Help needed regarding 20 yr old son

Parent Cafe
41

mokenny – hugs – I am going through the same thing with fiancé’s daughter. She’s at home, graduated from college, but is not working and is depressed. Easy to say “kick her out” but where would she go? Plus I don’t know if your son could get an apartment on his own with no income.

I second the suggestion for family therapy. I found “LEAP” (Launching Emerging Adults Program):
http://www.anxietytreatmentnyc.org/specialized-programs.cfm

We have not signed up yet but maybe as a medical professional you could speak to one of the organizers and get a sense of what it includes and see if there’s something like that in your area.

When DD was severely depressed and withdrew from school, the only thing that worked was to scale it back. She withdrew from classes on the condition that she see a therapist once a week and take her medication. She did some baby sitting which got her out of her apartment. She went to the gym. Fast forward a year, she was working full time and finishing up her college credits. I had almost given up.

Good luck.

42

He sounds similar in many ways to my son, who is now 23 and is much different now. We had him tested at 16 and the diagnosis came back ADHD-NOS. He had to drop out of 2 classes his first semester, and ended up with a 1.0 that first semester. He begged us to let him stay. He’s caused all sorts of trouble from minor to major overvhis college years. He could have readily been your son…kicked out and only doing half-a$$ in school because they really hate studying. Major executive functioning issues with these kids, and nothing was his fault.

First, you are doing the right thing with the psychiatrist. You need to see a psychologist on your own. I did that, and it was the best money. Your son doesn’t need to know. They will help you and give you skills to use, offer you a different way to deal with him and look at things. I found it invaluable.

We have always been supportive, but firm. As far as breaking curfew, we did this once when he was 19 and home on Xmas break. Throughout H.S., he was sneaking out of the house, so we knew about this. You would think it would have stopped in college. One night about 2:00, DH woke me up and said DS is not in the house. We looked and looked and found he had cranked a window in the laundry room, taken off the screen, etc. left the damn thing open in the winter. DH closed and locked it and we went back to bed. In 30 minutes we got a text with him apologizing all over himself, saying he was just next door and would just spend the night there.

The next day we received a huge email sent to both of us apologizing, begging us to let him go back to school, on and on. DH letbit sit for a day. He responded to him and copied me. All it said was that if he ever does that again, his bags will be waiting for him outside the window. We never discussed it and I truly don’t think he’s done it again. Why? Because he knew we would, as we don’t threaten.

So…to make a short story long…the next time he breaks curfew, bar the door. Let him figure out where to spend that night, even if it’s sleeping in the car in the garage. Tell him the next time he breaks curfew, his bags will be waiting for him. But, you must be prepared to do that. I think we need to shock them from time to time.

He’s been in trouble “with the law”, grades up and down, given us more grey hairs. But these kids age much slower and differently than most, so raising them can be extremely difficult and not how one would raise a “normal” child.

Don’t give up, don’t lose hope. But you must use a strong arm every so often. DS is graduating this week, only one more semester and 2 summers he had to go. He has had an internship and worked 20 hours a week this past semester as he’s finished up. He’s much more adult in his actions and conversation, and I’m proud of him. He’s still behind in how he thinks about things and he still can be sluggish and unmotivated, but he’s progressed so much. He is a different person then 4 years ago…delightful at times and even acts like he likes us again! Imagine that!?

Good luck. I do think something else is going on with him. You are on the right track. Don’t give up!
Oh…and since you threatened him about not paying for school, stick with that. He’s really not interested in studying, he’s just floundering and doesn’t know what else to do. I would tell him it’s time to get a job FT and you’ll revisit school in a year.

43

We have a dear nephew who has had more than his share of issues. He has some ADHD and some drug dependence issues. His mom was an alcoholic and passed away. His dad does his best but is challenged. He has spent some time in jail but fortunately was able to get into a good program after being released and is working two part-time jobs, trying to get his life back on track. He now knows he messed up and this is truly his last chance. It is really tough but counseling for you and your spouse as well as for your S sounds important. Hang in there–it will take some time.

44

Kids are different. Our son was overwhelmed by college and didn’t last a year. When he came home we took it very slow, only one class at CC, and then 2, and gradually took it back to a full load. At community college we would still monitor his performance and still help as needed. This process went very very slowly, and we barely noticed that he actually became a better student over time. He moved with us to NC and continued at community college, and then transferred to 4 year state university and eventually got his 4 yr degree. He did all his work on his own with no parental support. It just took a very long time. Now he has held a job for 2 years. Honestly I had my doubts if he was capable of doing this (maybe my expectations are too low), but he is incredibly diligent and punctual, got stuck in traffic and was late maybe once in 2 years. My point(s) are all kids are different even if there may be similarities, and sometimes it takes time.

