Hello, this is my first post here. My 18 year old son is about to start exams. What a nightmare this last year has been. He's always been academic and worked hard to get good results so was expected to do well, with the right amount of work and preparation. His plan for years has been to go to university and he wants to teach.
Spanner in the works a year ago when he got his first girlfriend, she's someone we thought was a lovely girl who was part of his group of friends. They got together just before AS exams and his results were poor - 2 Ds, an E and a U.
This girlfriend has turned out to be manipulative and incredibly clingy and they are now virtually living together as he stays at her house 4 nights out of 7, sometimes more. If they're apart for whatever reason then his phone is ringing constantly (Christmas afternoon for instance, he left his phone in the living room while he took a very quick shower and in those few minutes he had 11 missed calls from her). She's also in Year 13 but has almost given up on her studies, she's dropped one A level because she didn't like the teacher so has abandoned plans for university. A big concern we have is that she's trying to stop him going as well, all of their group of friends are going apart from her, and she can scupper his exams by demanding his time when he should be revising...or she could get pregnant.
When he's here we're not seeing much revision being done, she just sits here playing on her phone while he's working. His mocks weren't brilliant, just a very slight improvement on his AS results. School are supervising him doing work during a couple of free periods and at parents evening in March he agreed that he'd spend more time at home without her to get work done. That's happened twice.
His uni application went in on deadline day, and now we're nagging him about sorting out his student finance application. He applied to three universities, all came back with conditional offers but he didn't have a prayer of getting the points needed for two of them.
It's so difficult when they're this age, adults, because there's absolutely nothing we can do. We've resorted to bribery. There's a weekend in London for them if he gets the grades he needs and just before he goes to uni. He loves London, she casually sat there the other day and said "I hate London".
So, that's where we are in our house with our Year 13 student...