New Problems with our Teen

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I have no good advice for you, but just wanted to let you know that what you describe sounds sooo familiar to me. We also have a 17-year-old son, and struggle between wanting to push him to meet his potential and meeting him where he is and gently guiding him forward. It is so incredibly hard to separate teenage angst from Asperger's from life-long anxiety issues for us!

Socially and emotionally, our child seems to be at least a few years behind his peers, while physically and intellectually he is at or ahead of most of them. We take things day by day and do our best, but sometimes....man, this parenting gig is tough!

You're not alone. That's what I really wanted to convey to you. Hang in there!

Hi catbalou

Never was a great sailor but as a youngster went sailing with my dad on Zeekoevlei (sp?) – Hippo lake, near Cape Town (must have had hippos there in the very early days).

Thanks for your comments. Mostly our son just did freehand drawing. When he was young I thought he might graduate to the 3D programs you talk about and we bought several. We even downloaded Maya (one of the pre-eminent adult programs) with an instruction book, but it soon became clear this was completely beyond him. One program he did really enjoy and played with a whole lot was a Microsoft program called 3D movie maker, which relatively simply allows you to make small animated movies. (Fans of this program on the internet have extended the program far beyond its original boundaries and some quite good little movies have been made on the internet; warning: the 3dmm forum does not always appear to have child friendly content). I think while old this is a program well worth picking up on ebay if you can. I will check out the other programs you mentioned, thanks, although the problem about a career in this field is that Maya and similar programs are quite difficult and way beyond our son’s abilities.

Yeah I fully agree that our son will never enjoy reading the books I enjoy. I believe this is because of executive function failure ie when reading a book he cannot envisage the sort of things I am envisaging eg where the character is (in time and place), why the character reacts in a particular way, how the character might react etc. I read of another Asperger child who could not understand why a story was not told simply in a chronological fashion. I saw a youtube video of Temple Grandin yesterday who said she enjoyed movies like Wallace and Gromit, but found relationship movies simply boring. When our son was little he liked slapstick moments in books or movies, but seemed unable to read a whole story. I think the best we can hope for is that he may read books on subjects he is particularly interested in. Believe me, I have tried every sort of book imaginable. He will read Mad Magazines, and once himself read a book on Bruce Lee, but basically has no interest in reading.

Yeah I agree our son is basically stressed; hopefully he and we can work through this.

@postcards57

I partly agree and partly disagree.

I disagree that a lot of kids of his age skip classes and leave; at least this is not the case where we are. The school counsellor indicated I think that there are about forty kids having difficulties sufficient to be referred to him, in a school of about 1100, which is not a high percentage.

The second point I would disagree is some implication in your post that he does not need to be responsible for his actions. As his mother said this morning, he would get away with “murder” if he could. If he could he would just sit in his room on the internet, making occasional forays to the fridge or pantry when he got peckish (or heading down to the local fish and chip shop for food and a fizzy drink if he had money). He’s living in the real world and has to make adjustments to live in the real world (as do we all). We have been making quite a lot of effort to assist him and get him back on track with his academic work (so he can at least get some sort of qualification on leaving the school), and then he pretends to get ready for school and go, but instead decides to stay home instead of facing up to the realities. We have repeatedly told him to come to us or the school counsellor if he was having difficulties, and he has not done so. This is unacceptable. He has been told and must know that his behavior is causing major stress for his mother, who has a mental illness.

On the other hand we do understand that the world is getting too difficult for him. He cannot understand the world and cannot organise himself to deal with matters even if he could. He is in the teenage years which are difficult for most children. He is encountering increasing pressure from the school and his parents to meet minimum academic standards. I think while I was angry yesterday at his deceptive action my main feeling about the matter is sadness that our son cannot seemingly cope at a low level, cannot progress the precocious artistic/cartooning talent he originally displayed and that his life is likely to be difficult and possibly unfulfilling.

