teenage drinking & general bad behaviour

[imogen123]

My 15 yo son has started to hang out with an older crowd-he has always been a great boy-no problems at school-they think he is well balanced, polite and pleasant-which he has always seemed to be. However now he wants to do all night mixed parties-so we let him go until midnight and basically trusted him - once! He got blind drunk and filled the car with vomit. After being totally grounded for a period there is now a curfew at ten-and we have been as reasonable with him as we can be.
Now we find he is hanging out at local parks drinking and smoking. He is stealing alcohol from home and being abusive, bad language and violence, to my husband and I, although still polite and charming at school. He has even attempted to run off which was very scary.
Any advice would be very welcome, is there an organisation that can help?!
Desperate Mum

He sounds like a very typical teen. It must be hellish scary for you but try try to take your self back to how you felt at his age.

Its a mine feild really. You come down to hard and he'll rebel even more. You don't do enough and he thinks its ok to do as he pleases.
Maybe try talking over with his Dad about what you both expect from him and how he can learn to manage his own life. You want him to get good results at school, not to damage himself physically and of course to be happy. Maybe if you told him what the ground rules are and what kind of behaviour you expect from him then give him a trial period to see if he can comply?
He's got to be given the freedom to make mistakes and to learn from them himself. Painful as that might be for you to watch.
The more controling you are the more you lessen his ability to make good decisions for himself.
There will be plenty of times when he's so drunk he pukes. But hopefully he will decide at some point that its really not worth drinking that much. Same with the smoking.
Hope that's helpful. I was a rebellious teen. My parents gave me nothing to rebel against. Mum even gave me wine to take to parties when I was 15! But I still felt the need to be a nightmare. I was teased in the early years of secondary school and then was desperate to be "cool". Drinking and smoking seemed like a good way to achieve that. It wasn't untill I was 19 that I realised it wasn't.

Maybe try and foster one of his interests and make it in to more of a hobby? Encourage him to join sporting teams?