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JT's ADHD and Risk-Seeking Behavior
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<blockquote data-quote="susiestar" data-source="post: 398093" data-attributes="member: 1233"><p>Wow, in some ways you are speaking about my gfgbro as a teen. Only he had a lot of abusive behaviors going along with the complete lack of sense - common or otherwise. Sadly, much of this continued until he was in his mid thirties and got sober. He once commented that "drunken automechanics is about four times as expensive a hobby as regular" and thought it was a riot - esp when laughing over times that he destroyed MY vehicles (my parents insisted we let him borrow our vehicle and he drove over 300 miles in 4th gear, complained to us that it was "overheating", and roundly denied that it even had a 5th gear - the makers just put that on the shift lever to make us "think" that we had 5 gears. Yes, he really tried to make us believe this lame story - and he burned out a brand new transmission! He also was well known for having "guard rail burn" on the driver's door of his trucks. You get guard rail burn when you nod off/pass out/get really into the book you are reading while you drive and scrape the edges of the car against the guard rails.</p><p> </p><p>Has your son taken any industrial classes? Has he gone through a program with very rigorous safety training BEFORE he gets to even breathe on the tools? Our tech program here frustrates a LOT of kids because they don't want to do the bookwork and learn the safety stuff, but they are forced to. something like this might be your son's salvation. Wiz was not terribly accident prone but still got to learn to use some of the tools six MONTHS before the rest of his class because he didn't fight the bookwork - just got it done. ANY unsafe behavior resulted in having to go and completely recertify in the safety training from the very beginning. One student actually had to come back for a third year (one year they go half days to the program and half to high school, then next is full day in the program, this guy got a third full year in the program because he just refused/was unable to follow ANY safety rules.)</p><p> </p><p>Getting a true old clunker for your son might be the saving of him. Janet is right - get one from the junkyard, require him to pay for his parts and equipment (he may be able to rent some things from auto parts stores, etc...), and let him go. Do NOT send him online - too tempting. The older the car, the more he will be able to do with it. The newer ones have a lot of computer controlled parts, so older ones are often more "fixable". </p><p> </p><p>How do his damages get paid for? I would force him to pay you back with hard labor. NOT holiday/birthday money, or even money from a job. Money he earns at minimum wage by doing hard physical labor around your home. Mowing with a push mower (NOT a riding mower), weeding, digging holes for fence posts or a water garden or whatever. Every spare minute he needs to be working to pay you off. He gets NO money from you until he has this paid off. This means no $$ for gas, for allowance, etc... His money is yours until the debts are paid. For some people the ONLY way to get them to really SEE the damage they cause is by forcing them to pay it off before they can have any fun/nice things/etc... It will take months, but anything he destroys while acting this impulsively and recklessly, he must pay for. If he damages the property as he is working on it, his bill goes up and so does his workload. He HAS to take responsibility for the outcome of his recklessness or else he will never ever learn. My gfgbro was a real doozie with this - he had a job at the university and at 16 wrecked a univ truck by crashing into a parked univ van. To pay the fines off my parents made him work around their house. They even let him use the riding mower - on the condition that he check the oil after every hour of use. Because he "knew" that my dad was "being a baby" about it, he refused to check the oil. Less than a month after the accident he did thousands of dollars of damage to my parents' property - ran the mower engine out of oil so it seized, put some doors against the garage to paint them and didn't put anything up to protect the garage so he left big stripes of white oil paint that he then smeared with paint remover, and wrecked four or five other big things. My mom was already so stressed and sick that I went to meet her at work and told her in a public place so she wouldn't explode when she drove up the driveway. There had already been so much fighting that my ulcers were a wreck, and my mom was dealing with some problems that stress made a LOT worse so I tried to ease her into it. </p><p> </p><p>My gfgbro hasn't outgrown this. Sobriety helps, but doesn't fix it. When he was trimming trees and doing remodeling for people, he did some work for his psychiatrist in trade for treatment. My kids saw a therapist in a building she owned. We were there one day and heard a HUGE thud, the building shook like an earthquake had hit! We all ran outside (well, I had a pretty good idea who was responsible and I walked veeeerrrryyyy slowly as I was incredibly embarrassed) and saw that gfgbro's chain had broken, resulting in dropping a HUGE limb on the building!!! NO WAY should that chain have been used - and he knew it was in such bad shape that this was going to happen. He had taken off part of it because it dropped a limb a couple days before! This type of "mishap" is incredibly common for him. If he is going to be ANYWHERE at a certain time, he will be late and have a litany of things like that that are the reason - and he will make you listen to it over and over. It is another reason why I do NOT let him near us.