I do understand that not going to school and hiding away in the wardrobe ostensibly so his mother would not notice is disturbed behavior and a sign that he is just not coping. We did talk to him last night although I don’t think we really got to the bottom of things. His thinking is frequently somewhat disordered and he will repeatedly say everything is all right when it is not. He seems to have an avoidant personality where he thinks that if he tells a lie, the problem will go away.

Although we need (and I believe are) strongly supportive I am not completely sure about expressing unconditional love and devotion to his cause. My mother had that attitude and while I am grateful for that I just took some advantage of it as a child. Children are self centred and need guidance and to learn some responsibility and caring.

The school is fully aware of his diagnosis. I did not think they were doing enough previously but as his behaviour has been worsening, more levels of support are being brought into play. He is now (meant to be) spending all his free spells in the counselling rooms and after this latest incident I understand some formal counselling is to be given. We cannot and he cannot keep pretending he is normal and coping when he is not.

@za

Thanks for your thoughts. At least in your case your son is intellectually advanced, which can hopefully enable him to find a satisfying career in time. Our son is academically behind, and he never progressed his outstanding and precocious cartooning talent into other forms of cartooning or into other forms of art generally. Still the talent remains and maybe he can find some niche in time which is satisfying for him.

It is harder with a teenager, as obviously that is a difficult period in many people's lives. Our son when young was a very happy child laughing infectiously much of the time. He is still not depressed I think but laughs infrequently now.

As you write, it is hard to push your teenager to meet the objectively required standards while not making it too stressful for him or her. We need to make even greater efforts for him to communicate his problems to us, so that we can face up to them and work through them.

Best of luck with your teen!

Respectfully, passive aggressive posts like postcards57 making spurious attacks in the guise of being "helpful" are not helpful.

What I wrote: "Although we need (and I believe are) strongly supportive I am not completely sure about expressing unconditional love and devotion to his cause. My mother had that attitude and while I am grateful for that I just took some advantage of it as a child".

How you misrepresented this: "OK, if you believe that expressing unconditional love and devotion, being on his side etc. is wrong, then we do disagree, fundamentally, about the role of parents".

I had already pointed out that we are of course strongly supportive of our son. What may be the issue is one of semantics viz yes, we are always there for our son, but we do not support him when he deliberately and knowingly does something wrong.

About the lesser issue of whether most kids like or dislike school, I do not have the figures to support this, so will not make a comment except to note the obvious that some kids love school and some kids hate it, and probably most kids are in the middle of that spectrum, and it is certainly not universal that kids are reluctant to go, where I live, anyway. Most NT kids (and others) like meeting their friends at school. Again it serves little purpose to suggest that I had stated that the fact our son did not go to school was an "incomprehensible disaster". The issue was that we have been spending a lot of time with our son trying to get him up to speed, and then he pretended to go to school and lied to us in the process. This is essentially a trust issue, although obviously we are aware that our son has issues and we must be sensitive to that.

He is much better today and back on track.

Despite this, best wishes to you and your kids, postcards57

I am glad your son had a better day and seems to be on track again.

I think the difficult thing at your son's age is that, if things haven't come together yet, you do have to wonder if they might not, ie that your child may not reach independence. And I think what makes it even more difficult is that for the first time your child may be starting to wonder the same thing. That is the factor that I have thought about as I've read your threads and comments: his son may not be seeing a future for himself anymore. Most of our kids aren't clueless; they can get a sense of where they stand in the world, and all the things you are seeing and worrying about, are probably things he has been seeing and worrying about, too. Will he be able to do well enough? Will he be able to get a job? Will his gifts work for him? These sort of questions come to a peak for almost any child as they near the end of High School, and probably are magnified exponentially when there are obvious challenges.

I think that most of us spend a lot of time asking our kids to dig deeper and try harder than anyone else around them has to, and that most of us sell that by indirectly promising a pay off, that down the road it will get easier, or that they will get a job they enjoy, and so on. It is usually sold by asking our kids to look to their futures.

So what happens when the child no longer believes in that future?

I think that the natural answer is that the realization is going to eat into his willingness to keep tackling challenges and unpleasant tasks.

