Last Summer Together a Disaster...Why?

anitaw · July 31, 2006, 4:30am

Sage,
Often kids who have been through a lot are viewed as ‘fragile’ by their parents. Furthermore, often kids who are ADD are a bit (or more than a bit) oppositional.

As a result of these two tendancies parents might find themselves waffling, excusing and generally not drawing hard lines for their children-- to preserve a shred of a relationship or because they ‘feel bad’ for the child.

When the parent then, for the reason clearly appropriate to the parent but perhaps not entirely appropriate to the child, adopts a more structured approach to the child and has specific expectations, it is not surprising that the child might not be amenable and responsive.

I would not go the psychiatrist route- because that targets your son as the ‘problem’ and while he MIGHT have some sort of incipient mental illness- he probably will resist this assumption, but I would find a family therapist or a pastoral therapist or someone of that ilk to help mediate a more healthful communication style in your home. I would also suggest you read Dr. Mel Levine’s book- Ready or Not Here Life Comes… about the issues of young adulthood in a society where secondary school usually does nothing to prepare them for life, but everything to prepare them for college…The last few chapters, in particular, are very helpful- particularly for a parent with a child with a learning or attention issue.

You know what, he might not be ready to go away…and maybe he is just making this very clear in a particularly unhelpful way. You will probably have a clearer idea about this a few months into his college stay-- if you have been able to figure out some ways that are okay to communicate BEFORE the inevitable challenges, more the better.

CrzyCatDC · July 31, 2006, 8:44am

First of all, thatg was three years ago and I admit, I was only 18 and not as mature as I am now. But I never said that I spent all of my time with my friends…my mother drove me to wanting to do that because she wanted to control everything about my life. It was different for me because I was a very independent high school student, unlike, it seems, most of your kids. I’ve had a job since I was 13, working and paying for all of my own stuff. I applied to colleges and filled out financial aid forms by myself. I also visited most of those schools by myself or with friends. Not that I wanted to…I had enough stress with my father’s death and everything else I had to do deal with (my parents were divorced), but my mother didn’t go to college and neither did my siblings so she left it all up to me. I have a strong bond with my family and spend a lot of time with them. It wasn’t until my mother wanted to take over every aspect of my life that I had to take a step back and get some air. My mother will tell you that I’m there for here more than any of my other siblings combined so don’t judge me based on a small paragraph without askign questions.

No need to get hostile. I was just trying to add another perspective to the discussion. This is the same kind of defensiveness and unwillingness to listen that causes problems between parents and their kids. Everyone wants to see it as a problem the kids make, but parents are part of the problem as well.

wbow · July 31, 2006, 8:54am

the few minutes that i spend with my son are really quite pleasant. i have always enjoyed his company, and i think that we both enjoy the time we have left. instead of resenting him for spending time with new friends and old friends, i am pleased that he has built relationships on his own and that he is ready to move on. i think that often times the kids are rebelling a little to hide their concerns about being on their own, but i also have seen parents that act poorly while trying to deal with the impending separation. it’s a hard, hard time for everyone.

brendansjci · July 31, 2006, 5:36pm

“And also, don’t think I am crazy, but depending on your son’s sport, it is always good to be alert to signs of steroid use, one of which is noticeable anger/rage. I hope you don’t think I’m crazy for mentioning it.”

This is just horrible misinformation. “Roid rage” has only been observed in people with preexisting psychological problems. This has been proven in double-blind, placebo controlled studies.

As for the original topic, I’m leaving for college this fall and my parents are divorced; I’ve had a great summer with my father and a terrible summer with my mother. To me the difference has been, if I’m acting surly, my dad just ignores it and things get back to normal quickly, whereas my mom tries to “get to the bottom” of my generally irrational moodiness and worsens the situation.

cheers · July 31, 2006, 7:32pm

Sorry, Sage. I did not mean that your son should see a psychiatrist, I meant that you might want to have professional counsel available to give you guidance as you try to lead him to a successful launch.

