Lazy DS will not make food

[LazyDS]

I’m at a loss with DS17. He is lazy on a completely new level. He does go to work but he just will not tidy up after himself or make any food. His clothes are constantly strewn all over the floor and he won’t make any food himself unless he’s desperate and then he will ‘prepare’ pot noodle.

I have tried and tried refusing to do anything like his washing or cooking but always cave as the mess in his room gives me anxiety and I can’t live like it, if I refuse to make him food he will just eat several bags of crisps rather than make a sandwich or boil some pasta. I do cook all main meals which I don’t mind but he eats a lot and wants me to make endless sandwiches/ bowls of pasta.

He does have ADHD and struggles with simple instructions, I have tried doing things like preparing food with him and I have recorded myself putting a wash load on and WhatsApped him the video.

Alas nothing changes and he just says ‘I can’t do it’. Does anyone have any experience of this or advice please?

Pasta parcels/ravioli can be heated up in minutes. With a bagged salad.

Try thinking of meals together that take 5minutes or are very simple.

He sounds like a completely normal teen to me. Have you ever been in a male student house?

Close the door on his messy room. It is his space and not your problem. If you are feeling generous, you could change the sheets once a fortnight.

Leave him to sort his own food most of the time. Presumably you stock the cupboards, so buy some pot noodle but not enough that he can eat it all week.
My ds won't cook either, but I ensure there is always wholemeal bread, cheese, tomatoes, beetroot, crisps, and fruit, and he eats that. If I cook, I make more than I need and he heats left overs in the microwave.

He won't get scurvy or rickets and it's just not a necessary battle. Mine miraculously started washing more, tidying his room etc when he discovered girls 😀

I don't allow cannabis in the house though. That's my red line. I guess we all have them.

My daughter has been diagnosed recently so I am saving this for careful reading. She is also very messy She will cook if in the mood bit otherwise she will live on crap too.

The other thing I did prekids was buy a cooked meal at work and ensure I had toast/easy veg like mange tout and tomatoes and crisps at home for teaand did it in reverse.

I'm 53 and have the same struggles as your lad. Work exhausts me, as does socialising and when I've finished work for the day, I'm pretty useless. Food is a big problem for me and I resort to sandwiches or ready meals. Medication has helped massively for all areas of my life, except for food.

I cut him some slack as well, my 17yo dd is neurodiverse and still relies on me to help her with things that most 17yos can do. She's had an eating disorder when younger but has never got out of the habit that I will prepare all her food.

I think she will get there eventually.

My 15yo has ASD and can sleep for ridiculous amounts at the weekends and holidays. He got up at 5pm one day this week after going to bed at midnight. He had been doing a school camp then sports earlier on the half term holiday and I think it's exhausting masking and managing in the outside world for him.
Still frustrating that he misses so much!

You could cut out buying snacks and crisps, but instead cook extra portions and freeze. He can microwave those. Explain he must wash up the container it was frozen in, so you can refill the next meal. No container = no frozen food.

Unfortunately a lot of parents don’t actually care about the welfare of their children, and sadly a lot of parents enjoy abandoning their children when they turn 16.

Yes and no, I find it incredibly hard to get to sleep as I just can’t switch off, so sometimes I’m still awake at 4am, after a few nights of 3-4am bedtimes I would easily sleep for 12-14 hours if I didn’t have an alarm set.

I used to sleep until the afternoon when I was a teenager, but that could have been late nights.

I need about 9 hours of sleep normally but DS3 is breastfeeding in the night, so that might go down when he stops. I've had small children since 2018 so sort of forgotten.

The challenge here is to differentiate between behaviour that is typical lazy teen behaviour, and an inability to function due to a mental disorder. Either way, a teen has to learn how to function in every day life in order to reduce the mental load on themselves as they become more independent.
Doing everything for someone because they can’t seem to do it for themselves is often the easier route - the line of least resistance if you like - but has consequences in the long term.
There are some telling things the OP has said - smoking weed, girlfriend living in family home, trouble in school / workplace, refusing to take medication. Her DS sounds very immature as many 17 yr old boys can be, but is being treated like an adult.
What he needs is a routine that’s simple to learn and follow. For example, every Saturday morning he washes his clothes. Not his mum, not his girlfriend, but him. Whilst his clothes are washing, he had to tidy his room up. He could use a timer of listen to a few songs whilst doing it so he knows how long he has to focus for. Then he needs to pop to the supermarket for his ‘snacks’.
What everyone else has to do is stop facilitating his passivity by doing it for him. They’re NOT doing him any favours. I wonder if he expects his father to make him sandwiches or snacks? I suspect not.
Remember OP, doing things for him isn’t helping him long term. It’s just getting him off your back.