Basically, I am wondering if you have started to see mini rebellions related to an erosion of hope. If so, that process is likely to get much more difficult before it gets better.

It has to be really hard. For everyone. Parents, child, family. We know that a certain percentage of those with ASD may not be able to live independently, and we all hope that won't be me, or my child. But sometimes it is, and the question becomes, what do you use as the driving force to push forward and learn after coming to that realization?

I think that after that point you shift the focus from an independent life to a meaningful life. There are members on this forum that cannot support themselves but have built lives they feel good about, and that contribute to society through art, blogs, and other less-than-profitable activities (I am just now realizing that the later may actually be the primary difference between those happy with their situations, v. those who get biter). It was a member like that who first helped me understand why my son couldn't write; she made a big difference in my life. It may not have been profitable, but it was meaningful.

Maybe your son needs to take a breather from academics, slow it down, so he can re-discover the things that hold meaning to him. To do things that give him joy and spark, just because they give him joy and spark. Education can sometimes really squash that in a child, opposite of the result educators hope for when they teach, and there are many good reasons to fight that tide and actually encourage the child to do a few things simply because they feel good to do. I went through that with my son in middle school, he had so much hard work to do, and I saw it changing who he was. It got to the point that if I suggested he do a creative activity of the sort he had spent his whole childhood doing, he would tell me there was no point, all his ideas had gone out of his head. That broke my heart, and I knew it had to change. Which it did, thankfully.

Anyway, I think it is a good time to make sure your son knows, and gets it integrated into his heart, that even if he can't create an independent adult life, perhaps he can create a meaningful one. A different road, and a more difficult one to find role models for, but I think it would help if you start integrating that concept into your conversations. He may well have to take a different path than the world teaches to kids, and there isn't much in a typical childhood to prepare one for that. Adding it in doesn't have to write-off the future for the child if done right: to me, the idea is to expand the possibilities of what the future might look like.

Anyway, I hope this has made some sense. If I've missed the boat with what is going on with your child, I've missed the boat, but maybe it will strike a chord with someone else.

Best of luck to both of you.

Thank you as ever for your thoughtful post. You are kind to post such a lot of good advice when you had indicated you yourself were under some stress.

While I don’t think we are yet at that point, as time goes on our son seems to have a great deal of difficulty coping with life’s/school’s normal demands. His mother and I have done a lot of thinking about this and, while we are hoping that lack of an independent life will not be the case, it must be admitted this is certainly not an impossibility.

Basically we are having to spoonfeed him a lot to try and get through the academics in his second last year of school. Today after going quite well with his first fifty minutes of revision and after a half hour break he took over half an hour to get through one quite simple half page of his Media Studies. (He said he has a “brain fog”). Later today he went somewhat better again. But dealing with the academic demands on him is proving really difficult.

Both I and my wife are sure that if he currently were to get a basic holiday job (eg shelf stacking at the local supermarket) he would not last in it a day (because he would not listen to or follow instructions). Actually he went for a job interview for shelf stacking about a year ago and was turned down, as it was immediately apparent to the supermarket that he was very socially inept. (To be fair at the same age I was fired after one day at my first job in a fastfood restaurant!). As I currently have my own small business it would probably be possible when school finishes for him to work for me (albeit I could only afford to pay him pocket money, but at least he would be getting some work experience, without having the pressure of “real” employment).

He has no real sense of money nor basic arithmetic nor much idea of what things are worth. It is possible he may do a half year course next year on “financial literacy”. That might be of practical use to him, although he is reluctant to do it as opposed to the academic (albeit easier academic) courses he is presently doing (and presently unfortunately in the main failing).

Admittedly probably not unlike a fair proportion of teenagers, he generally has no real sense of responsibility. If we did not check on him all the time nothing would get done. He will never voluntarily do any of his academic work. He has no responsibility about looking after the dog. When I put up a small tent with him I noticed I was doing all the work. Unless told to do so he basically will never voluntarily do anything he does not want to (ie no academics, no walking the dog, no chores) although to be fair he is not very rebellious about following instructions.