ThinkDifferent · July 31, 2006, 11:08pm

Let me offer the perspective of someone who just completed his first year of college. True, last summer, I was more irritable and standoff-ish than I usually am. I’m convinced, though, that it’s not because I was subconsciously afraid of college life and my new independence. Rather, it was because I was so looking forward to it, and my bad attitude arose from simple impatience. I spent the summer between high school graduation and freshman year of college at my grandparents’, in a town where I knew nobody my own age, and there is nothing interesting for a college-aged guy to do. As a result, I was very bored and my only escape was to talk online with fellow soon-to-be-college students, and to just think about what college life would be like. It was a thin lifeline, so the dull existence I lived that summer was just a disappointment - like the final hurdle I had to jump to get to college, after jumping so many others.

I truly, honestly believe that fear of semi-independent life was not a cause of my irritability. When I got to college I never felt homesick for a second. It lived up to all my expectations. I was impatient during the summer because I was craving college life. My experience in high school wasn’t the most pleasant, so that was a contributing factor. Earlier that summer I had been to a two-week conference (GYLC) with hundreds of other people my age, and there I got a taste of what I imagined college life would be like. Hence, for the rest of the summer, my thoughts were all along the lines of, “Oh man, I can’t wait to get out of this dump, college starts in x days!” Against that backdrop, I think it’s pretty easy to see why life in a backwater town in New York got on my nerves and made me cranky.

I’m not denying that bad pre-college attitudes can be caused by subconscious fear of independent life - just presenting my own experience.

citygirlsmom · July 31, 2006, 11:28pm

Thinkdifferent, do you feel that you treated your family okay and that they deserved your crankyness?

Just wondering as your post was honest…do you feel bad at all

david06 · August 1, 2006, 12:45am

I’m about to be a freshman at Penn State.

The way ThinkDifferent mentions the GYLC reminds me of my experiences… the past two summers I went to two summer programs - five weeks in Paris before my junior year, and eight weeks at Harvard SSP before senior year. After these two experiences I don’t really have any fear about semi-independence and going off to college. Last summer was the best summer of my life. I didn’t really like high school too much for the first two years, and while junior and senior years were far better (primarily due to getting more involved in different activities) going back to my senior year of high school after spending two months at Harvard was very, very difficult. I’m still ambivelant about actually leaving home for real and I ended up having a pretty good time during my last year of high school, but really, for the past year or so, I’ve been really convinced that I’m not going to have problems with the responsibility of college and haven’t been able to wait to go. Now I have less than a month.

I’ve been somewhat cranky and irrationally irritable on and off throughout this summer – once again, like pretty much every student who’s posted in this thread. Nothing like the OP’s child, but still, I probably haven’t always acted the best way I could this summer. The same thing happened to a lesser degree (as in, for a day) right before going to Harvard last summer. I was at the national FBLA conference and flew directly from there to Boston. The practical considerations – travel plans, getting my stuff together for my dorm room there, etc got messed up and my parents and I fought a bit right before they were about to leave and drive home. This didn’t last too long though … we talked on the phone quite often throughout the two months and they came and visited twice and I was really glad to see them when they came. Really, that’s another thing I’m looking forward to in college and in the future in general. I think I get along with my parents much better – as in, I’m never irritable towards them or anything, when I’m away from home and more independent. I still care about what they’re doing back home, they still care about what I’m doing, and we talk a lot and are still very close.

I’ve typed posts for this thread a few times and ended up not posting them because I didn’t want to risk coming across as intending to flame anybody. But really, a lot of what citygirlsmom has been giving as advice doesn’t seem like it would work very well to me. “Laying down the law” and “taking a stand” by saying being cranky or whatever is not acceptable is not going to help. Neither I nor any of the other students who are about to college wake up in the morning and immediately begin to think of ways to take out some sort of anger against our parents. It’s not rational and the one point made that is really true is that being irritable in this way would be considered completely inappropriate as an adult when dealing with anyone else. Maybe there are more extreme cases of this behavior than what I’m thinking of… but all “taking a stand” is going to do is make the situation far worse. For example brendansjci posted, “To me the difference has been, if I’m acting surly, my dad just ignores it and things get back to normal quickly, whereas my mom tries to “get to the bottom” of my generally irrational moodiness and worsens the situation.” It’s going to take a kid which snaps quite a bit and acts in ways which probably don’t reflect his or her true feelings and make them want to be completely defiant 24/7. If a parent is considering following her earlier advice of cutting a kid off financially as a result of them being “cranky before college” they should realize that it’s very possible that once their son or daughter leaves the house after being informed about that, they will not have a son or daughter again for a very, very long time.