I would say that it's not actually that important to differentiate, as long as you're not using punitive methods to try and teach it - if you support and scaffold and help him problem solve to try and find solutions that work for him (e.g. the time of day/week/etc that he has enough energy and mental bandwidth) then this works equally well to cajole a reluctant teen as it does to build skills one is lacking. AND - as he is likely to struggle all his life with balancing work needs and everyday tasks - it gives him a positive model for how to approach these challenges, and a sense of "I can do this - even if it doesn't look like how other people do it".

If you simply say right, I know you can do XYZ so I'm not going to do XYZ for you any more, and if you don't do it you won't get the benefit of it, that works fine if he can manage those things. He'll suffer and grumble for a bit and then it will matter to him so he'll get on with it. OTOH, if he can't do them, that won't work as a motivator, and instead he will get all the negative parts - poor nutrition, poor sleep, smelly clothing, losing/breaking stuff in his room etc and the associated problems in life and in addition, he'll feel like it's all his fault/he's useless/he's lazy/he's smelly/he can't do it and these all create a negative self-image and self-fulfilling prophecy - and I would say highly dangerous if he's prone to using weed, as that would be a welcome escape from such negative self-talk. So for me, I think this strategy has to be totally out if you are in ANY doubt as to whether they can manage it really.

And OTOH if you say OK, I accept that you can't do XYZ, so I'll do them for you - and at some point in the future he moves out and suddenly there is nobody to do XYZ for him, while he might have progressed a bit further in coping skills/development/sorting the right medication/getting used to the job etc and be able to do some of them now, there will probably be parts, or possibly even all of it, that he hasn't made any progression in, still can't manage, and this is quite frequently devastating and can cause a total breakdown. It can be really dangerous to go from 100% support to 0% support. So this is not a good solution either, and that's why people say don't "enable" him, except, that I would say that the problem solving/figuring out how it's going to work best for him, this part can take some time, a while, trial and error, and it's useful to have this "plan C" as a kind of temporary backup to avoid setting him up to fail and setting him up for those negative consequences which are ultimately destructive for him. So: Cook for him if you like, until you figure out a solution where he can manage to eat nutritious food within his current challenges and ability. Remind him to clear his room every night/week, until you/he figure out a solution for his room not becoming some kind of mould lab. Etc etc. Don't just do it and expect him to magically come up with solutions - you will probably need to lead the process.

There is a great book by Ross Greene called Raising Human Beings, which I've just realised that I have essentially summarised here. It's useful with tips for how to actually go about the problem solving stage.

Oh 100% what Bertie says. I've not read that book but I love Ross Greene. "Children do well if they can." Support and scaffold rather than crash and make feel shame is the way forwards.

@BertieBotts excellent post.

This is very insightful thank you. I’m constantly in turmoil thinking should I stop doing this for him because he can’t or won’t? I gently encourage him to do stuff, sometimes he’ll try, sometimes he won’t. I try not to push him because he’s quite explosive and gets very frustrated very easily. I do focus on lots of praise for small things. E.g I’ll acknowledge the odd occasion he’s put his dirty clothes in the laundry basket or brought his dirty dishes down to the kitchen.

one of his triggers is he can’t manage time. E.g if he starts working at 4, we need to leave at 3:50, he won’t think about getting ready until 3:40, then panicking because he wants to have a shower. He then starts slamming doors and stomping around because he can’t find his work clothes. Because his he won’t put anything away he can’t find anything. I’ve calmly explained that getting his work clothes out the day before is a good idea, but he can’t seem to do it so now when I do the laundry I iron and place them in a small pile by his TV to avoid the drama. Again I’m in turmoil- am I helping or enabling? I just don’t know!

The poor time management and ensuing frustration is typical adhd.

Op, does your son have any professional treatment or support? It is very important to treat adhd and there are things out there that will help. Medication, firstly (incredible for many but not for all!) occupational therapy can help too. Diet is important, as is exercise. He will need specific adhd treatment and support as a lot of advice for neurotypical people just doesn't apply to people with adhd; our brains work differently.

Having support from those who understand can really help people with adhd. Is there a group he can join either locally or online?

As I'm sure you know, there are so many books, sites and podcasts out there which will teach you and your son how to navigate this, and he can learn skills to improve his quality of life, which will lead to better outcomes in his emotional and mental health too, in the future.

I would urge you to read up all you can on adhd but be careful of your sources. I also suggest Russel Barkley as a good place to start. The US website additude mag also has plenty articles that may interest you.

This thread is so useful

I wonder I fits worth changing the title to include adhd tho as you may get more responses from those in a similar situation. .

So with the Ross Greene process, you would make a list of everything that seems to be an issue and then order it by priority so you can work on one (maybe two) at a time.

Everything you're not immediately working on, you can be the support/enabler, because it's temporary.

This issue about getting ready and your solution being to put his work stuff out the night before is a great example - what we so often try to do, when we see somebody struggling with something, is that we offer a solution that works for us, or what we would do in that situation, or perhaps the kind of "standard advice" that seems to work for most people. But that doesn't always work for that person, because they are not us and they have different strengths and weaknesses and blind spots and so on. We all have different strengths and weaknesses, and therefore different things getting in the way. When you have a neurodiversity issue like ADHD or ASD, then "standard advice" that works for most people, probably relies on things that are not weaknesses/blind spots (aka "lagging skills" by Ross Greene) for most people, but might be for the neurodivergent person, and this is why people with ADHD in particular often seem to be unable to follow the kinds of typical solutions to common problems.

