I would add “to do with an adult mentor/counselor/friend who is really enthusiastic about said hobby.” I’ve heard that such things can change lives.
Though I agree from what I hear that therapy is warranted.
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Again, that convo isn’t necessarily indicative of anything, considering his age. It might be that he had a glib answer ready, because three other adults had already had that convo with him that week. And everybody wants him to do this really hard thing like its super-easy and will solve all his problems, when he knows that’s bullshit. So, yes, he is telling you that so that you can stop poking at this painful thing and have fun, because he likes you.
And it’s even harder when everyone tells him what to do, but no one gives him any tools or idea how to do it.
I know of a kid (well, not anymore) who had similar issues around anger regulation who took up knitting. When he felt himself getting worked up, he’d take out his knitting. Having something else to focus on helped him get his anger under control. It let him create instead of destroy and gave his body something to do. That last part is important. Anger often demands a physical reaction and too often we deny ourselves that until it becomes one of violence.
In other words, Don’t Panic. Just because he’s having trouble does not mean he’s irredeemable. Kids often are glib and superficial. It’s a defense mechanism, especially when you don’t want to feel bad, right now.
I agree with @chgoliz. The school is not going to be of help here. School counselor is quite possibly where he got his rote answer to start. He needs to talk to someone who can not only assess him, but give him the tools to help himself.
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Hi and thanks again all.
They’ve investigated a behavioural psychologist. $800+ for an assessment, $200+ for sessions. They’re doing ok financially but I’m pretty sure they can’t afford ongoing expenses like those. But family counselling sounds good: I’ll suggest it.
Hobbies etc: he’s been through and discarded cricket, soccer, swimming, AFL, basketball and probably others I can’t think of. Similarly with computer games/coding, lego, model-building (as in airplanes and such), basic electronics. He’s so keen to begin, promises he’ll stick with it. Within about two weeks, starts showing signs of losing interest and is usually done two weeks later. Then the search is on for the next interesting thing.
Even his mum acknowledges he doesn’t have any friends. Neighbours and kids in the street even when younger than him “get sick of him being bossy” so it’s not just a problem confined to school (general interaction I mean. The violence and swearing is confined to school).
Another convo we had before he started high school:
ACTM: how are you feeling about your new school?
N: good, I’m excited to have a fresh start and meet new people.
ACTM: Great! You know how you’ve said in the past that you need to control your anger, walk away when you get angry or annoyed and take some time for yourself?
N: (eyes switch) yeah.
ACTM: now that you’re going from being in the eldest year-level to being the smallest fishes in a much bigger pond, how are you going to approach it if, say, older kids start hassling you?
N: (almost robotically) I’m going to step back, not let them get to me, walk away.
ACTM: are you sure? That wasn’t very convincing!
N: I’m sure. I have to control my emotions.
ACTM: ok kiddo. I hope it all goes really well for you.
Maybe I ask the wrong or too predictable questions. Or respond the wrong way. Dunno. All I do know is nobody seems to know what to do or how to help him. I even suggested to his mum that if she hadn’t cried about it in front of him, maybe crying before him would help him understand how serious the situation is and how it impacts others, not just him. That she’s upset, not necessarily angry, but this could have long-term consequences. She said others had suggested the same and that in anger (more like angry desperation, I’d suggest) she’d told him he was a disappointment, cried and that she’d have to quit her job if this kept happening b/c of staying at home with him while suspended. I don’t think I would have said that last bit as it gives him too much perceived power in my view, but realistically, who knows how I’d react in the same circumstances.
TL;DR Apparently this is really bothering me as I haven’t written so much on any previous topic. And thanks again for your patience, understanding and suggestions!
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I’m more interested in why he’s getting so angry in the first place, where what the other kids are calling “bossiness” is coming from.
I’m reminded of something one of my profs said he’d encountered:
- “I can’t control my success, but I can control my failure”
- “I can’t control others, but I can control pissing them off enough that they’ll leave me alone”
He definitely knows the answers to the behavioural questions, but he doesn’t seem to see any consequences for either good or bad behaviour. If the worst thing to come out of a school suspension is a brief and awkward conversation with a relative, or mum freaking out (again)… why should he behave?