No, nobody “deserves crankyness.” Nobody, parent or child, probably ever acts completely perfectly in a stressful situation. If you’ve never been in a situation where you felt bad about the way you were acting, or afterwards wished you could do things differently, congratulations on being perfect. I think most people are not. I think most high school/college students have gone through some situation at some point that was (or at least seemed at the time) stressful or important. I think most parents have gone through the same thing – maybe a stressful time at work or something. Everyone has bad days, everyone has bad days sometimes, everyone vents once in a while in a way they probably wish they hadn’t. Usually, a family’s close enough and both parents and children realize afterwards that it’s just a bad time. Nobody “deserves crankyness” but it seems like a fairly natural way that people express stress and in a family situation you usually love someone enough to realize that and forgive it.

That doesn’t seem to be the case for everyone in this thread. It should take far more than some crankyness and irritability the summer before college for this to become a serious problem between a parent and a child. I suspect the vast majority of kids going off to college act that way to some degree, and nearly all of them end up having great relationships with their parents after a little bit, while in college and afterwards. It’s not a rare thing, and if every parent handled it with citygirlsmom’s attitude, there would be a lot of estranged parents and children. Yes, while I feel somewhat bad about it and that my family didn’t “deserve my crankyness.” However, I’ve been irritable before. My parents have been irritable before. It’s passed and I know that no matter WHAT were to happen for the rest of this summer in a few weeks, I’m going to have the same good relationship with my parents that I had while away last summer, and I’m going to be really happy whenever I come home. Really, I feel sorry for any students whose parents follow the same school of thought that citygirlsmom seems to express by saying “Seriouslly, do no more for the young adult.” It must be hard to go off to college, no matter how ready you feel you are or are not, with the knowledge that your family does not love you unconditionally. I know that if I was in that enviornment, I wouldn’t be “pretty happy to be going to college but somewhat cranky occasionally,” I’d be in the hospital for psychological help. One of the other phrases which touched me was “sorry for all the vacations, the clothes, the paying for school, and putting up with tantrums, messy houses, picky appetites, helping with school projects, watching games, listening to recitals (for that we deserve medals), feeding friends, driving all over the place, bringing in left lunches, going all over town looking for jsut the right backpack.” Yes, I’m just 18 and perhaps being somewhat idealistic, but I hope that I never have children if I ever become cynical enough that I’d non-jokingly think about my child who is about to go to college in terms of a list of what I’ve provided from diapers to college tuition.

I’m sorry if I’ve interpreted things as more extreme as they are from this thread. I’ve held off on posting for quite a while because I did not want to come across as flaming or anything. I guess I’ve just been very surprised by some of what I’ve read here.

cowpernia · August 1, 2006, 9:02am

This thread is very emotional for me. My son is to be at UF on Aug. 19 and I’m finding myself wanting to touch him more as well as finding him coming to cuddle for a few seconds then rushing away. Last night, he curled up next to me for several minutes and I got teary-eyed but I think I hid it. I think the crankyness is a way of coping with with the unknown and changing feelings about it all. I just read The Red Tent and found the line “Time is the enemy of mothers” to feel very true.

ThinkDifferent · August 1, 2006, 2:56pm

citygirlsmom: My family did nothing to deserve it. They tolerated me and I managed to keep a lid on myself a fair amount of the time, so there wasn’t too much tension.

I do feel bad about being irritable and touchy that summer, but I don’t think there was anything anyone could have done. No matter what, there had to be a summer before college, and no matter what, I was going to be anxiously looking forward to college throughout it. It might have been better if I’d had something interesting to keep myself busy with during the summer…but it’s too late now.

