My mother never varied her answer. “Can’t never did anything,” she would say.

I hated that. Yet, no matter how many times I tried it, she never wavered. Eventually, I would have to do what she told me. We both knew I could.

That one fact, that we both knew that she wasn’t asking me to do something impossible is what made this thing between us work. I’m certain that my mother would never demand that I do something I wasn’t able to do. She often asked me to do very difficult things and it seemed to me that I couldn’t, but if I kept trying, I usually got it done.

In 13-year-old boy code, “I can’t,” really means, “I don’t want to try because it’s inconvenient. I have other things I want to do more. Do it yourself, Mom!”

One of my best friends has adult Attention Deficit Disorder. It’s fairly pronounced and he often has a hard time concentrating. Despite these challenges, he went back to school a couple of years ago and is working hard to get a degree.

As a social worker, my specialty is working with developmentally disabled adults. My job is to train them to meet their goals, goals that are often to do things that their families, society, professionals, and research say they can’t do. I operate on the assumption that the only way to know what a client can’t do is to make our best effort at helping him learn how to do it. I am often impressed at how wrong people can be about what is possible.

When dealing with the child protective services system, it’s important to remember my mother’s saying: “Can’t never did anything.”  For your family’s sake, it would be good to remember that success in keeping a family together will require you to do things you don’t think you can do. It will also be important for you to keep a can-do attitude about those things.

Saying “I can’t” is as good as saying, “Take and keep my children.”

Avoid saying, “I can’t.”

Avoid thinking, “I can’t.”  You’ll surprise yourself with the things you find out you can do that you didn’t think you could.

You will need to make the changes they demand and even more than that, make them believe those changes are permanent. You won’t really fool them if you try to pretend you’ve changed. You might fool them for awhile, but they’ll figure it out and you’ll be worse off than before.

It isn’t enough to just do something to please a judge or a social worker. The change you make has to be a real change. You have to truly change.

Don’t say that you should not have to change, that the way you’ve been doing things is just fine. The way you do things may be just fine to you, but the system has different ideas than you, and the system is going to win.

True change begins on the inside. It starts with you understanding that what you’ve been doing is related to how you think and feel. You can’t make a change by just doing something on the outside that you don’t feel on the inside. So, you begin by looking at how you feel on the inside and think about how that comes out in your behavior.

For example, you may want to be a physically healthy person, so you give up soda, cookies, cake, and donuts. You start eating asparagus, broccoli, and brussels sprouts. You don’t really like asparagus, broccoli, or brussels sprouts, but everyone says that healthy people eat them so that’s what you do.

How long can you keep that up? If you don’t learn to like those healthy foods, you’d be lucky to eat them more than a day or two before you go back to your favorite foods that are keeping you unhealthy.

You might say, “But I can’t make myself like something I hate.”

Well, that’s just not true. That kind of defeatist attitude will result in one thing only: defeat.

I grew up hating spinach. I would throw all sorts of tantrums if my mother tried to make me eat it. One day, I saw this recipe for something that used fresh spinach. I decided to give it a try. The spinach bothered me at first, but I kept telling myself to give it a try and to think about what I liked about spinach. I let myself like it. That’s different than making myself like it. See the difference?

Now, I’ll pick spinach over lettuce in salads. I even make a drink in a blender with spinach as one of the main ingredients. I changed on the inside, and it resulted in healthier behavior on the outside.

Think about some of the changes you are being asked to make. Ask yourself how you can let yourself like doing things that way. You may find out that you prefer it.

True change is like that. It’s what the system is hoping to see in you. Is your family worth the effort?

Our definition of “family” is fairly broad, although we affirm that the ideal environment for raising children is a two-parent home with a mother and father. As with anything, you do the best you can with what you have.  We also recognize that some configurations that don’t fit the ideal may, in fact, be working better than those that do.

What is most important is that you take what you have and make it better. You adjust here and there and you do it together.