And what happens when he does behave?
Note people who train orcas and seals don’t make a big deal about the failures to comply. They make a big deal about compliance, no matter how small. From the animal’s point of view, it’s “all I have to do is swim 'round the tank once and do a stupid backflip in front of that human, and they give me FISH!”
But if they don’t, no fish.
It does work on humans too.
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Junior Kidd has ADHD. We first talked to his doctor about his attention issues (in Kindergarten, no less) that his teacher had noticed. She was no slouch - 35 year veteran who had no need to work (her husband’s a surgeon). Junior’s doctor sent us off to a psychologist to get an assessment. We tried counseling with the same guy, but he has ADD himself, and it was going nowhere. We managed to keep him off meds until last year when he was getting his behavior micromanaged by his teacher, which can be a serious trigger of negative feedback loops for ADHD kids. (Later found out that this teacher had a rep for picking on kids, and other parents pulled their kids from her class as late as spring break.)
It was last year that we discovered that school counselors and social workers aren’t there to help your kids, they’re there to cover the school’s ass. I recommend against going there.
So, we ended up starting meds last spring as a last resort, really just to make sure the poor kid didn’t get kicked out of school. There is a clear difference between the boy on the meds, and not. He’s much more able to focus on subjects he doesn’t love, and can more easily follow a regular routine. We also see a lot less negative self-talk and irrational anger.
Just one parent’s experience here, but the attention seeking behavior you talk about up thread sounded so eerily familiar. Our son did a lot of that until we started basically bribing him for good behavior and minimizing our reactions to the bad.
It’s not a good sign that your nephew’s parents are bad at following through. That’s kinda the number one thing a parent has to do to get through to their kids. There’s no one single approach to help kids, but nothing can improve if parents give up at the first instance of failure.
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Based on this:
a teen who’s a little older might even be better. Either way, this reminds me of that Big Brothers Big Sisters program.
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As someone that went through a lot of these things I can concur that having an adult or older teen mentor can really do wonders.
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raises hand.
This is pretty common ADHD behaviour. I know.
Sometimes “want” is not a part of it. The age of dvds and streaming for me has been a godsend, because it means that I can put things on pause, and this is with shows that I like. I take colouring pages into meetings and training so I can mitigate the drift. But they said the same thing about me, because if it is something I am into, I can focus or even hyperfocus (which is it’s own problem, sometimes).
The difficulty with mental illness and learning disabilities is that not everybody will display all the symptoms. And everybody can have some of them. That’s why a professional assessment can be so important.
Again, this is just my own experience. No one pegged me as having Attention Deficits, because I learned how to cope and pull out enough salient points from lessons to get good grades, how to take shortcuts, and reading is one of my hyperfocus things. And I was bullied mercilessly, too, and if I was a boy, I might have reacted like your nephew.
I also noticed that a lot of the things he’s tried and abandoned have been team or group activities. Those tend to be regimented in what you need to pay attention to when, which doesn’t always play nice with attention disorders.
Sometimes, too, other health issues can affect behaviour. Anything affecting his sleep will mess with his attention, motivation and impulse control. Even something as seemingly minor as allergies can have an outsized effect.
It sounds like there might be a bunch of different things affecting his behaviour. Again, don’t panic. It means there’s a bunch of different things you and his family can do to help him help himself.
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Real talk but goddamn does that ever hit a nerve. I’ve been seeing a shrink regularly for years and whenever I hit a wall it comes down to that. It pisses me off no end. Yes, I fucking want to change the circumstance but, how?
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Hi again everyone. You can probably guess where this is going. Yep, nephew suspended again.
This time for taking a knife to school. Jesus, that sounds so bad. Mitigating factors: it was a pocket-knife. Which was our dead dad’s/his grandfather’s. Nephew apparently had no intention of using it, just wanted to show friends.
When I asked why he took a knife to school when he knew they weren’t allowed, I didn’t get an answer. But his sister said ‘because his friends did’. I don’t know if they got away with it or not, but it seems that he did it to a) show off b) show it to his friends c) maybe see if he could get away with it, as his friends evidently did?