Since then, though, I think I get along with my mom even better than before. I think she’s enjoying the freedom of life without me as much as I’m enjoying the freedom of life without her. It’s a good arrangement.

I think my observation about the inevitability of it applies to lots of people - you can’t avoid the fact that there’s going to be a time period just before college, and most kids are going to deal with it badly, whatever the reason. The only upside is that it’s temporary.

emeraldkity4 · August 1, 2006, 3:50pm

I think transitions of any kind are stressful
Even if they are planned, even if they are wanted
Some people have a harder time with transitions than others.

My kids had a hard time, just going to school ( when they were young).
Everyday, they needed space to settle themselves, if their friends rushed at them, they learned that they would be growled at and worse. ( The girls also learned how to “use thier words to ask for space”)

Getting ready to go on vacation is awful, so much stress, and that is something that is planned for and wanted.

Going off to college is a huge change- a huge step for kids- it isn’t any wonder that they are touchier than usual.

I think to be successful, they have to do a rewiring in their head. They aren’t only part of this nuclear family group, they are almost adults, starting their adult life.
I think most kids need some psychic space to figure that out, and it takes energy, energy that they obviously aren’t spending on being as polite as they usually are.

They can still be reminded that the family has certian rules, and you don’t take your feelings out on anyone, jsut because you are out of sorts, but I also think families, should give the transitioning adult some space and allowance for their * stuff*

brendansjci · August 1, 2006, 7:38pm

I think david06 had a great post, the second last paragraph especially. I was thinking along the same lines but couldn’t find the right words; good job.

citygirlsmom · August 1, 2006, 7:53pm

“with citygirlsmom attitutude”

my “attitude” only comes in if the child is being especially rude, obnoxious and disrespectful
As the mother of two often moody teen girls, I can tolerate quite a lot, but a parent has to draw the line, and I think we can all see that from my posts

I said over and over again that outbursts, etc are normal from everybody, but it is the persistant attitude from another adult who is treating someone cruely more often then they are treating them nicely that is when the parent or child needs to say enough

Occassionaly is very different from most of the time…and often parents just take and take and take cause its “normal”

Gosh, everybody is cranky, or moody, its when it reaches the point ie the OP son, that something needs to be said

As for my comments about think about all we gave you, when you have an ungrateful brat treating you like dirt, thinking that you are annoying and a pain in the )*%# and that person should be able to do whatever they want, well, they SHOULD be reminded cause they obviouslly don’t remember all you as a parent did for them

Its not cynical at all…I do for my daughters because I love them and want the best for them, but if they don’t appreciate it, then a parent needs to think what they are doing, and there is no harm and saying, hey, I am giving all I have for you, I don’t deserve to be treated like this

It was more than cranky, it was hurtful to the OP, it was callous, it was cold, it was harsh, it was dispectful, it was WAY BEYOND crankyness, but i think you know that

If my ADULT offspring walked all over me, abused my feelings, my property, my home, when they were an ADULT, they would not be here very long

How much )*%#) is a parent supposed to take from a mean nasty person. And sometimes the offender needs to be brought back to the reality they are not the center of the universe and that other people exist in the their world and those people have earned at a minimum civiliity.

It was not mere crankyness, and if you read my posts carefully, you can see what i said…

Not every obnoxious spoiled adult child needs to be financially cared for by a parent if that adult child is abusive…when does the parent say enough is enough?