You raise an interesting question as to whether he is gaining an insight into his condition and that is discouraging him. I think at least to some degree that has been the case for some years. On the other hand he does not seem to realise he has a problem, face up to reality, and very rarely asks for help. Or at the least if he is realising the realities of his position, he does not communicate it.

One unfortunate thing is, in some ways he seems to be regressing. He had friends at twelve and got on quite well with them. Five years later he has no real friends. When he was younger he drew cartoons and also made little movies, but in more recent years he has become much more passive, largely listening to rap music etc. He doesn’t even play video games much anymore. (He does sometimes mix and match music on some program but not much). Partly this is because when he was younger his mother arranged play sessions etc with friends. But after a while, he seemed to be getting on less well with his friends and then they seemed to reject him. With his academics he is clearly managing to cope less and less the harder the work gets in the later years of school.

I can see how a kind of learned helplessness may take over. I note from this forum that some ASD persons have significant academic skills. It is unclear however whether this is the case with our son (although he has artistic talent). In general he is very slow on the uptake, tends to think in a rather concrete fashion and has difficulty in systematising information and thinking in abstract terms. On the other hand sometimes he seems quite “with it”. He was adjudged to be of above average intelligence by a psychologist. His sister is an A student at university. He did not have some of the difficulties with eg “theory of mind” tests that aspergers children typically have. Say today the first fifty minutes of revision went well, with his comments and understanding seeming not much different from what one would expect of a typical seventeen year old. Then after a break he just seemed to lose it, sitting looking at a quite straightforward page for half an hour without any progress. I cannot understand this sort of thing, but have been reading on other threads about ASD persons minds having a brain fog which can be alleviated by rest, exercise and possibly some types of foods. (After a while he got going with his work again). Is the problem more fundamental or do we just need to find what works for him? Could he achieve adequately in the right environment, where he can control the environment, unlike school where in the main there are lots of distractions? (although he does have a reader for his exams, sits them otherwise alone in a room and also gets extra time for them).

To say he cannot be independent in life while not impossible is I think questionable at this point. We have a friend who had now nineteen year old son with I think bigger problems than our son. But that boy’s particularly good mother finally got him a job in a mailroom (after he left school early owing to major difficulties there and apparently did nothing for nearly a year) and he has managed to stick at his job now for two years (although his mother says that he would not be able to cope if they made him clear floor 13 before floor 14!) At nineteen, although admittedly in part from living at home, that other child has saved up about half the money which would be needed for deposit on a small house. He still has lots of problems, but I am pretty sure is on the right track to have at least moderate success in life and live independently.

At this point it may be that our son matures in time, or it may be that some medication can make a real difference (as Ritalin does in fact seem to be doing at the moment) and his mother and I do hope that at some point he will meet and marry a “motherly” type girlfriend who can act as a mother for him as well as a partner. I think we are thinking at this stage of a more routine, non academic career, rather than the idea of him not being able to support himself at all.

It is possible we are too optimistic. Our son has chosen (easier) academic courses for his final year of school, which are contingent on him passing all or at least most of his courses this year, something which is not looking particularly hopeful at this point. (He has just written a practice exam at home and unfortunately it is far from even a passing grade in my view). The school counsellor (who has more direct feedback from his teachers and sees him in the school environment) thinks his proposed courses are too optimistic and that he should in fact drop at least one course this year. But even if he does effectively crash out this second last year of school, this does not by any means mean he could not obtain some more basic type of job, presuming he matures, learns some responsibility and how to get along with people well enough to get and keep such a job.

At this point we are just dealing with each day, week and year as it comes!

Best of luck for you and your family too.

You know, I get a version of brain fog. Sometimes more constant, sometimes more in spells. I can literally come to a realization that I've just spent 10 minutes staring and at a wall and be unsure why or what I was thinking about. People can jolt me out of it, or at least temporarily. But, because it is usually balanced by other (and less frequent) moments of intense brilliance, where everything rushes together and I suddenly finish a task or solve a difficult problem, I've kind of gotten away with it all these years. I think there could be some relevant observations in my experience: first, along with the diet and exercise variables, this gets worse when I am having to go through the motions and am not really living. When I not doing things that I love to do, and have not had an opportunity for a while to feel the joy of solving something interesting. Second, the frequency has some connection to depression.