It sounds like in this case there are actually two separate problems feeding into one:

1. Difficulty leaving required time for getting ready
2. Not being able to find work clothes in the mornings

And maybe even a third, struggling to connect later frustration with earlier action (though this might be more of a lagging skill).

There is a very funny article here about being late for things which he might like:

waitbutwhy.com/2015/07/why-im-always-late.html

You can help him work on the "not enough time" issue by actually suggesting he does a dry run of a typical work morning (or any going-out kind of event) - if he had to leave the house RIGHT now, what things would he need to do. (Prompt if he's forgotten anything). Get him to estimate how long each thing would take. Write it down. Then actually get him to do them all one by one, time them.

Add the times together (the estimated ones, and the real ones separately). The funny thing is that the estimated ones even by themselves often add up to more than ten minutes. And the real ones will add up to even longer. But this exercise is often quite genuinely surprising to somebody who struggles with time perception. Add an "emergency" 5 minutes and that total is his getting-ready time.

For not being able to find work clothes, forget your solution (put clothes out the night before) initially because this is something that would work for you but not necessarily for him. If you getting them ready is working for now, then that's fine, just decide whether it's sustainable. If it isn't, then it needs to be added to the list and you can problem solve for it. Problem solving means finding all the barriers and then (preferably him) coming up with solutions that work around those barriers or take them into account. So for example, it might look like washing the work clothes in their own load so that they never get mixed up with casual clothes. It might be that the work clothes and casual clothes look too similar, so might involve replacing his casual clothes with different coloured ones and avoiding the work clothing colours. Or even the opposite - buying extra sets of work clothing and wearing that every day! It might be that he doesn't have anywhere to put worn but not yet dirty clothing, or he gets undressed in the dark, so the dirty/clean/worn all get mixed up. It might be that the lighting is poor in his bedroom (maybe even because he doesn't switch on the light). It might be that he does not like hangers, and prefers to keep clothing in drawers. Or maybe drawers are too out of sight out of mind, and he needs to hang clothing on his door. The point is, he identifies the problems, and instead of saying well, that wouldn't be a problem if you just XYZ, you can add "difficulty with XYZ" to the list and solve for it separately, and/or you can work around it for now as though it is just something that will always be the case. You can do this even if it is something as obvious or silly-seeming as not turning on the light. The whole point of this is that the solution needs to work for him, so if he finds it too onerous to walk three steps and turn on the light, then work around it (or perhaps get a remote controlled light or a lamp within reach or he could use his phone torch, etc etc) - but the hardest part IME is not jumping in and rattling off all the solutions that you immediately think of, the first step is just to get him to work out all the barriers and accept them as real difficulties, even if they seem trivial.

If he is explosive, BTW, then The Explosive Child might be a better read, as it explains the "ALSUP" (Assessment of Lagging Skills and Unsolved Problems) in more detail - the unsolved problems is your "list of issues".

There is also a FB group called The B Team which is dedicated to helping you work out the process but I find they get very very technical and it can be a bit overwhelming. I do read anyway, but sometimes it makes me feel a bit stressed out!

This is very helpful thank you, the clothes thing is difficult for him maybe because there’s too many places for him to look - his work T shirt is in the T shirt drawer, the work trousers are hung up in the wardrobe, his underwear is in a different drawer and his trainers in a different place again. He can’t seem to look in all those places and coupled with the untidiness of his room where his clean and dirty clothes often get muddled it compounds the chaos.

maybe a ‘work drawer’ or space is a good idea so everything is in one space?

The having a dry run in theory is an excellent suggestion but his motivation is somewhat lacking and I don’t think he would comply, he would say that’s a silly idea or no I can’t be bothered.

I have the Explosive child book from when he was completely unmanageable at about the age of 12, it is an excellent book.

I will definitely think about managing him in a different way which hopefully works for everyone. Thank you for your advice it’s very helpful and appreciated.

In that case I'd definitely reread the book for the problem solving bit, because the point is I can't give you a solution, you can't think up a solution, you have to talk to him to find out what his problems are with the current set up and write down all the different obstacles (this is the empathy step or "concerns") then you can brainstorm together to see if there's any solution which solves for all the different problems. But you have to do it with him, and believe what he says otherwise it won't work.

BTW thank you for starting this thread, as it's given me a bit of a kick to restart a similar process with my 14yo DS who also struggles to eat and do his chores, and he often refuses meals that we make for the rest of the family! Explaining it like this has reminded me of how to do it so I will try to do that with him a bit next week as it's half term here.

Maybe just show him the funny article as a kind of "lol, it's you!" It's very compassionate and useful.