And oh we are so stressed…phooey…mom and dad are stressed ALL THE TIME, and if acted rude and snooty to people, believe me we would get called on it, yet we are to let young adults slide…yes, crankyness is normal, for the 700 hundrenth time, its when that horrid behavior overtakes the nice behaviour and there is no regard for anybody elses feelings, that is when a parent need to step up

And apoplogizes can go a looonnnggg way…

When my D is in a particulary cranky mood, I say, honey, I didn’t deserve to be told you hate me, I know you don’t, or I hope you don’t, but that really made me sad

My Ds have told me, mom, boy you have been SOOO NAGGY today, come on know, we are doing our best

We both apologize, make a deal to start over, and move on…it is easy to get stuck in a pattern of back and forth crankyness and meanness, its learning and being mature enought to back up, say sorry and mean it, and the next time steppnig back and approacching the situation a different way

its called growing and learning and becoming an adult, and showing caring MOST of the time…and when either party blows it and over reacts, say, oopss, I love you lots, and lets figure how to make this better

Civility is not much to ask for from anybody, even a stressed kid going off to college

Civility at least 75% of the time is not too much to ask for, is it?

Alas_Poor_Yorrick · August 2, 2006, 5:22am

I just want to add for the record:

Not all kids rebel. I’m about to leave for college (less than two weeks) across the country. If anything, I have been spending more time with my parents. I have not been contentious or petulant. Yes, I am incredibly sad and at times very emotional. It’s just that not all kids are being rude and disrespectful.

cathymee · August 2, 2006, 5:23am

David06
Thanks for posting your thoughts.An excellent summary from the kids perspective.Best of luck to you at college.

citygirlsmom · August 2, 2006, 11:52am

I would gather that most kids are fine- have their moments, as do parents, but we in this thread are talking about the few that cross that line, and cross it often, and cross to the degree of creatig much sadness, fear, hurt, etc that maybe it will be difficult to repair

DRJ4 · August 2, 2006, 7:16pm

Actually, CGM, I think this thread has far more to do with parents than kids.

citygirlsmom · August 2, 2006, 7:17pm

Read the OP and her posts, very sad indeed

Northstarmom · August 2, 2006, 7:25pm

"
My DS has always required more, much more. Over the years we have sacrificed much to relationship to meet what believed were legitimate needs. Now, he has absolutely nothing to do with us…only avoidance and ridicule and anger. I ask, how much patience, gentleness, and support can a parent demonstrate. Yes, the children are heading off to college and a new life. I did that years ago and I was never like my DS. True, parents have more life experiences under their belts, but remember that each stressful experience is new and different no matter who owns it. While my DS will go off to an uncertain future, so will I and my DH. DS will have thrilling new experiences in spite of the newly conferred responsibilities; plenty of distraction. DH and I will have an empty house, quiet so thick you cut it with a knife, and an unimaginable amount of debt just as we reach our mid-60s. DH and I have recently lost our parents…only one, now in failing health, remains. As DS might say, “fun stuff”. Also, because we are older parents we are facing not only the loss of DS, and our “mommies and daddies”, but also the realization that while DS grew up, we grew old. I am ill and significantly disabled…under a doctor’s care, unable to go forth into my new future with a great deal of vigor. I feel we have given and given and given to someone who only thinks that everything is about him. And, that’s so unfair."

Dear Sage,
What you describe goes well beyond the irritation and tension that often happens in families as our very beloved teens prepare to leave the nest.

To me, what you are describing is an entire family that is suffering after having had some very painful losses and stresses due to the deaths of your parents, the upcoming college of your son, your disability and the debt that you will be taking on.

I would imagine that everyone in their own way is upset and grieving. This probably also is true of your S: For many males in particular, anger and isolation from loved ones is a sign of depression. Your son may even be pushing you and your husband away to protect himself because he fears that you’ll die shortly as two of his grandparents recently did and one may be dying soon.

My advice would be to seek counseling from a therapist who is experienced with grief issues. Even if your husband and son won’t go, I hope you’ll go. If just one person seeks help, that will change the balance in the family and can help everyone heal.

If money is a problem, there probably are affordable places thorugh community mental health services or places like Catholic and Lutheran Social Services that provide professional counseling to people of any religious faith.

I am sorry for the pain that you are suffering, and I wish you well.

DRJ4 · August 2, 2006, 8:20pm

CGM, I did read the OP and her subsequent posts and I reiterate: I think this has more to do with the parents than the child. I hope the author of the OP heeds Northstarmom’s sound advice.

Last Summer Together a Disaster...Why?

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