If this were my son, I would want to regain the sense that he is living, and not just going through the motions. I cannot continue long without that feeling, of feeling charged up and inspired. I need it to keep on moving forward. I tend to believe everyone does, and so I'm always encouraging my kids to find it and pursue it, but maybe it isn't always true for others to the same extent it is for me. Still, it could be true for your son: that he needs that internal charge somewhere in his life to help him with the tasks he has to do but lacks inspiration for. You know the feeling I'm talking about? The one that feeds your soul?

You talk about a child that once had things he loved to do, but no longer does. In your description, I hear a child that sounds like he is determined to go through the motions of the things he is supposed to be doing, but who seems to be unable to find any internal satisfaction or motivation in it. I don't think that is a sustainable pattern for him. I think he needs something more.

I think I would be telling him that it is clear something isn't really working for him, and that it is time to mix things up a little to see if that can make things go better, and make him happier. I would chuck some of the academics in favor of sampling extra-curricular activities that have some chance of making him feel charged up and inspired. You may have to drag him into it: a person can get so stuck in the mud that nothing sounds interesting or exciting, and you actually resist doing things you used to love because they seem pointless, too. But I know with me that if I can just get myself through the start, and the first few sessions of resistance, I'll start to respond to it.

Don't be afraid to sample anything and everything. Find new directions.

I think I would also take him to work with me. Since you do have your business, you can offer him the luxury of sampling different skills in a work place, to see if there are any surprises there. Don't limit it to the mundane tasks: let him try everything (to the extent you safely can without costing your business thousands of dollars. Losing a few hundred in this experiment? Let it happen). You can tell him, again, that you can see things aren't working that well for him, and you'd like to let him try out a wider variety of tasks to see what he likes and responds to.

I have always been terrible at anything routine or mundane, and I have slow work speed. It made keeping jobs as a teen an interesting exercise. I work slow in my career, as well, but since there are opportunities to offset that by occasionally solving in half an hour an issue worth thousands of dollars, I get away with it and have actually done really well. I see in both my kids similar mixed bags of traits, I've always felt that if they don't get a chance to be occasionally brilliant in a job, they won't make it in that job at all.

I would look at volunteer positions for your son, as well. My son had his first volunteer job last spring and it went quite well. They ran it like a paid job, which taught him responsibility, but since it wasn't paid, it wouldn't have hurt his future job prospects if he had ended up fired. In what may seem like an odd match for an Aspie, he went to work in his former after-school daycare. Some days he didn't like it, some days he had a great time. I thought it was a very good overall experience of what real work will like. A volunteer job that gives your son similar exposure could also be helpful.

I've learned, from reading this board all these years, that 18 to 25 can be difficult years for those with AS. Many are still developing key maturity and life skills during a time many assume they should have already acquired them. They may think they have them when they don't, or see that they don't and consider it hopeless, and so on. I think my point is more that everyone in your family, including your son, has to be prepared for the idea that he shouldn't be packing up and leaving at 18, or 21, or 22 (which I think you already are). Allow yourselves to see the existence of a little extra time to just experiment and try things on, if you don't already.

Have you and your wife, or anybody at your son's school considered a reduced courseload for your son? My son, who is your son's age, is able to take three classes a term instead of four. It's not a hard thing -- at least in Ontario, Canada -- to arrange, and makes a world of difference in terms of my son's academic stamina.

Re: the brain fog thing. My son described this exact same phenomenon toward the end of last semester. In fact, he described it as "being in a fog"; and by the end of semester had completely shut down academically. Fortunately, my husband and I were able to contact counselors and teachers at my son's school to explain the situation and get some accommodation; this term we're working more proactively with my son's teachers to try to keep the brain fog from setting in.

