Laugh or gasp?

Oh, Jacob. Last night he lost control -- destroying things, throwing things, refusing to go to time out, etc. I sent him to his room to change into his pajamas. Shortly thereafter, he came down to tell me he'd climbed out onto the roof. He was ecstatic. What a cool experience! And also very much hoping that this would get my attention.


Well, it was a real dilemma. Should I laugh and think: boys will be boys!

It would be a lot easier, I must admit, if he was MY boy, if I didn't have to answer to an agency and DSS and his mother if he fell off the roof and broke his leg.

I wanted to laugh. I did. I wanted to find joy in his youthful exploration.

But instead I kept thinking about how, when we tell him not to do something because it's not safe, he races off to do it. If the oven is hot, he has to open it. When he is told not to run into the road, he deliberately does so...and on Sunday, even waited until a car was coming and then darted in front of it.

Is he getting a high off risky behavior? Or is he,  as I suspect, looking for anything that will get that gasp of horror?

It seems to me that he has been searching for that since the beginning...at first he could get it from throwing something. Then we got smart and stopped reacting, so he figured out that shredding books got that reaction. Now any sort of destruction gets no gasp from us...but being incredibly physically unsafe does.

So last night, I just sighed and said, "Now I can't trust you to be in your room anymore." I got him into his PJs but made him sleep on the futon downstairs so we could keep an eye on him. Then I nailed his window shut and got him upstairs to bed.

This morning, the first thing he did was to try to open that window. He unlocked it and got one of the two nails out.

I tried not to react to this either.

Unfortunately, he's also figured out that if he destroys his sister's things -- -shredding her art work, for example -- he gets that gasp. So now he's doing that, too. And his mother encouraged him, last week, to shred papers when he felt scared. Since then he's become a destruction machine, ripping and breaking everything he can find, and saying, "I feel mad," as an excuse whenever we ask him why he's doing it.

The situation is getting more and more intolerable. And I am now desperately afraid he will somehow manage to hurt himself -- and it will be my fault. I don't know how much more I can do to keep him safe.