45

OP, there are a lot of paths forward besides “demanding he take a full load at community college while also contributing some at home” and “kicked out on the street.”

I feel like a lot of the responses got pretty harsh.

46

Just saying, not every or any counselor is the right match. Don’t be afraid to switch, if needed. What helped D2 was finding a psychiatrist who specializes in late high school and college, knows this group, the defenses, the masks, and the blind spots, but is gentle and supportive.

Also just saying, while it is possible, the jump to assuming a drug or alcohol problem can miss the many interwoven causes of some failure to thrive. It can be some EFD, sure. Or as simple as never learning the needed life skills, which include awareness and follow through.

47

Please don’t kick him out, unless you feel your son is willfully trying to take advantage of your housing him. But – to me at least, – it doesn’t sound like that’s the case with him. Remember, your son is likely not happy with his life/himself either, but he may have no clue in how to make things better.

I love compmom’s line about working with him as an ally. Make him understand you are committed to him, and want to work with him on ways he can help himself. But If you feel that “kicking him out” is the way to proceed, consider doing it calmom’s way (great post #35): with alternatives, a defined path and a long enough notice so he can make plans and doesn’t feel like you’re simply pushing him out of your life.

Consider allowing him to focus on ONE thing. Suggest he drop his job if he focuses on school more. Or allow him to leave school but insist he pick up more hours at work. That way he has ONE responsibility to focus his (likely) all-over-the-place mind. Only when he appears to be succeeding at school should he consider working.

It’s not a bad option to encourage him to leave school altogether. He can go back, many people do. Or maybe his psyche just isn’t easily adaptable to school. That’s OK too. There are many ways to make a living – a decent living – without a college degree.

Either way, make it clear to your son that it appears he has brain chemistry issues he needs to address. Keep insisting he gets help - therapy, counseling, perhaps meds. A family session may not be a bad idea. Talk to him about his thought processes, how’s he’s feeling or coping. If he’s trying meds (vyvanse was very helpful to my son) talk to him about how they work or don’t work for him. Praise him when he appears to be making a real effort, and certainly when he’s making progress.

Keep in mind some kids – even the smart, nice ones – take longer to grow up, physically and mentally. At 20 he’s still very young, his brain is undeveloped, he’s likely emotionally immature, and he may not fully understand his own disabilities, their consequences, and the importance of learning to deal with them.

Finally, be nice to yourself and your wife. You need some TLC as well.

48

^^really good points katliamom. Plus compmom’s comment about being allies. So much of the issue sometimes is we get locked in our respective “default” roles of parent-child, instead of three grownups trying to figure out a solution to a difficult problem.

49

@mokenney:
You have my sympathy. Haven’t been through something similar personally, it could be depression, in my case a large part of it was that school came easily to me much of my life, then when I hit college I was overwhelmed. My dad like some of the people on here attributed it to laziness or not trying, but it was a lot more than that. Depression especially can make it difficult to function in a setting like school. The first assumption many people make is that if someone crashes and burns like this, it must be drugs, party-hardying, dating, being irresponsible, but a lot of what the poster wrote could be caused by other things as well. Was he always so irresponsible? Did you always struggle to get him to do the things he needed? Or did this seem to come about when he went to school?

Just from personal experience, it may not be a bad thing for your son to experience a bit of ‘real life’, maybe take a break from school and work for a while. Just speaking as myself, but I found a very different perspective that before finishing my UG degree, I started working, for some people after so many years of going to school it can be IMO that they lose sight of why you go to school, what it is about, and the real world can help with that, whether it is working some sort of relatively low wage job and wanting better, or whether it is the discipline of working and understanding that school like that is work as well. There is a fine line in parenting, of trying to figure out where to use the carrot and the stick, but one of the things I have learned is that even good, disciplined kids stumble at times. My son being a music student has drives I never had, yet at times he slipped a bit (not on college, more like high school), and we had to step in to show him the consequences of what he was doing. On the other hand, the idea of telling a kid to join the military to ‘get discipline beat into him’ is idiotic IMO, that sounds like something from 40 or 50 years ago, when they used to give convicted criminals a choice of jail or the military, I doubt the military wants recruits like that these days (if your son expressed an interest in the military, on the other hand, and seemed to want to work towards it, it might not be a bad option, but with that big caveat, that he himself expressed the interest).

50

My 22 year old daughter has similar issues - she does in fact have a diagnosis (a LD and Anxiety/Depression) but when she wasn’t taking responsibility for treating it I shut her off. And not the first time – it is ongoing and beyond resistance, she is plain belligerent, disrespectful and rude when faced with any boundaries from me at all.

She had the world by the balls - great school, scholarship, horseback riding team and decided she didn’t NEED her meds and stopped taking them. By the end of year 1 she was off the team and out of school. I helped her back on her feet but to this day I don’t feel she has the right priorities or takes responsibility for her LD and anxiety so I cut off the funds.

