FWIW my older teen has been amazing throughout lockdown and I was giving thanks daily that we had avoided the nightmares that I was hearing from other people...
...Then suddenly 3 weeks ago it all changed. I think the reality of all the summer activities being cancelled, combined with the sheer monotony of life at the minute just hit him hard. He has gone from being motivated to study (halfway through GCSEs so was still doing a little bit of work each week as we just don’t know how they will be affected next year), running every other day, being nice to his siblings, graciously vacating the Xbox so that they could watch one of their preferred programmes etc etc to just being a little shit.
He is moody, grumpy, eye rolling, hands lifting, (this is his default position to indicate he is completely blameless in all circumstances) lazy, unmotivated, rude, silent and just generally unpleasant to be around. As a family we have some other significant stresses going on regardless of the pandemic so his behaviour has been particularly galling at a time when DH and I are under a huge amount of stress and are busting a gut daily to try to improve things for our family.
This morning he was supposed to be taking part in a road race and he decided last week he didn’t want to do it anymore. His race entry was paid for and plans made to work our day around driving him to and from the race site etc. Ordinarily I would have said he had to do it because he had committed to it, but I’m going for the hands off approach now and just letting it go. He has paid back the entry fee so that DH and I aren’t out of pocket and we’ve just left him to it. We haven’t made him vacate the Xbox, we haven’t asked him to do anything. We also haven’t engaged with him at all. He has pretty much been ignored for the last few weeks and just left to his own devices.
We tried shouting, we tried reasoning, we tried everything that would normally work and it just wasn’t working so we have ignored him - partly for our own peace and because we just don’t have the energy to parent him in any other way right now, and partly because this is effectively what he wanted - us to leave him alone.
It’s taken a few weeks (and the atmosphere in the house has been horrible) but there seems to be some light at the end of the tunnel. He has missed out on family days out, and DH and I have shown zero interest in anything he’s done. Yesterday he went for a run and got a PB and came home clearly desperate to tell us. He eventually did, and we said well done and then left it alone. He was disappointed. (As was I because if he’d done it today in race conditions it would be been properly recorded and his club would have recognised it in some way.) We started to see a thaw though later in the day - I think he is realising that us “leaving him alone” isn’t actually that nice after all.
I don’t suddenly expect the horrible atmosphere to be over, or for this attitude to never rear its ugly head again, but I think I might try this strategy next time too.