When will my 17 year old junior stop trying to ruin his life?

[Anonymous]

After your update I think therapy is definitely warranted. I know you tried once, but sometimes it takes a few tries to find the right therapist. The neuropsych eval should show impulse control issues, but therapy can help you deal with them. You can’t keep him on lock down permanently, especially since he’s a junior and will graduate in a year. You need a professional to help guide you to some better solutions. I’d start calling for appointments Monday because it can take a while to get on the schedule.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did he make a C in trig or is he addicted to opioids? Does he not smile and say good morning or does he pull a knife when you ask how his history test went?

I can’t tell what you mean by ruin you or what kind of bad decisions you’re talking about.

In between.

Weed, vaping, sex, and the most recent/most egregious...attempting to steal something that he owns (that he doesn’t even care about or keep picked up).

His grades are As and Cs, no in between. I’m exhausted. He has two involved parents, but only makes good choices when he’s on punishment. I’ve become a full time juvenile detention officer. Two steps forward, three steps back every single month.

This sounds so much like my son -- only he's 14, so no weed or sex (yet). But vaping, bad grades, constant parental monitoring. It makes me so sad when I see other kids his age in the neighborhood innocently hanging out; I wish he would make better choices so that he can have more freedoms. We are starting down the mental health assessment / therapy path and trying to move him to private school. Good luck, OP, I hope your son (and mine) are among those who get back on track.

[Anonymous]

really when I read the post, I think of the word "enable". Who bought the expensive sunglasses he leaves around? Who is paying for his phone? Does he work? You monitoring his phone does nothing. He sounds a bit spoiled and that is on you. Ruining your life? You are ruining his life, literally, by not parenting him. Stop hiding in Mexican food joints, and go parent our child. He needs to know you care. Parenting is hard as hell. Now if you say he is a drug addict/dealer, shut the door in his face and do not support a damn thing he is doing, Kick him out of your life, Make him hit rock bottom now and maybe if he is lucky, he will pull himself away from that life style and live.

[Anonymous]

It will stop ruining your life when you realize it is his life.

His decisions are his and the same as many teens turn successful adults.

Truth told, he was never going to a top university. But he will go to a Towson or UMBC... And be fine.

Sex at this age is developmentally normal.... Go buy some condoms. She the moms with tots saying he needs to buy them.

Vaping is stupid and addictive but most of us were smoking cigs which was also addictive and stupid.

Weed / drinking can get a little out of hand so I would continue to punish for this and some low level therapy to ensure things don't spiral out of control.I

Also do something together that you both like... A movie, mexican, something.

[Anonymous]

Que the moms with tots****

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did he make a C in trig or is he addicted to opioids? Does he not smile and say good morning or does he pull a knife when you ask how his history test went?

I can’t tell what you mean by ruin you or what kind of bad decisions you’re talking about.

In between.

Weed, vaping, sex, and the most recent/most egregious...attempting to steal something that he owns (that he doesn’t even care about or keep picked up).

His grades are As and Cs, no in between. I’m exhausted. He has two involved parents, but only makes good choices when he’s on punishment. I’ve become a full time juvenile detention officer. Two steps forward, three steps back every single month.

NP here. This sounds like my brother when he was 16-17. I remember one night being awakened about 1AM by my parents. We had to head to the police station in the middle of the night. My brother had convinced his friends to go with him and they broke into the empty house up the street that was being sold so that they could party in the empty house. The problem was that a patroling police car saw the flashlights and found the kids. We were going to the police station to bail him out. My brother was also not only smoking weed, but he was dealing weed to his friends. I remember the night my father found his stash and flushed a large amount down the toilet.

This kid went on to go to Carnegie Mellon in engineering and got a very lucrative career as a corporate lighting design engineer. He raised two wonderful children and sent them off to four year colleges. One got a job at a firm in Manhatten in a dream job and the other is now in a PhD program. He just celebrated his 60th birthday as a very successful man who spent 38 years working for the same big commercial lighting firm. My parents who thought like OP that they could barely survive his HS years, spent the last 38 years (since he graduated college) being very proud as they watched the milestones go by.

