Nearly 20 year old DS: no aspirations / plans

[NationMcKinley]

Hi everyone, I know this topic has been done to death but DH and I could use some advice.

Our eldest son is nearly 20. He did very well academically and socially at primary school / the first couple of years of secondary. He’s bright but definitely doesn’t like to break a sweat and as soon as school got harder he basically stopped trying. He passed all his GCSEs with reasonable grades after doing absolutely no work but then dropped out of A Levels after a year, as again, he wasn’t willing to put in any effort. He took himself off to college to do a diploma - again, same thing - his tutors said he’s academically very able, could easily get a distinction but has made zero effort. He’s just about scraped a pass.

At home he’s also pretty lazy: does the bare minimum in terms of jobs around the house, has to be nagged at constantly which we hate doing. He doesn’t really have any hobbies except for going to the gym a few times a week. He likes spending time with his brothers and is a bit of a home bird. DH and I both work in demanding roles and we have 2 other children, one of whom has significant SEND.

This all sounds very negative! He’s a really lovely boy as well: he’s kind, has great communication skills and is fantastic with his SEND brother. He’s one of the few people that I’m happy to leave him with.

He also has a PT job and a pretty responsible one at that. He does well in this as it involves f2f contact with vulnerable people. The money is pretty good but it burns a hole in his pocket and apart from what we insist he saves in an account he can’t access (he blazed through every penny of his government trust fund thing before we could stop him so we’ve learned our lesson.

He’s our eldest so this “parenting” a new adult is very new to us. We want to support him and teach him how to adult but he can be quite resistant to this. He doesn’t want to go to uni but also doesn’t know what he wants to do long term. He’s not open to career planning / support either from us or the college which has offered loads of options.

The plan currently, is that he’ll take a year out, work pretty much FT in his current job and figure himself out. He will be paying nominal rent to us and we have said he must save. He’s passed his driving test and is agreeable to the saving as he wants to buy a car.

We’re in London so I’d much rather he stayed at home and saved as renting, even in a house share is ££££££. But I’m still anxious of “failure to launch” / him just not putting any effort in when things get a bit harder.

Any words of wisdom? Am I just being a bit dramatic? He is only 19 plus I do think that covid is possibly playing a part in all this as he was the first cohort who did GCSEs as normal / usual grade boundaries despite all the disruption to education.

Sorry this is a bit long but I have used paragraphs! Thanks for reading.

Fuck Fuck. I’ve honestly never thought he’s ND but now reading all your posts I’m seeing him through a different lense. What I HAVEN’T told you is that he has 2 x AuDHD siblings 🤦‍♀️. One very mild, the eccentric scatty professor type. Was prescribed meds but hates them and actually manages pretty well. The other has an EHCP is on a truckload of Elvanse and is in a specialist school but expected to do GCSEs etc, He just can’t cope with the overwhelm of mainstream.

I’ve may have really dropped the ball here…

It’s not too late @NationMcKinley! Our ds was diagnosed with ADHD at 13, and he was a classic case. My dd was very different so we completely missed/misinterpreted her struggles. She was diagnosed with ADHD second year of uni and with autism her fourth year 😩

The world is filled with people who are not diagnosed until they were adults. Most people in my generation are only getting diagnosed late in life. The penny drops when your child is being evaluated.

If he is ND, you have probably already been doing some parenting with that in mind, even unintentionally. For “higher functioning” children, most support is going to come from parents anyway.

Definitely get him screened, but no need to panic or feel guilty.

You read my earlier post about delayed career start?

I got my autism diagnosis in my forties.

Myself dd and ds all have adhd

We all know a single full time job is something that is beyond our capabilities. We all work agency work in a few different fields doing different things, we all have businesses of varying profitability.

We all like to choose where we work

I did try doing 1 week of 9-5 and by the Wednesday morning I was climbing the walls and counting down the hours/minutes till I could leave and never return
I am offered full time jobs all the time that I turn down. The thought of doing one job over and over I know I would have a breakdown

And this was on the maximum dose of 70mg Elvanse and 4 x 5mg dexamphetamine and a couple of lions mane, saffron and L carnitane

My brain is so dopamine starved I still can’t function properly.
I even said I was ok on the amount I was being prescribed just to get out of titration as it was boring me keep going back to do the same thing again and again

Hahaha I’m also on the RTC pathway. I got him to do the ADHDUK very general screening tool last night which came back a a score worth investigating,

Like I said earlier, I knew what I wanted to do at 5 and kind of hyperfocused on that with no regrets. It’s not that I necessarily want that for him: it does come with its own set of drawbacks. I just want him to be happy and fulfilled.

