IADad said:
I don't know what the new-fangled terms are, but it sounds we're talking about what used to be simply "Deliquency." Why do kids become delinquent? Despite their parents best thoughts, it's not the crowd they hang out with (at least that's not the root). It's often because they don't feel a part of a "Community." Whether that community is the local community, family community, church community, whatever. Kids who float along, doing as they please often don't mean to hurt anyone, but they also don't realize the impact they have on others, what they gain from others, and their responsibilities to a working community. That's a big thing that juvenile homes teach these days, "You are important to your community." "You should be able to count on it, and it's depending on you." It's a really simple concept, but one that's hard to teach if it's been lost.
I'm thinking if this were my child. I'd bring home the papers for emancipation, and give him a choice. If he wants to go, here are the papers, here's $100 and here's the door, I hope you can figure it out...OR If you want to build something of a life for yourself, let's stop wasting time. I'll work tirelessly for you. I'll invest myself in your success, but only if you do. If he buys into the concept then you sit down and work out an agreement, what's the plan, what are the steps, what gets done every day and what are the consequences if they don't. Where are those steps leading and how do we monitor success. What happens if success isn't achieved on schedule. Neither you nor your girlfriend can be the ones responsible for his actions, you can be responsible for living up to your end of an agreement, but only if he does his.
I guess I want my kids to know, not just feel, that I'm their biggest fan and I care as much about their success as they do. I can't care more than they do.
So here is an update.
IADad, this is almost the exact approach we took. We sat him down and told him that we were willing to help him, but he had to do the work himself.
He blamed his failures in school on ADD and his PTSD / anxiety. We offered to take him to a medical professional to work through it. He refused and said that marijuana helped him more than any of the other meds could, and that we were too closed minded to see that marijuana wasn't a drug and that it would be soon legalized.
Christmas of 2013, we got him an Amazon gift card, and he bought himself a PS4. We later found out he sold it to a friend for less than he bought it for for some quick cash. After he turned 18, he stopped going to school and started going missing through the nights. We told him he should at least get a job and start working so he could have some money to save up for a car or his own place since he couldn't respect the house rules. (We offered to contribute half for rent) His mother even sat down with him and filled out several job applications for him. He got hired at one place, but he quit after the first day. We started noticing personal belongings missing, both mine, my girlfriend's, and his younger 12 yr old brother's. We noticed he started selling off his prior Christmas gifts (guitar, amp, etc). When asked about his job search, he said started saying he wasn't going to work for minimum wage, and that he wasn't interested in any of the jobs available. We repeatedly asked him what was going on, and he denied knowing anything about the missing items.
He was now 18 and he still didn't have his driver's license. We had offered to take him to driver's ed and to go to the DMV to get his learner's permit the year before, but he either could not get up for the appointment or he would be missing.
Last February of 2014, his grandmother started talking to him and told him she could help him by offering him some work. She promised him some outrageous things (getting him a job that would pay him 40k a year, getting him a car, a house, etc). Much to my girlfriend's and my disapproval, he left home to go live with his grandmother. He was back by June of that year. We made it clear what the house rules would be (no drugs, no staying out and coming in at all hours of the night), and he said he didn't want to stay with us.
We laid out some terms for him and told him that we would pay for him to stay in a hotel, but he needed to go actively look for a job and start looking for his own place to live. He spent two months making excuses on why he couldn't find a job while my girlfriend made every attempt to take him to stores to find applications. After two months, he got kicked out of the hotel for smoking pot. He didn't want to move in with us at this point because of our house rules, so he found a friend to move in with. Two months later, we find that his friend's brother is a convicted sex offender (against children).
He came to us and said he couldn't live there anymore. He wanted to come home. So again, we laid out the rules and he agreed to every single one of them . No drugs in the house, no smoking in the house, no wandering in and out at all hours of the night.
The first night he was back, the fire department came because the smoke detector went off.
The first weekend we left for the 12 yr old's hockey tournament, we come home and find burnt up joints, roaches, and the smell of cigarettes in our finished basement.
Furious, we asked him to leave. He claimed that he had nowhere else to go and said we were condemning him to a drug house. So we set rules again. He was not to be left alone in the house. When we left, he got put up in a hotel and the house was locked up. During this time, we also set goals for him to achieve. He needed to find a job. He was interested in vaping, and he wanted to start his own e-juice business. We told him we would help him where we could, but he had to do the work himself. This went on for about 2 months. Rules were continuously broken during this time period - we kept finding drug paraphernalia in the house.
We took a family vacation in January, but he refused to come. So we put him up in another hotel. When we got back, the cops were called on him, and he was kicked out for marijuana again. We now now have two young kids (1, and 7 months), and we couldn't subject them to finding drug paraphernalia. We finally decided that this was the last straw, and we told him that he either had to get help or he couldn't stay in the house any longer. Help would be in the form of a mental evaluation or rehab center, and drug testing. He argued that drug testing was against his right, and he lose respect for us if we did that. So he left.
He was staying with a friend up until two nights ago as that family turned their back on him as well. Since staying, he started a fire in his friend's bedroom, had the cops raid their house because the neighbors saw him with a non-lethal weapon (which is illegal here). His friend says that they don't feel that they are helping him because he still doesn't have a job after 3 months of doing nothing.
The night before he had to leave his friend's house, my girlfriend gets a call saying that he was severely beat up at a gas station. When she drove over to see him to take him to the hospital, the only sign of a physical altercation was blood on his lip, but he was bug eyed like he was high on something. He was lucid enough to yell obscenities at his mother and said he didn't want her taking him to the ER. His friends took him and sped off with my girlfriend following. They ran red lights like they were trying to get away from her. She got worried and called the cops. After the cops questioned everyone, and after the visit to the hospital, it almost seemed like it was all an act. The ER said he had no indications he had been in a physical altercation, and they let him go. We feel that it was an act to try to gain pity to let him back in the house.
The last we've heard, he called from a McDonald's to be picked up. My girlfriend drove to get him, but he wasn't there. So my girlfriend is worried sick about him. He supposedly doesn't have his phone because it was stolen in the fight (we gave him his younger brother's Android phone because he had destroyed 3 phones before this within 6 months). I'm exhausted talking about the situation with her because it seems like an endless pattern. She's beating herself up over it thinking she could have handled things differently. This child has not wanted to help himself since the beginning - he wants everything done from him. A month ago, he had called his mother and basically yelled at her for not giving him 80k to start his own vape business, and that she should do whatever it took to support him. I'm at a total loss. So we don't know where he is right now. I don't even know what we would do if we found out where he was staying.
I get the comments about bad parenting because from the outside looking in, that's what I would surmise as well in the past. But I can say that we've explored all options, and I am almost inclined to believe that our 19 yr old has a severe addiction and / or mental illness that has been untreated.
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