My oldest DS is 20, but acts like he’s 14. My 12 year old acts older than him.
He has always been lazy, he never bothered with school (he went, but only did what he needed to do), he doesn’t care about how he looks, spends all his money on shite (thankfully not alcohol or drugs, but computer games, crisps, sweets, fizzy pop, biscuits etc) and generally just acts extremely immature.
He is at college, his dad and I personally think he is kidding himself on with college, it’s to be a personal trainer, but he doesn’t eat properly or train, doesn’t study, so we can’t see this going anyway. Of course we don’t tell him this, and we try to encourage him as much as possible, and try to get him to show us his college work and tell us what he’s doing but he doesn’t tell/show us, and just tells us he is passing his test!
His room is disgusting and I mean disgusting. Whenever he opens his bedroom door, the smell that comes from it is terrible and even my younger children complain about it. He leaves clean clothes which I’ve washed and ironed on the floor in a pile, mixed with dirty clothes. He takes food upstairs and it gets left uneaten for days, so the plates are encrusted with food, he never uses a bin so the rubbish is scattered all over the floor.
He shares a bathroom with his younger brother but he never takes his turn to clean it, smelly towels left all over the floor, his empty shampoo/soap bottles cluttering up the shower.
He has eczema and has to get special cleaning products from the doctor, but he hasn’t been back to see the doctor in months, and the products have run out.
He constantly argues with us.
Now this is something he has always done, and it doesn’t matter what we do/say to him it doesn’t make any difference. I have tried helping him clean the room, to show how lovely it can be when it’s nice, it doesn’t matter, I have tried not cleaning his clothes, he just wears dirty clothes and will take his dads socks/underwear and wear that. We have tried speaking to him in a calm manner (I have been in tears in front of him), it doesn’t work, I have screamed and shouted at him, it doesn’t matter, nothing works.
He has a girlfriend (which we are really pleased about) we thought this would make him buck up his ideas, it it didn’t. Again we spoke to him about this, and all he said was “girlfriends room is like that too”.
He has started to stay at his girlfriends parents house and whenever he is away, the calm that descends on the house is fabulous, and TBH I actually dread when he returns home.
He works with an agency so it works round about his college hours, but he wants to do minimum hours as possible so he can spend it with his girlfriend. I’ve tried to tell him he can’t do this as his student loan won’t cover everything and that he needs to work to help boost his funds. He never has any money as he spends it all, so therefore he needs to ask me, and if I say I’m not giving you any money he just says, well I just won’t bother going to college or work. He also threatens not to babysit his younger siblings if I don’t give him money (we don’t have any other family that we could ask to babysit).
AIBU I’m feeling like this, can anyone give me any ideas as to how I can make his see what he is like. My other 2 children are not like this, they are the complete opposite.