Good luck. I hope your son's path gets better like my brother's did.

What do you think turned it around for him?

Being a white man born at the right time.

[Anonymous]

Twenty-five years ago, this was me. Smoking, drinking, drugs, skipping school. Grades all over the place. High school advisors wrote me off. Luckily, a mentor pursuaded me to apply to colleges and I got into a decent one (provably due to my very high test scores). I saw this as an opportunity to start fresh. Did great in some classes and failed others. Continued recreational drug use. Graduated and after a few years, got into a middling MBA program (again, test scores). Something clicked in business school and I became a motivated go-getter. Did very well in competitive internships, landed a great post-grad position, and have been working my way up ever since. I have achieved what many people would describe as a very successful career and home life. Looking back, the only thing my parents could have done to help me would have been to let me know how much they loved and cared about and worried about me and reinforced to me how special and important I was, even if they didn't approve of my actions. Even better, I think if they had had gotten me treatment from an early age, I would not have had the self-loathing that can stem from undiagnosed mental illness. Eventually, I found ways to capitalize on my weaknesses, like directing my obsessive tunnel vision from ADHD to work projects and managing my anxiety by allowing my perfectionist tendencies and adrenaline rushes to manifest as extreme dedication to work. Eventually I sought out therapy and began using medication to manage my mental health and I am still a work in progress. My experiences may not mirror your son's but I wanted to let you know that there is hope for him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did he make a C in trig or is he addicted to opioids? Does he not smile and say good morning or does he pull a knife when you ask how his history test went?

I can’t tell what you mean by ruin you or what kind of bad decisions you’re talking about.

In between.

Weed, vaping, sex, and the most recent/most egregious...attempting to steal something that he owns (that he doesn’t even care about or keep picked up).

His grades are As and Cs, no in between. I’m exhausted. He has two involved parents, but only makes good choices when he’s on punishment. I’ve become a full time juvenile detention officer. Two steps forward, three steps back every single month.

NP here. This sounds like my brother when he was 16-17. I remember one night being awakened about 1AM by my parents. We had to head to the police station in the middle of the night. My brother had convinced his friends to go with him and they broke into the empty house up the street that was being sold so that they could party in the empty house. The problem was that a patroling police car saw the flashlights and found the kids. We were going to the police station to bail him out. My brother was also not only smoking weed, but he was dealing weed to his friends. I remember the night my father found his stash and flushed a large amount down the toilet.

This kid went on to go to Carnegie Mellon in engineering and got a very lucrative career as a corporate lighting design engineer. He raised two wonderful children and sent them off to four year colleges. One got a job at a firm in Manhatten in a dream job and the other is now in a PhD program. He just celebrated his 60th birthday as a very successful man who spent 38 years working for the same big commercial lighting firm. My parents who thought like OP that they could barely survive his HS years, spent the last 38 years (since he graduated college) being very proud as they watched the milestones go by.

Good luck. I hope your son's path gets better like my brother's did.

NP - That's great but it seems like so many guys were like that in the 80s (& 70s for your brother) and are all-good now. I remember my DH & friends partying like rock stars every weekend, drinking (lots), weed etc (I met him at 16). They are all successful now (lawyers, business owners etc.) and we marvel at our teens who are the opposite - don't drink, smoke and some are head positions at school. It just seems so different, the world is a lot more serious now! I would be alarmed if my teen boys were going out partying like that (yes I really know they aren't before anyone questions) and yet I know that's what our generation did. However, it does show that OP's son is probably not ruining his life, but it will be a hard period to get through.
I remember DH's and his friend's parents weren't really involved that much, i.e. didn't tell us what to do. It seems weird now looking back, but that's just the way it was.
Good luck OP, sorry you are going through this.

