Entering Adulthood?

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even a local community college may have a dorm. he would probably find he enjoys it once he is there. I know aspies have difficulty with change and transitions. my son does too. but life does move on. staying in a dorm locally could be a baby step toward independence. and it would be at a natural transition point, less traumatic than being made to leave home for some other reason.

my son specifically wants a community college because he does not want to move away from home or stay in a dorm. One of the options I have is to renovate our garage into a small apartment for him. I think it's a great idea and would help foster some independence, but my wife doesn't agree with me at all.

I think the garage sounds like an excellent idea. We all make mistakes when we first move out, but in that case his first mistakes would probably be small and fixable. What does your wife object to?

What do you think about a program like this one?
http://www.minnesotalifecollege.com

BeeBee

Okay I am sorry to say this but alot of what your saying is stupid. First off I stay in the dorms due to lack of other good options, I hate it, I get 5 hours of sleep a night max, and maybe another couple hour nap in the day time (hard to go to sleep early when others are up til 3-4 making noise and you have very sensitive hearing.) Take computer games from him sure, but I think on the same respect he should be allowed to take TV away from you (it would only be fair) and seriously I think I would retreat farther back to books before trying to be more socialable (and you could hardly get mad at him for doing that.) Also if your going to try to make him be socialable with everyone, beware of the consequences (generally aspies have a hard time telling friends apart from enemies, at least at first. so it might lead to bullying and increased depression, but your all such nice parents.) Okay Im done.

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Good point about possible sensory issues coming into play at a dorm. The problem is, at some point he will need to move out.

but there are quite a few quieter places that he could move out too. Heck just about any place is quieter then a dorm.

_________________
"we never get respect ... never a fair trial
[swearing removed by lau] ... as long as we smile"
Im tired of smiling.

Vote for me in 2020

Agreed!

That's why the garage might be a winner. If Mom's okay with it. Which she isn't. At this point anyway.

Well - my wife feels that it is not necessary. He has his own room, and is responsible for it and the bathroom he uses. Plus she envisions us moving in a few years and doesn't think it's financially a good idea to spend the money to convert a garage. We are still dialoging about it, though. I really believe this would be good for him because it would allow him to be more independent, yet have the support from us that he needs. My son would not last a week in a college dorm. Besides being very naive and gullible about things in life, the whole social aspect of living in a dorm would be overwhelming for him.

aspiedad2

If he could get a private dorm room due to his "disability/handicap" things might work. Refitting the garage does not sound like a good idea because of the isolation. Also it does not give him "a clean break". Don't underestimate your son's ability to adapt, even aspie kids are more resiliant than you think. He might not like it at first, but if the dorms were a total disaster he could still come home. He could also come home on weekends. Some day you will not be here to care for him. Better to shove the little bird out of the nest while you are still here to provide the safety net it he needs it. My aspie son is managing in the dorms although I hear many complaints. Good luck.

Just fyi ...

American Campus Communities of Austin, TX owns about 90 private dorms/student apartment buildings in about a dozen states. They build on or next to college campuses, including community colleges such as Metro/CCD in Denver.

www.studenthousing.com

So if your aspie son or daughter is considering community college and the dorm experience is desired, you might want to check out this option.

I do listen to my son's complaints, but since I live in Wisconsin and he chose to go to college in St Louis all I can do is listen. Before he left I told him if he needed to come home all he had to do was call and he would have a plane ticket immediately. He has never made that choice. He knows he is loved but he wants to make a life for himself as well. And yes, he goes to a private college for which I pay $25,000.00 a year. The dorms are still noisy.

trasitioning from adolesence, to adulthood is hard especially when the times come to chooses to go to college or not.

My mother found it was very difficult to order me to do anything when I was young (even when I was 2 or 3 years old), and the more she pushed the more stubborn I got. Her solution whenever I started to get stubborn or have a tantrum/meltdown was to always present me with two or three choices and let me decide what to do. The choices never included what *I* wanted to do (and the things I chose not to do would invariably show up as choices in a later dispute), but at least it gave me the illusion of having control of the situation. Once the decisions were made, she would hold me to them, 100%, no exceptions. I would scream and fume and cry, and she'd tell me she loved me but that the decision was made and there was no getting out of it.

For example, I didn't like vegetables when I was young, but my mother wasn't planning to raise fussy eaters. She'd offer me a choice between turnip or brussel sprouts with my supper. I could have one or the other (or both!) but "none" wasn't an option. Once the chosen poison was sitting on my plate I had to eat it. The choice then became "do you want to finish your veggies now and have some dessert, or do you want to leave the table now and I'll put this in the fridge for later?" "Later" meant "breakfast". They would keep appearing (cold) at every meal *AS THE MEAL* until I ate them. She would have let me starve to death before she'd let me eat anything else. Now that I'm an adult I can eat almost anything.

