I don’t understand why it wouldn’t just be fine for him to visit his friends because, hey, they’re his friends. Are you guys punishing him or something? I mean, the guy is working his little booty off, paying rent and trying to save. And you would begrudge him a weekend with his pals? Am I missing something?
I do think it’s admirable that you’re making him work and encouraging adulthood.
Good for him and good for you,** ivylass**.
Have you considered urging him to look into the Air Force or Navy instead? Given the current situation, I would be very reluctant to encourage my child to go into the Army or the Marines. I would think that the Air Force would be especially good for someone of a technical bent.
ETA: I see that others have suggested the Navy or Air Force as well.
And that’s why I deferred to Ivylad and let him go. Sometimes I’m right, and sometimes he’s right. It’s a team effort. We both want him to succeed.
I don’t know if Air Force ROTC (or whatever the equivalent is) is at FIT. He can investigate it…one of his friends is in the Army ROTC.
I’d recommend the Air Force, too. My son sounds a lot like yours – bright but no idea of how to work, which resulted in him doing so poorly his first year of college that he lost his eligibility for financial aid, which was the end of college for him. After a few months slinging pizzas, we finally persuaded him to enlist in the Air Force. He just finished a four-year tour and is now out on his own in the world. after spending the entire four years in Omaha with zero chance of having to go to a combat zone unless he volunteered, which in his career field there were more volunteers than slots open for tours in Iraq or Afghanistan. So he stayed in Omaha.
He’s learned how to work, learned how to manage money, has an affordable apartment shared with a friend, his own car that he bought himself, excellent credit, and is now going back to school to finish up. One advantage of the Air Force? A lot of the military training provides college credit, so between what he earned in his abortive year in school and his Air Force tour, he’s now only 3 credits shy of being a junior.
He’s looking at getting student loans for now, as well as a job – which he has some great leads on – and saving his GI Bill benefits for grad school. All in all, he’s gone from a sullen, lazy kid to an outstanding, hardworking, responsible young man.
I couldn’t be happier! It sounds like Ivylad is going through the same process, and coming out with some great lessons learned. Isn’t it wonderful?
Good on you too, FairyChatMom! Parents like you do a good thing for the whole world. Your daughter will hit the ground running, and we’ll all be the better for it.
Oh gosh doesn’t it.
I have cried more in the last year than I think I have raising my kids through their elementary years.
My children have grown up more in the last year then the previous ten it seems.
My mom said in an email the other day “your little girl is no longer a little girl anymore”.
I sat at my desk and cried. Maybe it is just me but the pride you get from your child’s bridge to being an adult is harder than anything I have been though so far.
It makes me long for the days of Barney and Ninja Turtles on Saturday morning with a bowl of Froot Loops and footy pajamas.
Gee, thanks, Lib! We (translation: spousal unit) were a bit more indulgent than we probably should have been, since the kid got a car at 16, but she has handled the maintenance and the insurance copay (where the heck did that pole come from??? :eek: ) and she learned a valuable lesson about putting gasoline in a diesel engine. ($$$)
She’s planning her wedding now, and when she sees what everything costs, she’s leaning towards eloping. Hey, if it was good enough for Mom and Dad… Instead of telling us what we’d have to pay, she asked if we would be able to help her out (since she knows we’ll be covering her moving-out-of-Orlando expenses and all of her graduation costs literally days before her planned wedding day.) Based on what I’ve observed among some of my coworkers, a young person who doesn’t have a sense of entitlement is a rare and wonderful thing.
Sorry to hijack, ivylass, but it is important that the world knows there’s more than one young 'un out there who done good! Some of us parents managed to get them out of the nest (or almost) as functioning adults. Yay for us! 
I worked as a day laborer during the summer of 2006 in Fort Myers. Those jobs are not fun. I’m not sure what could be as miserable as tamping down hot, fresh asphault into the ground in the blistering Florida sun. It teaches you a valuable life lesson though if nothing else.
No, you did good. I guess Ivylad and I were at a loss because I did well in school, sailed through college with no loans and plenty of academic scholarships to cover everything, and Ivylad has always been a bear for work.
Our son was an enigma to us…why *don’t *you want to get A’s? Why *don’t *you want to take the extra effort to do it right? 
:mad: 
We had no context, and ultimately he had to figure it out on his own with other people “teaching” him.
pool, did you find that the other day laborers were a bit on the slack-ass side? That was my son’s experience…he was out there busting his ass, they were there to get paid for 8 hours, whether or not they did any work. (The golf course did ask him how far away he lived, and if he would be interested in working there full time. It would not have been practical for us to schlep him out there, so he had to turn them down.)
Yes there were definitely a lot of lazy people that I worked with but there were a lot of hard workers too, I guess I would say it was about 50-50. I worked mostly with a group of masons but if we got rained out or there was no work available I went to a temp agency for day laborers. There seems to be a lot of drug abusers working in those types of jobs as well.
I guess I have to give them kudoes because they’re not on welfare, they are trying, but from the stories my son was telling me, if they made the tiniest bit of extra effort they could stop relying on day labor and get a more reliable job someplace else.
I guess we all are where we are because of the choices we make.
My good friend (a somewhat geeky college educated guy) spent a few weeks as a day laborer on his summers home from college.
I don’t think he learned much. The vast majority of people working there were homeless, and in California most homeless people are people with mental illnesses who were kicked out of the hospitals by Reagen. These are mostly people who can’t hold regular jobs. And if you look hard enough, you’ll often find there is a health related reason.
Anyway, a few years later my friend ended up getting a big check as part of a class action suit. His labor agency required it’s workers to show up and stay all day, every day, even if there was no work. So he sometimes waited days in the agency doing nothing and earning nothing just to keep his name on the rolls. Turns out this it’s not legal to force someone to be somewhere for days straight and not pay them.
Anyway, I think the day laborers you can hire on the street do a much better job (and get paid accordingly.) They understand they get paid for the work they do and they appreciate not giving the majority of their profits to a middle-man insititution.
Ehr, because he didn’t see the point? It was the case for me and a lot of my classmates, for different reasons. And it’s the case for a lot of the people I work with. Someone wanted to send bad rubber to the customers claiming “bah, it ain’t so bad! They’re just a pain about it, is all!” - until I pointed out the customer made tires and asked what brand did he and his family use. Someone else slacked with registries - until we showed him that we knew he was leaving “the paperwork” for his next-shift mate and that there was no way he could hide it (short of bribing the guy who was taking up his slack… we reckoned the bribe would have to involve blowjobs and a house in the Bahamas).
If you don’t see the different consequences, there is no reason to take the actions that mean more work.