Parenting a 20 yr old who feels like a failure

[IrianOfW]

I don't know what to do about my son. Well I do as I am doing it atm - nothing! I have decided to be totally hands off as nothing I do appears to help.

DS was OK at primary - above average but not brilliant. Secondary school he was doing well - we were pleased with his improvement...until he started GCSEs and the pressure was applied from school and he just fell further and further behind. Got very poor results.

Went to college to do a BTEC in a practical subject. Did well in first year. Second year he found harder but completed Level 2 then chose to leave to look for work. He found an apprenticeship fitting audiovisual equipment - mainly fitting speakers, amps and players, testing and fixing problems as they arose. Only after he was offered the post and had accepted it did he discover the course component was a Level 3 in computing at the same college. He was expected to go from making furniture to creating websites and databases. He wasn't happy as he reckoned it was too big a jump and irrelevant to the job he was doing. It was really hard but he stuck it out for a year - did most of the assignments OK (with help from me as I work in the field!) but in the end he just couldn't keep up and the backlog was insurmountable. During all this time whenever he summoned the courage to approach his tutor for assistance he was told to use the internet to get help. He was stressed and miserable. In the end he was told to leave the course and as a consequence lost his job.

We wrote a detailed letter to the college explaining our concerns and got the usual arse-covering and denial in response. Waste of time. What we wanted was an apology to our son and some appreciation that he was put on a course that was not suitable for him.

We now have a 20 year old who believes he is stupid, can't do anything, fails at everything. He is not stupid, he worked extremely hard at his apprenticeship and did well at the work component and I truly believe he was let down badly. He is looking for work but is not nervous of anything that requires him to use his brain in case he 'fucks it up again'.

It's such a mess

[FireflyGirl]

I'm not sure this is the right topic for this sort of post, Irian.

You could try posting it in chat, there's a lot more traffic there?

Hope you get some useful advice