My son is scruffy and i don't care

[EwwwwwwDavid]

But my husband does.

My son (11) comes home from high school with muddy shoes, muddy trousers, and today came home with a cut in his jumper. He comes home each day having drawn over his hands and arms, which sometimes creates ink stains on his shirts.

I'm fed up of replacing shirts - they are clean, just stained.
He has cut a slit into his trousers out of boredom.
He cut his jumper intentionally, don't know why.

He isn't a bad kid at all, it's not naughtiness, it could be inattentive ADHD but if it is it's mild.

None of this really bothers me in the sense that he has clean clothes every day, goes to school relatively well-kept, and I believe it's all part of the high school transition.

But I don't want to clean his shoes for him.
I don't want to keep replacing clothes, especially logoed items.
I don't want to keep mending clothes he intentionally damages.
I'm happy to let him go in clean but scruffy - and ALL the lads he is friendly with come out of school an absolute mess.

My husband strongly disagrees and thinks I should do the above. He has said he will do the mending if I won't (he can't sew). He thinks the teachers will judge DS and people will "think we are poor" (like thats an insult 🙄).

But I've never cared much about appearance so maybe IABU.

Would appreciate thoughts.

I need to do a claim for DD, the amount of clothes she ruins through biting and picking is unreal. Plus all the other additional costs. She is 10 and was DX in Sept, i'm still getting my head round it all.

couldnt agree more

they see it as not paying attention, its daft, i know full well that doodling helps him (and me, and DD) to focus more

(and rather OT - does everyone really teach their children to mow the lawn? I barely mow the lawn!)

What I have taught him recently is a basic P & L for a small business he has set up. And how to manage orders.

Oh they for sure would, my mum used to send me to school in jumpers she'd knitted from what was probably a knitting pattern book from the 70's on non-uniform days "because it's trendy, and you're not going to school looking like those other scruffs"

This was between 1997 - 2002 by the way.

imagine the bullying from literally everyone when you turn up in the latest fashion from winter 1977 and corduroy trousers.

Op two things- you keep saying you and ds will work on it etc, include your dh too, he’s the one who wanted to try and sort the scruffiness issues out and while my dh is the same and can seem too strict to me, we work better with the two heads on us than me trying to figure it out alone.

Secondly a few rolled their eyes that it bothered your dh that your ds might be seen as the poor child- we weren’t poor when I was in school but I was a shy scruffy girl who didn’t care about appearance and a few comments were aimed at me like ‘would your parents not buy you a new jumper’ or ‘can your parents not afford a brush’ (I had mad frizzy hair!). Kids unfortunately do comment on these things and I wasn’t strong enough to do anything but pretend to laugh along and get out of there.

You can buy fidget toys in key rings which go in rucksacks of pencil cases. They aren't obviously fidget stuff either - my DD has most recently got a mini Rubik's cube and popit.

The shoes - if you care (I wouldn't) buy a second pair. Non fabric shoes cope with mud better because you can just wipe it off. My DD had docs which she loved.

Agree with adhd - my DD has Audhd.

Messiness is different than deliberately ruining things. My kids are 8/12 and I would 100% take their money to replace anything they ruined on purpose - or have them fix it of course. It will just fray and get worse and worse - and he will keep doing it. Stains and mud I don't care about - our school grounds are super muddy and my kids are super active so stains are unavoidable and I don't have the interest in replacing things each week. But absolutely no interest in my children cutting their clothes apart - that's awful behaviour. But this is a problem for you and your husband to sort out together, it's not your problem to fix alone

how do i upload a pic of the shoes

If it was me and it meant walking over a huge muddy field to get home 10 minutes sooner or go the long way and not have to wash the shoes so i could "get an extra 5 minutes of tik tok" i'd cross the muddy field every time.

Then there needs to be a bigger incentive than 5 minutes of tik tok. It's also illogical as he'll get home ten minutes sooner, but if he were my child he'd be spending those ten minutes cleaning his shoes AND he'd not get the bloody tik tok or whatever it is.

It's not difficult to get a child to wash their shoes. You're teaching him to be responsible.

You can't. Mumsnet took away picture posting after some nutter posted loads of child sexual abuse images.

What does it matter for us to see what his shoes look like?

Just to put it into context and see how bad my standards are!

And wtf to the child abuse images that's horrendous

It's wild. It was around 11pm onwards a few nights back. Just spamming them in the middle of threads. Took a while to vet them down too. I don't know when photo posting will be reinstated. Not sure how they can after that!

the shoes

https://jmp.sh/s/eIwh87O3cmEhaJXoi02K

honestly you can barely see them under his trousers

Youd think they could put some AI checker in place to assess the content of the photos and then approve / decline upload

as clearly it can be got round by using links as i just have

Not sure you've got the full story from your boy., are you ?

Do what you like, dont know why you bothered starting the thread tbh. Can't wait to read your post in 5 years time when DS gets sacked from his job in McDonalds as he's stabbed his filthy uniform. Hopefully he'll never become some poor girls husband either.

what do you mean?

😂 👍🏻

Oh and given that we are working hard with his homework, revision, and starting his business, i'm pretty sure that at 16, an inkstain on his shirt wont mean he has to work at McDonalds.

This is really uneducated of them

But again, getting the diagnosis process started and/or a conversation with the Senco (if they are any good) should help with this kind of thing

I quite like Deli erase.

Now where could I use it though ?

I feel like this nails it perfectly. He's clean, well fed and learning.

Being undiagnosed was the issue - didn't stop her father being a dick, but he was told very clearly that she needed an outlet that didn't involve anything relating to her body/clothes, so the paper on the side of her wardrobe returned, complete with whatever pens she liked the feel of.. School immediately allowed her to have a separate doodlepad to keep her books clean and she found things much more tolerable as a result of her diagnosis.

Homework, revision, keeping a room straight and especially showering daily are not "demands".

They are rock bottom basics.

If he's giving you grief about any of this, you need to make sure he knows that he's being completely unreasonable and you expect cooperation with the very basic standards you're setting.

Refraining from destroying his clothes is also a rock bottom basic.

The problem here is likely that your DS believes he can get away with acknowledging and complying with absolutely none of the norms of life in ordinary society.

Is he justified in this belief? He certainly seems to have convinced you that you're being unreasonable to expect anything of him.

You wouldn't if you had to spend fifteen minutes cleaning your shoes after you got home, though.