That’s not what I’m seeing; I think he cares a lot about the kid, and doesn’t want to see him wasting his life.
I agree with all of this (except kicking him out, too - save that for when he turns 18).
Cognoscant, you implied that his mother (your wife) is an enabler - are you both on the same page about your son? Or is she wanting to protect her little boy and in denial, and you have to be the bad guy?
I’ll stand corrected on the phrase no one likes.
Instead of out on the street, let’s say out of the house.
So, he can stay in the garage, then?
I want you all to know I’m not ignoring this conversation, I’m just waiting for a point when I can properly respond. I put in about 11 hours at work yesterday and this one looks like another 11 hours.
A hot air balloon tethered to the house.
They will have a bucket on a rope to raise food to it, and lower wastes.
THE. SAME. BUCKET.
So long as he’s not your problem anymore.
Whether or not he, IYHO, “gets” to throw a hissy fit, in less than 2 years he “gets” to decide whether or not to have a relationship with his parents.
I’m gonna balance my ass over the edge of the balloon’s basket, and crap. So, lookout below!
I was lucky - I got a board game about a hedonistic drug-using Wiccan harem. It was called Easy-Baked Coven.
Darlin’, with your luck, you’ll crap, then fall, and land right in your own crap.
That’s true. And, in the meantime, his parents should do right by him which includes
monitoring his stuff since he repeatedly shows he can’t be trusted.
I’d be a terrible parent to my teenager if I let him fuck around and ruin his life because I was too worried that he might not want to come by the house when he’s 18.
I think the OP needs to come down off his high horse. (heh, no pun intended)
Seriously, I remember being a teen and having some of these very same problems with my parents. They tried to get me to see a psychiatrist. They would drop me off at his office as if I was the soul fucking problem while they cavalierly went about their day.
I refuse to open up to this guy. After several sessions, I finally broke down and told the guy, if you want some conversation, you’re going to have to get my parents in here as well. This ain’t all on me. That never happened. I stopped going.
Also, quit trying to mold your son into what YOU think he should be. He’s searching for his own identity and he doesn’t need any scorn from you should that identity not be to your approval.
I understand that a lot of people say “You can’t always be your children’s buddy, sometimes you have to be a parent.” This is true. But it is also true that too much parent and not enough “buddy” is equally as bad.
If this were me, I’d tell the kid, “You want me to chill about the weed smoking? Here’s the deal, show me you can make good grades, stay out of trouble (which includes NOT getting busted for weed) and I’ll turn my head the other way. I wont condone it, but I wont bitch about it either.” This gives empowerment to your son. I’m sure he’s feeling powerless right now, which I’m sure is the root of his frustration.
I’m pretty sure my kid started smoking when he was about 15. Of course he always denied it. But it was never an issue with me as he kept his grades up and eventually graduated just last year. Which is why I never really pressed the issue.
And might not let you meet your grandchildren, nor be willing to take care of you in your dotage. It’s his life to fuck up, and 16 is pretty old–old enough to emancipate and quit high school in various jurisdictions. It would be different if the kid were 12.
Why can’t you (royal, not *just *you) see that forbidding an older teen from doing anything that they clearly have easy access to–whether it’s dyeing their hair blue, dating a specific person, having sex, or enjoying marijuana–isn’t going to do anything but alienate the teen in question?
Whether or not an activity is forbidden and/or illegal, this teen has proven he is not going to stop. The right response is not to forbid it harder, start opening his mail, and ask his counselor for information on what he’s discussing in therapy. And, not to pile on, but this is not the OP’s first thread that indicates he may have lost control of his life. Maybe he needs to admit that he’s lost control of his child and let a professional take over, rather than using the internet as a sounding-board. If the solution involves removing himself from the situation because his wife has chosen to enable her child for years rather than discipline him BEFORE it was too late (because now is waaay too late), then he should consider that.
I speak from experience. My sister was a lesbian and voluntarily got in a relationship with a much-older woman at age 17. My mom went into psycho-stalker mode to break them up, and my sister didn’t know a single moment of privacy until she moved out for college. Now it’s 10 years later and, while they still have a relationship, it was irreparably damaged by my mom’s ridiculous actions. Drugs are illegal and my sister’s relationship was not, so it’s not quite the same, but futile actions are futile. OP needs to stop doing what he’s doing, because it hasn’t worked yet. For the sake of his future relationship with his son, not to mention his own sanity.