[Anonymous]

Punishing a 17 yo for all but the most egregious offenses — is not going to work. He is almost an adult. He needs to experience life consequences not Mom and Dad consequences.

[Anonymous]

One of the most beneficial pieces of advice that I got from one of my sons therapists is that I should never work harder than him to get him where he wants to be in life or on any of his problems. We give our son the tools and he chooses whether to use them. And the consequences of his actions - good or bad- are all on him.

One thing to remember when you have a 17 year old is that at 18 you can’t force any sort of treatment. And at 18 the consequences of bad behavior are so much more serious. So anything more you want to try should be now.

[Anonymous]

Sounds normal. Don’t put too much weight into it. He will outgrow it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did he make a C in trig or is he addicted to opioids? Does he not smile and say good morning or does he pull a knife when you ask how his history test went?

I can’t tell what you mean by ruin you or what kind of bad decisions you’re talking about.

In between.

Weed, vaping, sex, and the most recent/most egregious...attempting to steal something that he owns (that he doesn’t even care about or keep picked up).

His grades are As and Cs, no in between. I’m exhausted. He has two involved parents, but only makes good choices when he’s on punishment. I’ve become a full time juvenile detention officer. Two steps forward, three steps back every single month.

NP here. This sounds like my brother when he was 16-17. I remember one night being awakened about 1AM by my parents. We had to head to the police station in the middle of the night. My brother had convinced his friends to go with him and they broke into the empty house up the street that was being sold so that they could party in the empty house. The problem was that a patroling police car saw the flashlights and found the kids. We were going to the police station to bail him out. My brother was also not only smoking weed, but he was dealing weed to his friends. I remember the night my father found his stash and flushed a large amount down the toilet.

This kid went on to go to Carnegie Mellon in engineering and got a very lucrative career as a corporate lighting design engineer. He raised two wonderful children and sent them off to four year colleges. One got a job at a firm in Manhatten in a dream job and the other is now in a PhD program. He just celebrated his 60th birthday as a very successful man who spent 38 years working for the same big commercial lighting firm. My parents who thought like OP that they could barely survive his HS years, spent the last 38 years (since he graduated college) being very proud as they watched the milestones go by.

Good luck. I hope your son's path gets better like my brother's did.

What do you think turned it around for him?

Being a white man born at the right time.

We're Asian and grew up in Pittsburgh (which was a lot more like the midwest than like the East Coast), so a conservative town. We were definitely "not white" and there were plenty of small signs that we were not always regarded as white. We clearly did not have white privilege back in the 1970's when this happened.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
NP here. This sounds like my brother when he was 16-17. I remember one night being awakened about 1AM by my parents. We had to head to the police station in the middle of the night. My brother had convinced his friends to go with him and they broke into the empty house up the street that was being sold so that they could party in the empty house. The problem was that a patroling police car saw the flashlights and found the kids. We were going to the police station to bail him out. My brother was also not only smoking weed, but he was dealing weed to his friends. I remember the night my father found his stash and flushed a large amount down the toilet.

This kid went on to go to Carnegie Mellon in engineering and got a very lucrative career as a corporate lighting design engineer. He raised two wonderful children and sent them off to four year colleges. One got a job at a firm in Manhatten in a dream job and the other is now in a PhD program. He just celebrated his 60th birthday as a very successful man who spent 38 years working for the same big commercial lighting firm. My parents who thought like OP that they could barely survive his HS years, spent the last 38 years (since he graduated college) being very proud as they watched the milestones go by.

Good luck. I hope your son's path gets better like my brother's did.

What do you think turned it around for him?

I'm the PP with the brother. He also had some problems in college that involved stealing. He was lucky that the family that he stole from was nice and when my dad paid them back, they let the matter drop, so there was no record about it.