So now she is trying out life on her own without a degree - she is broke and complains and I say not a word.

51

@mokenny, I have been on this board a looong time, so this is almost ancient history. But I too have a bright son with inattentive ADHD. This was a late HS diagnosis and old, poor habits prevailed. He had a not so good first semester GPA and we shared our expectations for the Spring. The Spring semester GPA was so horrendous that the school suspended him, but offered a life preserver. If the boy did a summer school session, in residence, and was able to bring his cumulative GPA to 2.0 (which was barely mathematically possible), they would let him continue provisionally in the Fall.
DH and I were quite torn; the $$$ investment felt like a big risk. But something told me that we had to be supportive to preserve a relationship with our son and let the school (and him) determine his success there. So he did go that summer, and earned the opportunity to go back in the Fall, and was on the Provisional list a couple more semesters. By using every summer and interim term, he graduated ‘on time and over budget’. It wasn’t easy; calls and texts were often ignored. There were poor judgement legal issues as well. And for those we lent money (which has been paid back - kept records on a spreadsheet).
I would be careful of actions that will seem punitive but I recommend devising a plan for little successes as so many above have suggested.

52

OP, as the mom of two now-adult kids who took non-traditional paths to adulthood, I wanted to offer my support. I think the most important things to realize is that 1)There could be many reason your son is failing in college and struggling-an undiagnosed LD, a newly hatched mental health issue, drugs, even some unresolved issues between you and your wife and him that none of you even realized were there. I think kicking him out without so much as a fare thee well would be a disaster. I have a friend in her 40’s still trying to get her mental health under control because as a young adult no one took her seriously or understood that she NEEDED her family’s support and understanding to find the cause and treatment. But WHATEVER the cause, you want to work WITH your son to find that out and plan the right course of action. Once you have that, THEN it will be on him to follow through. THEN you can employ tough love if he doesn’t. But living on the streets won’t cure an addiction or mental illness. And FWIW, my son is a vet and they don’t take young men acting out to beat them into behaving. The military isn’t interested in immature people who won’t follow orders, because the cost might be their lives or those of others.

You actually have a secondary problem with you son, IMO. It’s that at 20, I don’t think, it’s a good idea to treat him like he is a kid still under age and in HS. Even though you are still supporting him to some extent, he IS an adult. You have the right to set rules, but he is after all, not a kid, and I’m not surprised he’s chafing at a curfew, for example. What we did (and do whenever an adult child stays with us) is ask that they let us know where they are and if they’ll be staying out overnight. They had their own keys and were welcome to come and go as they wished. They were not children. Now, I see on this thread that some parents see that any financial support of a young adult gives them the right to control them with money. Don’t like it? Move the heck out and starve! I don’t believe that that kind of parent/child relationship brings anything but resentment.

So whether it’s an actual contract or a verbal agreement, work out WITH your son when and if you expect to be kept in the loop about where he is. If he is working, work out whether or if he should pay for food, or rent or the car insurance, etc. My kids have paid rent when they lived with us. They bought and covered the costs of their own cars-or not-we have excellent public transportation here. I suspect that your son is as unhappy as you are, no matter what is driving him to act as he has. As others have said, work WITH him. He may have, like my older D, gone onto college only to realize it was not only what he didn’t expect, but what he needed at the time. My D took a little longer to get there, but she is self-supporting, has a good job and a good guy and a happy life. It’s not what her parents and grandparents and even a couple of great-grandparents with advanced degrees would have expected, but there it is. And we’re on good terms. Throwing her to the wolves without helping her figure it out would have been heartless and devastating.

It’s painful to watch them flounder. Sometimes it even takes more than a few tries at finding their groove, but if you keep the lines of communication open, they come back to you and might even say, as D did, “I should have listened to you more.” If you slam the door on them, you may never get them back.

Therapy can be very helpful, as others have said, for YOU, even if your son continues to flounder. But be aware that your son’s therapist may not share anything with you, as is their right and responsibility. But you can ask you son to allow a session or two with all of you. They’re pretty good at cutting through the BS and having ALL sides tell the truth in front of each other.

Good luck.

53

I’m sorry your family is going through this and it is obvious you want the best for your son. Re the curfew, as other posters have mentioned you may want to reconsider that particular battle. Once a young adult has had their curfew lifted (as your son did when he went away to college), it’s awfully difficult to put that genie back in the bottle. Of course, it is reasonable to expect courtesy when a night owl comes home late or decides to stay overnight with friends. E.g. being quiet when arriving home in the wee hours, texting or calling if plans change and he decides to stay overnight somewhere else, etc. But it seems unnecessarily restrictive to try to enforce a curfew on a 20 year old who has lived away from home for a time.

