Sounds virtually the same as our dinner table conversations. My daughter is excited about starting college this fall and has a plan (nursing). My son remains a dreamer.
My son will be starting driver’s ed this fall. I know he is dying to get his driver’s license. I’m hoping this will be the one thing that will motivate him to improve his grades.
That has been my thinking as well and is the only reason he is not living the life of an ascetic monk at this point.
I appreciate what you’re saying but I simply can’t disengage right now. Perhaps when he is finally 18 and I’ve made no impact on him I will re-evaluate my approach. For right now, I’m going to keep trying to do what I can.
You’re kid sounds pretty lazy - the trip to the museum seems to point this out. This isn’t a diagnosis but this is the the kind of laziness I have seen people have over performance anxiety.
For people who have never had performance anxiety, the stress level can be quite high. Think of your own vulnerable spots, things that make you feel embarrassed, the most humiliated you ever felt - those with performance anxiety feel that when trying to do certain things. If that’s the case, it will be difficult to find a trick or punishment to counteract the negative effects of the anxiety. I think people develop this kind of anxiety through bad conditioning, such that failure has pretty bad consequences.
I feel like I’ve seen it a lot where parents sort of don’t have “unconditional” love for their children, not every parent does; probably 1 in 3 parents do if that, but anyway, they tend to view their kids more as projects and are judgmental of them as a human being based upon their performance.
On the other hand it could be something completely different - I have no training in adolescent psychology so my above comments are just a WAG.
“Pretty lazy” - how many therapists would evaluate a child with that diagnosis? No, I think what my son has SMP: Selective Motivation Paralysis.
My son saw a therapist during this time. He didn’t have any diagnosis but the therapist helped on a few fronts:
It helped.
These are the teenagers I take to Romania every year. We work in a orphanage with disabled children. Before we go they need to raise funds. They never do, they do absolutely fuck all. We raise the funds for them. It’s so bad we can’t even get them to respond to our emails.
Then they get there, and seeing those kids is like getting kicked so hard in the face that the blinders finally fall off. And they cry and cry and cry. Every last one of them. They cry because they suddenly see how they did nothing while they had everything. If they had organised that car wash like I told them, it would’ve bought that kid right there a bed to sleep in like a fucking human being, but instead they were busy being a useless shit. That’s a hard, hard realisation, but it’s also quite a beautiful transformation to witness. It changes them forever, and I have never seen one kid who did not go back as a richer and more motivated person.
It’s not exactly an easy thing to find, but if there is some kind of similar programme you can get your son on I would recommend it.
Thank you, IvoryTowerDenizen. I think that’s exactly what my son needs.