TLDR: Tell me the most pea-brained things your child did, and how they've turned out 15 years later.
This is mostly lighthearted - please no armchair diagnoses of ADHD, ASD, etc
I have a wonderful 12yo son. He's got the memory of a goldfish and the attention span of a hamster. Organisational skills are zero. Won't use a diary, despite me giving him one and showing him how to use it effectively.
He's constantly losing things at school. I've just had to fork out another £50 for lost PE kit items (I got them in the next size up, so they're effectively next year's kit and I don't feel too out of pocket).
I've had some success in getting him to remember to go to his music lessons in school by making him pay for the ones he misses (suddenly he's found the ability to check the timing and set an alarm on his phone).
Yesterday, he managed to miss his school bus home - the school is a 45 drive from home - but he realised rather than making me do a 90 minutes round trip, he could get back to our town on a mixture of Underground and overground trains. He had his bank card with him and phoned to tell me his plan. I, of course, was having kittens at the thought of him navigating his way around public transport, but he tagged along with some streetwise friends who travel on the tube to school usually, and they took him as far as the overground. He managed to get back home to our town on the train. Hooray! Except, he lost his wallet somewhere along the way. [facepalm].
This is him all over. Confident in a way, but clueless and not at all able to organise his thoughts and his belongings so that things like this don't happen. If ever I try to talk to him about something in advance - like how he can make sure he doesn't lose his wallet by keeping it zipped up in a bag and not in his hip pocket, he gets narky and won't accept that it's a possibility that he might need some help with - then it all goes wrong.
He has trouble taking responsibility for his mistakes and, I think this impedes his ability to think ahead and avoid things going wrong.
Please tell me this is normal. Please tell me about your now adult sons and daughters who were like this but grew up to be capable adults who did not go through life in a fog of lost documents and missed appointments. He's sending me prematurely grey.
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Please reassure me my 12yo will become an OK adult
70 replies
Covert19 · 06/05/2021 18:24
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