I am a single parent (widowed when my children were young) and have raised my children myself. I am a professional and work long hours and had a childminder and a au pair when the children were young. Now they are in their teens and my oldest has graduated from University it is just us.
Both my daughters are aspirational and want to have professional careers, my son of late said he isn’t going to concentrate on his GCSEs this year as people don’t need qualifications in the real world and he will make money hustling and doing stuff. He has started to wear urban street wear and wanders around the house when he is in with his hands down his baggy tracksuit bottoms. His grammar has deteriorated and he talks with an urban accent using slang and swear words. It feels like an alien has landed in our house. He is rude to his sisters and calls the bitches and refuses to say please or thank you to them. He often uses derogatory urban slang to them. He has massively changed I don’t know what to do. He steals from the house, he leaves it in a mess, he vapes and treats all the women in the house disrespectfully. None of my friend’s children behave like him and they are all studious and respectful. He takes no interest in the world. My daughters are vegetarian and environmentalists. They take an interest in politics and campaign for issues they believe in. My son has no interest in the world or anything outside his narrow frame of reference and gets takeaway chicken and leaves the bones on the floor of the kitchen.
we have had family meetings to discuss our values of respect, honesty and personal responsibility and he says why should he respect our values as we do not respect his as no one likes drill music. We have tried to argue that this is not a value but a musical taste and people can have different tastes. But he does not seem to listen to reason. He gets angry all the time and his default state is anger to me or his sisters. I cannot get through to him. He does not seem to want to listen to me. I have tried to get an appointment with Cahms but the waiting list is over a year. He goes to school OK and school seem not to be overly worried about him even though he does not do any homework and wants to drop out after GCSEs this year. I don’t want him to screw up his life but don’t know what I can do to help him.