54

As foreign as drugs may be to you and how much you think your son would never go that route you must consider that as a real possibility.
The fact he can disappear to friends for days means he has a peer support group that condones his behavior.
This from what you say is not a continuation of something in his personality growing up but a new behavior.

55

You have our sympathies – it is impossible to make a legal adult behave in a particular fashion when they don’t want to, and there’s very little help for parents of semi adult children. I recall being so distraught that we had to navigate therapsists, doctors, etc. with someone so unable to do it himself, but even sympathetic professionals couldn’t do much for us without his consent.

Get therapy for yourselves. Tell your son the truth – you are worried and uncertain and think it mightt be helpful. Transparency is helpful for you all.

If he is truly gone for days, you do need to consider substance abuse. Safeguard your valuables. Try to see things as a practicality, not as a moral judgement. You can’t make a curfew stick. You can’t make chores stick, or you can exhaust yourself trying, or you can give him a different set of expectations. You can see him as someone who is lost and sick and disoriented, and be the lighthouse – but you will never get to row the boat. (my husband’s favorite metaphor)

Find support and remember to do things together that do not descend into stress. GIve yourselves time together to feel love and kindness and no strings. Give yourself, as parents, permission to not fix this right away. Time may help more than anything, so check in with your son once a month – does he have any idea what he wants to do moving forward? How’s therapy going? , etc.

Lastly – this is not your fault. It is not something you did, or something you didn’t do. You weren’t too permissive, too strict, too anything. And no matter how it seems, he is disappointed, unhappy, and sorry. Even if he doesn’t know it yet. In years looking back, you all want to know you stuck together and stuck it out, even if that means he is given a CHOICE to move out, or a CHOICE to stay.

((hugs)). Feel free to pm me if you want. We got through, and you can too.

56

“The fact he can disappear to friends for days means he has a peer support group that condones his behavior.”

It could also mean he’s got friends his age who live on their own and who don’t have curfews, have to check in with mom and dad, made to eat their vegetables, etc. I’m serious-a good part of this might just be that this kid is chafing at being under the rules of the house and has friends without rules. Of course, it COULD be drugs or drinking and neither should be discounted, but heck, I was a “good girl” and even I wasn’t thrilled with having to come home from college in the summers and suddenly having to check in any time I went anywhere.

My older kids, once they turned 18 and had graduated HS, had to let us know where they were, but if they were using their own transportation of public transportation (and OP hasn’t confirmed whether this kid has his own car, that I saw), then as long as they got to their jobs or their classes, they were free to stay with friends for multiple days. Son used to go camping or boating, D camped, kayaked, etc. and sometimes it was just easier than coming home from the other side of town.

Do I think this kid is pushing all kinds of boundaries? Absolutely, but just offering an option other than drugs and locking up your stuff because an immature young adult is staying out late.

57

For all we know, he’s just out there staring at some lake or sleeping in the car, aware of the disconnects and tensions and frustrated. He may feel he tries. He may be chafing at the expectations.

No one knows.

Get your own counseling. See how you may contribute or enable, get pro advice on options. Sometimes DIY costs too much time. Some here say kick him out. some say please dont. In between, you keep trying-- but with the right experienced advice. You’ll benefit. He might.

58

What if there is nothing wrong with your son other than the fact that he doesn’t want to go to college? If your expectations change do you think his attitude and behavior might change as well? I have two teenage boys who don’t clean their rooms on a regular basis, only put the dishes away when asked and their bathroom always looks like a science experiment. Typical boys (in my opinion). No need for either of them to seek any type of psychiatric help.

59

We have a friend whose son dropped out of Princeton. He was recently diagnosed with Hashimoto’s which may explain a lot of the issues he was having.

60

It seems so easy for some to say Kick him out about someone else’s 20 yo that is having a rough time. To me, that should be the last option. What good would that possibly do? People seem to think that if a kid has a hard time making ends meet, he will magically wise up, return to college, and become a great success. Many people live a hand to mouth existence for a really long time. A 20 yo is very different than an older adult kid and should not be kicked to the curb simply because they are having a hard time. I also don’t think this is necessarily the result of bad parenting. Some kids are just not wired for success.

That being said, of course you should not put up with disrespect or flaunting of the rules. I would certainly want to know if substance or alcohol abuse was fueling the nights away with friends, or simply wanting to be on his own for a while. What do you want there? Is it OK for him to stay with friends, as long as he lets you know?

I think having him at a therapist is great and second the idea of you and your wife attending family therapy. It can really help to have someone objective listen to what is going on and give you some ideas. CC is great, but people don’t have the expertise or experience to give good advice.

Good luck. It is incredibly difficult to deal with adult kids that are having trouble, but don’t want help.