaped him the way he was. I always believe children want to be good and loved, if they have a choice.
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