I believed that for fourteen years and it is the most expensive thing I have ever believed.

Three. Ask your child what he wants. Do not treat the answer as a decision.

A fifteen-year-old being excluded will always say do not escalate.

Always.

Invisibility is the last thing he has and an intervention takes it away.

So ask, and listen, and take it seriously, and then understand that you have just consulted a frightened person about a strategy, and that the strategy is still yours.

What I wish somebody had told me in March 2012 is that there was a middle option, and there always is: you do not have to choose between a scene and nothing.