I drank heavily and smoked some when I was in High School and got straight A’s because then and now I’m very good at the concept of “work hard, play hard.” I got what I needed done first, then I partied my ass off. (Less of the hardcore partying at my current age, but I like to think I still know how to have fun.)
But I’ve known a lot of people over a lot of years, some of whom didn’t understand the concept. They knew how to party, and how to put it ahead of what was important in life. The OP’s stepson sounds like that, as the OP has informed us he is in serious dangerous of failing to graduate High School. That is not the same as your son who was probably engaging in normal teenager recreational drug/alcohol use, but who still (from what I can tell) maintained his grades/future prospects.
If you don’t graduate High School in this day and age you’re fucked, you’re a failure and there is an enormous likelihood your life amounts to nothing.
I’ve known a lot of people like OP’s stepson, and I don’t think marijuana made them the way they are. I think marijuana is something that is fun to do (everyone knows that), and some people at a certain point in life evolve into losers. For some losers, part of being a loser is that in addition to basically not doing anything with your self you smoke a huge amount of pot because it’s fun and fills the hours. I think the heavy marijuana use is a symptom of general loserdom as opposed to the cause. I don’t believe marijuana is akin to alcohol where heavy use can in and of itself seem to cause a condition that in itself is your major problem.
If someone thinks that failing high school and smoking pot all the time is what they should be doing, you are a failure of a parent if you don’t try to stop that. I have no real opinion on whether you should let teenagers smoke pot or not, I probably wouldn’t but I don’t really care. But your job as a parent is to try your best to keep your kid from growing up into a loser/failure that cannot hold a job and has no income (basically someone like you for example, based on your many threads showing you have a terrible life, low income, poor personal relationships, poor physical fitness etc.)
If I was a father I’d rather not know my son than see him become such a wreck.
I cannot imagine any circumstances that would drive me to feel that way.
I know lots of people who have disowned their children, usually after many, many years of suffering various forms of abuse (physical or mental), nearly (or actually) bankrupting themselves trying to repeatedly bail child out of problems they’ve created for themselves or etc. For my grandparents the final straw back in the day, after spending untold amounts of money on their “black sheep” son (one of my uncles, obv) was when, at the age of 42 he was convicted of raping several of his own children and went to prison for many years. When he finally got out (they were quite old by then), they had nothing to do with him, they also never visited him in prison, either.
Some people are monsters, thus some people’s children are monsters. While some parents enable those monsters by keeping the parental relationship, some eventually wise up like my grandparents did (although they had invested a huge amount of money and emotional capital into the shitbag before they disowned him.)
I would be curious to know if you think this is a nature/nurture issue. Sure, a lot of it has to do with how the parent evaluates and nurtures a kid’s nature, but do you think it’s more the kid’s fault for becoming a loser, or do you lay most of it on the parenting?
ETA: Unfair question, let me narrow it down. How about the OP kid?
I’m kind of glad that Rachellelogram posted last here, because her line of thinking is exactly what I’ve run up against when I’ve tried talking to parenting “experts” and even my stepson’s own psychologist (yes, I have been to sessions with him). “By stopping him from doing something he loves, you’re going to make him hate you.” It’s even more convenient that Rachellelogram threw in a false equivalency about how her own mom broke up her sister’s relationship and her sister (rightly) hated her for it.
To me, this is more like preventing my stepson from putting his hand on a hot stove. Maybe he really wanted to put his hand there. But it’s going to burn him, maybe scar him for life. Do I stop him from touching the stove because “he might hate me” if I do that? No, and I’d be a bad parent if I didn’t. I don’t know how I’d feel if he was using and I didn’t see any bad effects from it. I’ve known casual users and heavy users. Some were affected, some weren’t. My son is affected by it. It’s killed his grades and potentially his future, it’s made him so paranoid he threatens people with physical assault if they try to enter his room, it’s caused him to lose interest in pretty much anything other than watching YouTube and TV (although it’s some consolation that he still goes out with friends and his girlfriend). This is the hot stove. I want to take his hand away from that.