Sometimes the choices were more of a thinly veiled threat: "do you want to clean your bedroom, or do you want ME to clean it for you?" I found out that her idea of cleaning my room was to take everything in the room but the bed and some clothing and put it into locked storage for a while.

When I finished high school, my choices were to move out (which I couldn't realistically do), go to university (which I couldn't afford) or get a job and pay my mother rent. She didn't give me the options of unemployment, welfare or "stay home and play video games". Not if I was going to live in *her* house.

When I was 25 my mother said "I'm selling the house and moving. You're not coming with me. You can either find another place to live or you can buy this one." We made a deal to save real-estate fees and property transfer taxes, and suddenly I was a homeowner. The reason I was able to make that decision was because I'd never been allowed to hide from the consequences of my choices and she'd never expected anything less than full independence from me. I was forbidden to say "I can't". It was a curse that would get my mouth washed with soap just like those other seven words you can't say on television.

I'm sorry if the rest of this post seems excessively blunt, but I can't stand to see people coddling their kids and turning them into parasites on society.

You may not be able to force an 18 year old to go to counselling, but you can certainly offer less appealing alternatives while tying participation to benefits. Aspiedad2's son is not entitled to post-secondary education at dad's expense. Once he's 18 or 19 he's no longer entitled to live at home, either. He's never entitled to treat his siblings like crap. You may not think he's mature enough to live alone, but you don't have to tell *him* that. Kids will rise or fall to our expectations of them. He won't grow up as long as he can retreat to the safety of his games. He will live in your home FOREVER if you let him. Mom and Dad won't live forever, so the kids eventually need to grow up and become independent. The alternatives are life under government care, life with relatives or life on the streets.

Addiction to video games is every bit as real as addiction to soft drugs. It's not a physical need (unlike addiction to hard drugs) but offers an escape from reality. If he's avoiding reality so much that it's affecting his ability to lead a normal life (for Aspie-modified values of "normal") then the addiction is serious and he needs to be weaned, RIGHT NOW. Hold an intervention. Take away his security blanket. Yes, it will damage your relationship, but from what I've read it's already too late to avoid that. If he grew up feeling loved then the damage will be temporary as eventually he will look back and see that you were giving him the kick in the a** he so desperately needed to get his life on track.

There were a lot of nights when I thought I hated my mother because all I could see and feel was the pain of the moment. Considering nobody knew about AS back in the 60's and 70's, I'd say she did a heck of a good job. She's still one of my best friends.

Your mother sounds like she did an excellent job preparing you to live independently in the real world. I applaud her. I hope I am doing as well with my own sons. I am glad you understand how much she loves you. I am going to show your posting to my youngest who is currently struggling. I don't know if he is ready to see it, but maybe somewhere along the line he will remember you. God bless, hope your holidays are great! Pink

To Aspiedad2 and Jetson,

So glad to have read your posts. We have an 18 year old daughter and are struggling with the same issues about preparing her to leave the nest. She was kept back in school in elementary school because of her poor social skills, so thankfully she has one more year in high school before she's going to be at the point where we will be encouraging her to leave the nest.

We have a small house that we own nearby, so that's the "plan"... She'll be near enough, but expected to be on her own.

We're currently mulling over whether college should be an option; she's currently not even doing her homework at school...altho some recent grounding may have taken care of that. We're in a holding pattern on the college thing at the moment.

Aspiedad2 - we have very seriously monitored and controlled how much video/TV she's allowed. Today I'm planning to go in and remove the computer games from her computer (which she uses for homework) because that's all I find her doing lately, no matter what else she's supposed to be doing. It sounds mean; but she has no ability to self-monitor nor is she self-motivated to change that behavior.

We have moved her toward some adult behaviors. She now earns money with her chores; she gets paid with a check from us and she's required to take that to the bank and deposit it. She has a checking account which she is just starting to learn to use (there IS a learning curve). She has a debit card for that account, but we haven't turned her loose with that yet! She is expected to go to the grocery store and buy all of her own breakfast and lunch food; any junk food comes from her own money but we reimburse her for the 'real food'. This is an attempt to teach her responsible shopping skills. The second week we did this she came home with 2 boxes of chocolate cereal, sugary drinks, and 5 packages of Oreos. That's when we had to implement the "junk food" caveat. Interestingly, if she has to spend her own money she won't spend it on junk food, she thinks we ought to pay for it. Wrong!

During the summer she was expected to bike the 2 miles to the store and back. We bought her panniers for her bike.

We began to teach her to drive a car, but she's really not interested. However, over the summer we did teach her to use the local bus system and she got pretty good at it.

Occasionally now, when she wants to go somewhere, we expect her to problem solve about how to get there.

None of this has been easy - lots of battles and stubbornness and cries of "I can't do this." But, ya know what.... "I can't do this." is not an option!