I’m going to speak to him tonight about making a GP appt to discuss this. Our GP is amazing and with several immediate family member already diagnosed she should take him seriously. Hopefully he will too.

@FairKoala - do you find that the L-Carnitine helps? I find creatine quite useful and HRT has also made a difference. I agree about the 9-5. I could never do that, the next stage in my job would be more office / management based and I know I’d end up insane within a couple of weeks. I need uncertainty, a bit of drama and a changing shift pattern to keep me on track.

@crazycrofter - this is it, isn’t it? They present so differently. My youngest was diagnosed at 6. It was painfully obvious but then didn’t get diagnosed with autism until 12. The middle one was 14.

I was like this; for me I think I just hadn’t matured. I now have a great job and am very self motivated, achieved through working my way up/sideways, networking, showing initiative, being a good do-er and a good talker, managing relationships. I learned those skills from people I was lucky enough to work with. The best thing my parents did for me was have a hard rule- you either have to be learning or earning.

Why is he only working part-time? He’s not going to find out what he wants ‘to do’ by not working. He probably needs to do a second job. It’s interesting that you conceptualise this as a year out because he has effectively left all education and is into the world of work.

FWIW the people who know what they want to do, or in the past knew what they wanted to do, are few and far between even if as grown-ups it seemed like a coherent decision to follow a path. However, this didn’t mean they floated around or only worked part-time as they were embarking upon their career.

I do feel like you’re indulging him. Why only minimal rent, why not a bit more? Even if you save it for him. I feel like we can sometimes make it too comfortable for our kids, that they don’t see how hard it is and how much effort they’ve got to put in to find the thing that will suit them.

@curious79 he's only just finished college so that's why he's working part-time. If you read the OP, he's going to work full time in his gap year. Nominal rent isn't a bad idea if it means he saves, but that might need some 'encouragement/help'. Our dd is nearly 22, about to graduate and also AuDHD and poor with money - she has suddenly realised that she really needs some savings, so we're planning not to charge her rent when she starts her job next month, on the agreement that she saves that amount. She'll still have car loan/insurance/tax, phone, gym and petrol, so she'll have some idea of real life.

@NationMcKinley good luck with the diagnosis process. It took about a year/year and a half for dd to get a diagnosis and then longer for medication (which didn't work!), but her boyfriend just started the process (also RTC) and he was seen within a few weeks and got meds soon after, so it seems to depend who you choose. Regardless of whether medication works, I think the self-awareness you get with a diagnosis is really helpful.

No advice OP but following with interest as my 17yo (diagnosed ADHD at 13 after I got my diagnosis 5 years previously and became obsessed with the idea he needed to be checked as well) TBH the diagnosis doesn't seem to help very much. He has been exactly the same as you describe your DS. I do sort of know deep down that he'll be fine long term but I can't help this feeling that I should be lighting a fire under him somehow and am worried that he doesn't seem to have ANY goals at all. I don't mean he needs to have it all figured out. But at that age I was looking at courses and getting excited by the possibilities, even though I ultimately never finished any of them. He doesn't do that, he's just like "whatever" about everything

@BertieBotts fingers crossed it will happen! Ds had no clue and no motivation for school work until March of year 13. Does your ds get motivated or hyper-focused about anything at all?

I get that it’s difficult, my DD is only in year 6 but seems so uninterested in school it worries me!

But I did ok at school, got decent but not amazing GCSE’s, stayed on at sixth form just for something to do really and got ok-ish grades. Then I got a job because I thought about uni because I didn’t know what else to do but then realised I’d have to pay for it at some point so didn’t see the point when I was only killing time.

Got a full time minimum wage admin-y job and now I earn £52k. My DSIS went to uni and earns less than me. I think sometimes she gets really irritated over that tbh.