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

Forum Index » Tweens and Teens

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
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.[/quote]

What do you think turned it around for him?[/quote]

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.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics