Hi, new to the board but been reading some of these teenager posts for a while and it’s good to know (sort of) that I’m not alone in my frustrations!
I’ve got a 15yo DS who is generally pretty good but knows how to push his luck. I get that things are very different at the moment and to be fair he is getting his schoolwork done with no nagging from us. But that’s all he’s doing. No exercise as he’s not walking to school, not interested in finding any other activity but continues to shove food down him and just wants to play an online computer games with his cousin which gets very noisy when Dh and I are trying to wfh. We ask him to be quiet or stop and he just gives back chat about it not mattering as we weren’t on the phone 😡 He won’t get dressed all day and doesn’t understand that we feel it’s important for him to maintain some level of self respect during the lockdown as he says he doesn’t care what he looks like or need a shower every day as he’s not seeing anyone.
His attitude and rudeness has been bad this week so last night Dh changed passwords for computer and we took his phone off him for the night. Ds very unhappy about the computer thing although Dh was using it for work anyway this morning. Ds then seemed to come round to some of the things we had been saying and said he would do the Joe Wicks thing at lunchtime and dare I say he seemed to enjoy it. He seemed to be happier and we were all getting on nicely again. Dh goes out for his daily exercise so ds thinks he’s clear to play on computer because he’d been “good for a couple of hours” and done what he wanted even tho we had said it would last til the weekend or longer if he didn’t buck his ideas up. So now another argument with me trying to tell him to take the punishment rather than risk it lasting longer but because he can’t play right now and it’s vitally important that he does so today blah blah blah the shit has hit the fan 😫 I can’t believe he’s being that stupid!!! He even has the nerve to tell me it’s our fault as we should left him alone to do what he wanted 😳
I just don’t know how to get through to him that he needs to take some responsibility for himself and his actions. He’s borderline overweight already and really worry that it’s only going to get worse if he doesn’t balance out what he’s eating. He has a pretty good diet in terms of fruit and veg but a wickedly sweet tooth.
I feel sad and miss him as we were incredibly close and he always wanted to do things together until the dreaded teen years hit and now feel like I either annoy him all the time unless he wants something 😢
Thanks for getting this far if you’ve managed it! Just needed to get it off my chest.