Consequences: time off school. Knife confiscated and handed in to local police. Cops gave him a ‘talking to’.
My sister seems more concerned that dad’s knife has been forfeited to the cops than anything else. Maybe that’s just her way of coping. I don’t know. I’ve re-read this thread and I’m still outta ideas, that much I do know.
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He could be bipolar and/or have poor impulse control. It gets worse in adolescence. Especially with boys.
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I don’t think he’s bi-polar. Or if he is, he doesn’t have any of the ‘down’/depressed symptoms. The impulse-control thing? Definite issues there.
With further thought/obsessing about him, I’m wondering if it’s ‘just’ boundary-pushing. Fairly extreme boundary-pushing, yes, but I guess there’s much worse things he could be doing. Like taking a big knife to school with the intention of injuring or scaring someone?
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If he’s frustrated with each of those hobbies, any sign of coordination issues?
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As the proud owner of my grandmother’s mother-of-pearl handled folding pocket knife, I’m glad the cops confiscated his grandfather’s knife. I hope they hang on to it for such a long time that it feels like new when (if?) it’s returned. Just to introduce some real consequences into this kid’s life. If I’d had my grandmother’s knife confiscated by cops, the cops would have almost been a comfort against my mum’s reaction.
If something is that precious, don’t bring it to school. Take some photos and show off those. Okay, his friends did it too. That just establishes his friends are also foolish. Loads of people speed, but just because a lot of them get away with it doesn’t mean you won’t get a speeding ticket if you get caught doing it.
Edit: autocorrect corrections
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It can not look like depression. A teenager can cycle through the states rapidly throughout the day. It can look like anger a lot.
EDIT:
However, as children often have difficulty expressing their feelings, depressed boys often act out in unexpected ways. The symptoms are not what someone might equate with typical depression. Bipolar boys are often defiant and display irrational irritability, aggression and extreme temper tantrums. They often express anger explosively by yelling or screaming accompanied by slamming or throwing objects. Activities that usually bring joy or satisfaction are commonly of little interest during depressive episodes that can last several weeks.
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Yeah, I think anger often takes the place of one or the other. Perhaps it should be called tripolar.
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Depression often expresses as anger, especially in men and boys who are trained that they are not allowed to feel sad or hurt, let alone ahedonic. Especially when society tells them that the way to deal with their pain is to externalize it.
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When I was in high school there was a group of kids that had a sort of ongoing swap meet, buy, sell, trade of knives. Personally, I took bowie knives, butterfly knives, throwing knives, push daggers, and a variety of pocketknives. There was never any intention of injuring or scaring anyone, it was more like an edgy teenager show-and-tell with a bit of trading going on.
I got caught with one in metal shop, but it had a bad rivet and I asked the teacher how to fix it; since we’d only done cutting and welding, but not riveting, it became an educational experience and I learned how to fix my knife. He did tell me not to bring it back again, and that it might even be illegal (even off school grounds). But back in the 90s that was a teach/advise the kids situation rather than a “call the cops” situation.
My anecdote may not be relevant at all, but when you said “because his friends did”, it made me think of that. That sort of thing used to be normal among teens (well, some teens anyway). My stepdaughter got handcuffed and taken to the police station over something that would’ve been a suspension at worst when I was in school, and probably wouldn’t have even been reported. Things that used to be considered normal teen growing/learning experiences sometimes get blown out of all proportion now.
However, if he seeks attention through violence then maybe none of that applies. It’s really hard to tell what is normal teen behavior and what isn’t. The only suggestion I have, both from being a teen and raising one, is to stay close and try to keep up with where his psyche is. Try to be ready to deal with whatever, and be there for him when he needs somebody. It’s not easy.
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My boyfriend had a butterfly knife. It was considered cool to be able to open them one handed. I think it was a thing to have one. I don’t think he was the only guy with one. And he was not the kind of guy to be particularly into violence. He was more of an artsy nerd - became a computer programmer.
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