Teenage Mutant Parent Hurdles

Full disclosure: I stole that title from an episode of Futurama.

We've had a teenager now for about four months. That still feels surreal to me. In some ways it's what I expected, and in others it's not.

Samuel is the same good person he has always been. He cares deeply about things, has a keen sense of justice, and makes intelligent observations about the world around him. But it does seem like puberty hit hime like a truck. He's already 5' 6", which I think is about 6 inches taller than I was at his age. He's struggling with terrible acne, as both his parents did, and we're in the process of getting him the industrial-grade meds to deal with it.

His biggest challenge right now is that he takes FOREVER to do ANYTHING. When I was his age I was going like a maniac. I was still smart enough to get my homework done without too much work, or I at least did a half-hearted job at everything. But I got it done. Every night he seems to take hours to even get started on his homework. If he can take a shower in one hour it's a miracle.

His slowness causes stress and gets him depressed. The real problem seems to be an inability to focus on anything. Whenever I ask what he's been doing for the last hour or two he honestly can't answer me half the time. We're trying to evaluate whether he has ADD or not, filling out some paperwork for the doctor.

It's so different from what I have experienced that I don't really know how to help him. Katie has been much better about dealing with the way he does things, but I feel like nothing gets done if I don't step in and constantly bug him about doing homework or whatever.

*Update* I drafted this a few days ago, and Sam was having a hard time getting to the bus on time. I leave for work about 30 minutes before the bus comes, and everyone else is usually still asleep. I guess he just gets distracted and is always running to catch it, and the bus driver got after him one day. So we tried setting some alarms to help him be on time, and so far it's been working. We also got his acne prescription approved so that should be improving soon as well.


Comments

)en said…
That is so weird. I would never anticipate slowness, especially that he seems unaware of it. Though, I do remember my brother taking ungoshly long showers and being late to everything and everyone giving him a hard time about it. He's sort of a dreamer so I wonder if he was just often lost in his thoughts? I actually was discussing teens with some friends last night and one said she knew a woman who said in their family, when each kid reached a certain teenage milestone--maybe when they turned 13 or something-- the parents sat them down individualy and had a chat with them, basically about entering the teen years. They said, "In a lot of families, teenagers and parents often fight. But we're not going to do that." And they sort of preemptively addressed the transition, laying down expectations-- "you will not be rude. you will be respectful, etc" and possibly sharing what they would do in return to help them through it or whatever. And this person said it totally worked. Each kid's teenage years went pretty smoothly. Ha! So that's something to think about.

One weird thing I think is for me, looking back, I shudder at the thought of those years but I wasn't feeling that way at the time. I thought it was normal and fine even though in retrospect it was a little bit wack. It's so weird how so much of it seems to be experienced subconsciously, sort of.

Also, I recently watched 8th Grade and kind of loved it. I thought it was super well done and captured the weird weird time of the age and will be of use to me when interacting with youths. I recommend it. Good luck with all the things!
March 2, 2019 at 2:43 PM
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