The other thing that frustrates me is the people who conflate marijuana legalization and the politics of that with what I’m trying to do. There is a certain group of people I meet who are so caught up in proving that pot is a wonder drug they refuse to think there might be bad side effects to its use. Therefore, these people say, “let him smoke all he wants, even buy him more”. I say to these people, “You live with him then.” Ironically, I’m actually still pro-legalization even after this. I think the illegal aspect of it stops people who need help from getting it. And yes, selfishly, I do not want to get in trouble if he gets caught with it while he’s still a minor. But wanting it to be legal doesn’t blind me to the effects it’s had on him. I wouldn’t want alcohol to be illegal, either, but I’ve met enough alcoholics to know it can do serious damage in the wrong hands.
Someone asked about how his mom is handling it. “Badly” sums it up. They argue a lot, she wishes he would leave and never come back when he’s not around. But on the other hand, she is so inconsistent in her punishments that she’s counterproductive. She’ll threaten to ground him for two or three months for the latest bust (in the last 18 months we have caught him 4-5 times with pot, 4-5 more times with bongs or vaporizers or the like). Then a couple nights later she’ll forget about the grounding and let him go to a concert. Or she’ll just let him wander off with friends. I get home late from work and ask “where is (stepson)? Isn’t he grounded?” “Oh yeah, I forgot that.” My wife is an extremely intelligent person in most respects but she seems to have no concept of sticking to her word or being consistent with her policies. She’ll blow up in as big a rage if he accidentally breaks a glass in the sink as if he’d been caught with a dimebag. I’ve given up understanding her and it’s been the source of a lot of argument between us.
I don’t know if I’ll call the police. But I’m at the end of my rope. The only time I considered it was when he went missing for 48 hours and refused to tell us where he was. That was pretty scary. We called the friends we knew, they didn’t know where he was. That was a low point I think. I think we got through to him that he wasn’t to do that again, but you don’t know. Teenagers think they’re bulletproof.
I think I have to address the question someone brought up of my own mental health. I did talk about it a little in my OP. Yes, I am very ill. My wife knows but I have hidden it from my employers and the rest of my family. (And I know my stepson doesn’t know because, well, Klonopin sells pretty well and I’m sitting on a goldmine of it.) I posted what I did in the other thread because to be perfectly honest I have little hope of getting any better any time soon. This situation with my stepson isn’t going away. The clusterfuck at work I’ve discussed elsewhere is about ready to explode. My wife and I aren’t getting along as well any more. I have no friends and no hobbies. I live hundreds of miles away from the nearest relative. I used to live in a foreign country and I want to move back but visa issues have repeatedly stopped me despite being wanted for employment there. (At this point my wife has told me she wouldn’t mind me living elsewhere as long as I was still making coin and we had plans to get back together.) Really, I am running out of things to live for. I was away on business for a week a while back and neither my kids nor my wife particularly missed me. I see the bridge every day.
Does this mean I probably don’t have a good perspective on life? I suppose so. Does it mean that I shouldn’t try while I’m able to do something right by my stepson? We as humans don’t get to live forever, but we can leave a legacy beyond us. If I could watch my stepson graduate from school, it might give me a reason to live. If I could watch him break free from his problems, it might make me happy. I don’t want him to get better for myself, but it’s a nice side benefit.
I appreciate everyone who wants to support me. I have been reading what you’ve written, and am trying to learn. I haven’t been perfect (and I will not blame that on my own mental health problems). I had no kids of my own before getting married. It is not easy being a stepdad, yes. It is like being a new king while the old king still lives–at the first sign of trouble the old king is wanted again. But I will try because I have to.
My theory is his son is doing this because he’s got two towering infernos standing over him telling him "You’ve got so much potential. “You could be this, you could be that.” I know to the adult mind that sort of rhetoric sounds like positive reinforcement, but to the mind of a teenager, it just sounds repressive and suffocating.
My hypothesis is, if the Dad backs off just a little bit and becomes a little more progressive, like one of the “cool or Hip” Dads, his son might be more willing to make an effort in school. It’s human nature, we tend to do things for people we like.
I’m with you on the school thing.When I had my kids, my first and foremost thought was 'Just graduate HS, you don’t have to be a straight A student, but please, for the love of god, graduate HS!"