What really turned things around for him was graduating college and getting a job. It was pretty clear from the time he started working in the real world that the background check the company did on him, and the rules that were in place for engineers at that firm were serious. He liked the job, it paid great money and there were signs that they had no problems eliminating any problems from the workforce and moving on to other less-problematic engineers. So he cleaned up his act pretty quickly working for that company and never really looked back.

So, essentially, it was when there were external and serious consequences that he wanted to avoid. Before that, the only consequences were from my parents and he didn't take those consequences seriously. It's possible that had the trespassing case gone to court and a juvenile court sentenced him, he might have taken that a little more seriously, but I doubt it. He was always the type to think that as long as it didn't go onto your adult record, it wasn't a problem.

[Anonymous]

The '70s and '80s were a very, very different time. We also had smoking lounges in school and got used to a few kids getting killed in drunk driving accidents every year. Employers didn't check Facebook and Instagram; colleges didn't cost two middle-class salaries. There were decent-paying alternatives to college for those who wanted to work for awhile or even skip college altogether. "Boys will be boys" was the typical reaction to most unsavory activities. Etc. etc.

I get where some of you are coming from, and I too would urge OP not to hover, but it's a different world with different consequences now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Did he make a C in trig or is he addicted to opioids? Does he not smile and say good morning or does he pull a knife when you ask how his history test went?

I can’t tell what you mean by ruin you or what kind of bad decisions you’re talking about.

In between.

Weed, vaping, sex, and the most recent/most egregious...attempting to steal something that he owns (that he doesn’t even care about or keep picked up).

His grades are As and Cs, no in between. I’m exhausted. He has two involved parents, but only makes good choices when he’s on punishment. I’ve become a full time juvenile detention officer. Two steps forward, three steps back every single month.

NP here. This sounds like my brother when he was 16-17. I remember one night being awakened about 1AM by my parents. We had to head to the police station in the middle of the night. My brother had convinced his friends to go with him and they broke into the empty house up the street that was being sold so that they could party in the empty house. The problem was that a patroling police car saw the flashlights and found the kids. We were going to the police station to bail him out. My brother was also not only smoking weed, but he was dealing weed to his friends. I remember the night my father found his stash and flushed a large amount down the toilet.

This kid went on to go to Carnegie Mellon in engineering and got a very lucrative career as a corporate lighting design engineer. He raised two wonderful children and sent them off to four year colleges. One got a job at a firm in Manhatten in a dream job and the other is now in a PhD program. He just celebrated his 60th birthday as a very successful man who spent 38 years working for the same big commercial lighting firm. My parents who thought like OP that they could barely survive his HS years, spent the last 38 years (since he graduated college) being very proud as they watched the milestones go by.

Good luck. I hope your son's path gets better like my brother's did.

NP - That's great but it seems like so many guys were like that in the 80s (& 70s for your brother) and are all-good now. I remember my DH & friends partying like rock stars every weekend, drinking (lots), weed etc (I met him at 16). They are all successful now (lawyers, business owners etc.) and we marvel at our teens who are the opposite - don't drink, smoke and some are head positions at school. It just seems so different, the world is a lot more serious now! I would be alarmed if my teen boys were going out partying like that (yes I really know they aren't before anyone questions) and yet I know that's what our generation did. However, it does show that OP's son is probably not ruining his life, but it will be a hard period to get through.
I remember DH's and his friend's parents weren't really involved that much, i.e. didn't tell us what to do. It seems weird now looking back, but that's just the way it was.
Good luck OP, sorry you are going through this.

Same situation here with my husband and me, although it was the mid-late 90s. My brother and cousins, too. Sex, drugs, cigarettes, partying. Somehow no criminal records and I was at least vigilant about being on the Pill and not getting pregnant. My parents tried everything to get us to straighten out, and eventually we just outgrew it (before college, thankfully). I don't think any of us could get a security clearance, but that's never been an issue. We all have very good, lucrative jobs, own houses, have kids of our own, etc nowadays.