I'm with DW_a_mom on your considering letting your son take a bit of a break academically. He's got to know at this point that he's not measuring up (in your eyes? in his own eyes? in his teachers/peers' eyes?), and that's a horrible realization to be coming to. Would it be okay for you, he, and your wife to acknowledge that things aren't going as wished academically and take a step back? Perhaps in consultation with administrators at his school?

As I said in a previous post, I really feel for you -- your situation is just so familiar to what we're facing. Not identical, mind you, but similar. I'm glad that you're posting here and hope that you're feeling some support and getting some ideas for how to move forward.

@DW-a-mom

I certainly hear what you are saying about finding something you love and being alive (eg in the words of a famous investor, where you can "tap dance to work every day"). We are following this through with our NT daughter. As I am in a particular profession, I encouraged her to do courses in that in her first year of university, so that she would have the option of entering that profession (as well as encouraging her to do a variety of other courses). She did quite well at the courses in my profession, certainly well enough to be one of the about one third of first years admitted to second year (cut offs at the end of first year level were fairly brutal). But her marks in other subjects were stellar, and so when it came to the crunch, I said that I absolutely agreed with her decision to major in the courses that she obviously loves, rather than following the courses in my profession that she only quite enjoyed.

To do well in a profession (or pretty much anything for that matter) you have to love it so that making the sacrifices involved in getting really good at that can be happily accepted, and even may be no sacrifice at all. It is quite possible to be part of a respectable profession but struggle along at the lower levels of that profession, without enjoyment or satisfactory remuneration and still with stress (I am speaking from personal experience here! - having followed the path of as you say, DW-a-mom, just going through the motions at school and then at university). In our daughter's case it is far better to get on the winning track by fully participating in life, getting great grades etc which has a snowballing effect eg she has a great part time job which can hopefully lead to others like that in future, will hopefully be in line for scholarships etc which will further enhance her potential etc.

It is so different with our son, although maybe it is a question of having to adjust expectations. I'm from a family where it was unthinkable that we would not have gone on to university (although this is not the case in my wife's family). It has been clear from some time that, barring some minor miracle, this is an extremely unlikely outcome for our son. I suppose there is still perhaps the hope that he will come right and that it is better to aim high, with it being easier to retrench than to start doing courses later. Also our son wants to do those (easier) academic courses next year rather than the "practical" courses like financial literacy. I have just asked him why he wants to do those and he after some difficulty (as communication is not his forte) he said it is because he might be able to go to university, and also he does not want to do courses like "financial literacy" as he implies they are mainly done by drop outs from the second last year of school (although I note they can be done by students from the second last or last year of school).

It is hard to know if our son is saying this because I have some implied expectation that the children would go on to university, and he sees his sister doing well there, or if he wants to stay with the status quo, or this is actually to some extent what he wants to do. It is clear this is not really what he wants to do, as he never picks up schoolwork or reads around any of that work unless required to do so. Also objectively he is very, very far from the required standard. I think I would mark his attempt at an exam at home last night as the work of a rather disorganised 12 year old, rather than a seventeen year old. (There is some not unreasonable chance though that he is better with the Ritalin which he has now been on for a couple of weeks, but his understanding of the topics at school is very poor because he was not on Ritalin at the time - owing to an unhelpful psychiatrist earlier in the year who initially refused to re-prescribe Ritalin for him; hopefully I am not clutching at straws here!)

The practical problem with following through on our son's stated wishes is that this will not leave time over the next few months (until exam time) for anything else. He has to concentrate pretty much exclusively on his academic subjects to get through them, also giving him his downtime eg he will only do an hour or two's work this Sunday so he can have a relaxing day and be ready and able to cope with school tomorrow. I cannot take him to work or start introducing him to anything else, as that will just be too stressful for him and will lead him to failing his courses for sure. Last year with intensive coaching he got through all his subjects (albeit with straight Cs).

