Polly

My oldest son who just turned 16 a couple weeks ago moved in with me and my family last summer. He was born when I was young. Since his father has his life together, we decided it was better for him to live with his father. I see him couple time a week until his father got a better job that required a lot of travel. I end up seeing my son once every couple months and stay in touch with him.

Last year, his father got sick and is unable to work any more. So my son moved in with me and my family. Ever since that day, everything has been a chaos.

My three other kids are happy to just stay in house and play video game or watch television and only play in the front yard. My son is just opposite. He cannot stand being home for more than an hour at the most.

He's always running off to nearby forest, river, or downtown. He'd spend hours there. We often tell him to not go in forest by himself or stay in downtown late. He always complains that if anyone goes in the forest with him, they will just slow him down or worry about everything he did. He often takes tools such as rope, flashlight, knife, and other things with him when he goes. He say he usually go cave exploring, rock climbing, and other things.

He also says he hang out at coffee shop or bookstore at late because he doesn't want to be with other high school students and prefer to be around college students.

He also want to do martial arts but he refuse to attend any dojo that my husband's friend recommend. Once he went to one and at sparring, he kicked a black belt in thigh and the black belt has to sit out for the whole class. Then my son says this isn’t the right place. He keep ask to go to one where they train cage fighter but we don’t want him to be around those people. Especially since he have got in a lot of fight just a couple months after he moved here. Almost all of the fights are with men much older and bigger than him.

During weekend, he often will go to farmer market or coffee house and spend hours there socializing with people. We have got on him about this, he keep say that this is a normal thing in other part of world.

He also doesn't really get along with many people unless they are from other countries or they’re interesting to him and able to carry intelligent conversation. In school he’s in advance placement program and get good grade, but he’s very aloof toward pretty much everyone who isn’t foreign students. The teachers reported that he often speaks with other students in foreign languages.

Lately he has been in a nasty mood because we refuse to let him travel the world by himself this summer.

I don’t know what to do any more. Everybody is fed up with him. He just seems to think he can just ignore everybody and do his things. He doesn’t even seem to understand what being grounded mean at all either.