The main impediment to any change in his behaviour was how to overcome umpteen generations of cultural conditioning that reinforced his own opinion that this behaviour was acceptable in a new and changed environment.
Neither was it my wish nor intent to simply brutalise him into a change that he neither accepted or understood....a process that I am quite capable of, but recognised it would be a real cruelty.
The actual impediment was his Mother !!!! The boy himself, with a lot of influence around him from 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation Chinese "Aussies" - his mates, was trying very hard to come to grips with this new reality. But Mother, being older, more imprinted with the "old" culture could not let go. She , in fact was rigidly hanging on to the old " Chinese" methods of managing a son, the Little Emperor method.
So it was more for the purpose of separating him from the daily, minute by minute incolvement of his Mother that I processed the ultimatum to manage his independance away from her.
You might argue that this was not my right...she can no more understand the innapropriate nature of her methodology , than I can accept it !! But something had to give....and on balance I truly believed that his best chance to survive and thrive in this new environment was to have a level of independance of thought and action that was generated outside of his Mother's influence and yet did not separate him entirely from his family/cultural and support network background...ie he always has a back-stop.
Only time will tell what was right or wrong, but to continue along the same path would have destroyed 3 lives.....this way may be only one or two