I do hear what is being said though. Perhaps what is needed is some fairly radical re-thinking as to what is going to work for him. I do love the idea of considering volunteer work for him, and we could try that in the school holidays (presuming he is not able, as is very likely the case, to find paid holiday work then. I have just asked him about this and he said it is a possibility, but to "leave this on the table". Perhaps we need to start being creative and brainstorm what he might like to do, and see if there might be anything he could get into in the holidays. I suppose if he is not needing to be paid for it, there might be a better chance someone could accept him in some field as a general help.

@za - yes, he can drop some of his courses; in fact the school counsellor seems to be strongly suggesting that. And next year our son could do a limited number of courses including re-doing ones he had failed this year, presuming that happens. For the reasons above, including that our son is stating he does not want to do that, we are currently pressing on with a fairly desperate attempt to get him though all his courses this year. Time will tell whether this has been a mistaken decision.

Thanks for both your comments.

I guess that if sticking to current commitments is important to him, then you help him get through it and work the radical re-thinking next semester. The reluctance to drop anything might also be a resistance to change, which is common, but, regardless, I guess he has to be allowed to play out his own choices.

I do wish you all the best, however. It sounds like it is going to be an intense semester for the whole family.

Yes it is certainly difficult. Our son has a mock exam tomorrow at school in media studies. Last weekend I had worked him about 3 1/2 hours on Sunday and on the Monday he skipped school and hid in his wardrobe. So the intent was to work him a bit more on the Saturday and on Sunday to take it easier with just an hour or so's work. Unfortunately despite best intentions it is not working out well.

He did a practice exam on Saturday and as already previously mentioned it was quite a bit short of a passing grade. So today Sunday I got a couple of printouts of achieved and merit exam answers from previous years to show our son what was needed as a minimum for a pass and why the meit answers were better.

Then we spent some time working out how he could improve his answers, keeping it really basic like writing down the question first to keep focus on that, then answering each aspect of the question. I said to pass it is enough to just answer the basics.

An hour or two later I asked him to summarise the key points of what I'd said. Unfortunately our son remembered literally nothing of what I had carefully explained. My frustration obviously showed, he had a bit of a meltdown, this set the dog off ... and things deteriorated from there.

My wife sent him off to have a shower and calm down and he is now playing Sims3, as it is obviously no use trying to do any work after that upsetment. I am now going to write down a schematic of what he needs to do, but the problem is, if the question is a little or much different, this will be of little use. This is all coming down to his lack of academic ability.

It is all seriously raising the question of whether him continuing with his courses this term is really in his best interests. His mother is the keenest on that, given that he has only two partly externally assessed courses, and the school has been in the main fairly helpful about him doing resits when he fails assessments. Also as stated our son wants to carry on with his courses (although he has little insight into what is the best for him).

I need to ensure that I do not let any frustration show. My wife has explained (who has a not too dissimilar mental illness) explains that when she is not functioning it is a complete waste of time for me to try and reiterate the points (albeit that they may seem completely obvious and simple to me). We have agreed that if our son is feeling it is too much he is to tell me. However my wife has pointed out that I need to be aware of the signs that he is not coping. I have pointed out to her that it is imperative though that we do continually question our son on the material being covered, as he is a past master at deflecting issues and saying he has understood something when he has not. But I need to find a very gentle means of questioning, otherwise it all just becomes counterproductive as happened this evening.

We'll see how he goes in his mock exams this week. Failure is expected, but he still has some time to get it together.

(((((((((hoegaandit))))))))) Even though you probably aren't a hug person, there doesn't seem to be much else left to say. Your son will either surprise you and pull it together, or frustrate himself and not pull it together. In a way, he is making a choice, showing his limits.

@DW_a_mom

Well not really a hug person, but the thought is really appreciated; both my wife and I are certainly experiencing a lot of stress at the moment with our son's lack of coping.

(As a complete aside, our daughter is currently doing a minor research paper on the differences between male and female communication on the internet, forums, texting etc and she asked me to review her paper yesterday. I suppose the outcome is to some extent what one would expect, that on a very broad brush view, males tend to communicate facts, directions etc and women tend to socialise, provide support and consequently use emoticons more etc)