</p><p> </p><p>You son may also have the "I know better than you" syndrome. My gfgbro is rampant with this. Just like with the oil and the lawn mower, if you tell him ANYTHING is needed, he knows it isn't. And will "prove" it to you. The last time I EVER let him take my kids anywhere - and I do mean EVER - I was flying back home with 6 month old thank you and gfgbro wanted to take the other 2 kids to the lake. I was unhappy about it, but my parents had already said it was fine - and they were to be in charge of the kids at that time. I was told it was going to happen whether I said OK or not. I gave gfgbro sunscreen and said it was really important to apply it every couple of hours. I also gave the kids (4 and 8) a second bottle of sunscreen and said if gfgbro forgets, you still have to put it on. He took it away from them to PROVE that you can spend all day out in the July sun in OK and not have it hurt you. He was supposed to be gone for 3 hours, and was gone for almost 7. My kids had to be taken to the doctor (and Jess almost to the ER shortly after that!) and their vacation with my parents was destroyed. They also lost the next 2 summers. Sunburn with blisters larger than a 50 cent piece were what he gave them. My mother refused to press charges because "he is miserable too" - the doctor told us that if my mother hadn't PROMISED that he would NEVER be alone with the kids again, and that he did NOT live with them, then she would have called CPS. We spent an incredible amt of money on pediatrician dermatologists and were told that IF we could keep the kids completely out of the sun for two YEARS then they MIGHT not end up with skin cancer. The entire next summer if they went outside during the day their skin hurt like they had a mild sunburn. My kids had NEVER EVER been sunburned before. NEVER (I don't tan so I was very careful about sunscreen on them). To this day gfgbro says it wasn't "his fault", that they refused to use the sunscreen when he gave it to them. But he was so drunk he couldn't find his dog - when the dog was licking his face, and my kids were at his mercy and forced to be in his car with him. He even made my kids lie about the cop who pulled him over, and the cop who chased them out of the ice cream/dairy place because he brought his filthy dog in. Those I learned about in the paper, and from the officers themselves when I called for details. </p><p> </p><p>This is just the bare minimum of the extent of the "I know better" that gfgbro is infected with. EVERY safety rule is for others, he can do everything perfectly, and if you tell him how to do something he has to skip the first parts and the safety stuff because he must "prove" to you that he can do it better. It always, 110% of the time, backfires. </p><p> </p><p>I wish I could be more reassuring. A new evaluation is in order because otherwise the concerta would be helping with the impulsivity. I hope that your son has a very on-the-ball guardian angel. I swear that is the only thing that has kept my gfgbro alive all these years. That and the grace of God looking out for idiots.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="susiestar, post: 398093, member: 1233"] Wow, in some ways you are speaking about my gfgbro as a teen. Only he had a lot of abusive behaviors going along with the complete lack of sense - common or otherwise. Sadly, much of this continued until he was in his mid thirties and got sober. He once commented that "drunken automechanics is about four times as expensive a hobby as regular" and thought it was a riot - esp when laughing over times that he destroyed MY vehicles (my parents insisted we let him borrow our vehicle and he drove over 300 miles in 4th gear, complained to us that it was "overheating", and roundly denied that it even had a 5th gear - the makers just put that on the shift lever to make us "think" that we had 5 gears. Yes, he really tried to make us believe this lame story - and he burned out a brand new transmission! He also was well known for having "guard rail burn" on the driver's door of his trucks. You get guard rail burn when you nod off/pass out/get really into the book you are reading while you drive and scrape the edges of the car against the guard rails. Has your son taken any industrial classes? Has he gone through a program with very rigorous safety training BEFORE he gets to even breathe on the tools? Our tech program here frustrates a LOT of kids because they don't want to do the bookwork and learn the safety stuff, but they are forced to. something like this might be your son's salvation. Wiz was not terribly accident prone but still got to learn to use some of the tools six MONTHS before the rest of his class because he didn't fight the bookwork - just got it done. ANY unsafe behavior resulted in having to go and completely recertify in the safety training from the very beginning. One student actually had to come back for a third year (one year they go half days to the program and half to high school, then next is full day in the program, this guy got a third full year in the program because he just refused/was unable to follow ANY safety rules.) Getting a true old clunker for your son might be the saving of him. Janet is right - get one from the junkyard, require him to pay for his parts and equipment (he may be able to rent some things from auto parts stores, etc...), and let him go. Do NOT send him online - too tempting. The older the car, the more he will be able to do with it. The newer ones have a lot of computer controlled parts, so older ones are often more "fixable". How do his damages get paid for? I would force him to pay you back with hard labor. NOT holiday/birthday money, or even money from a job. Money he earns at minimum wage by doing hard physical labor around your home. Mowing with a push mower (NOT a riding mower), weeding, digging holes for fence posts or a water garden or whatever. Every spare minute he needs to be working to pay you off. He gets NO money from you until he has this paid off. This means no $$ for gas, for allowance, etc... His money is yours until the debts are paid. For some people the ONLY way to get them to really SEE the damage they cause is by forcing them to pay it off before they can have any fun/nice things/etc... It will take months, but anything he destroys while acting this impulsively and recklessly, he must pay for. If he damages the property as he is working on it, his bill goes up and so does his workload. He HAS to take responsibility for the outcome of his recklessness or else he will never ever learn. My gfgbro was a real doozie with this - he had a job at the university and at 16 wrecked a univ truck by crashing into a parked univ van. To pay the fines off my parents made him work around their house. They even let him use the riding mower - on the condition that he check the oil after every hour of use. Because he "knew" that my dad was "being a baby" about it, he refused to check the oil. Less than a month after the accident he did thousands of dollars of damage to my parents' property - ran the mower engine out of oil so it seized, put some doors against the garage to paint them and didn't put anything up to protect the garage so he left big stripes of white oil paint that he then smeared with paint remover, and wrecked four or five other big things. My mom was already so stressed and sick that I went to meet her at work and told her in a public place so she wouldn't explode when she drove up the driveway. There had already been so much fighting that my ulcers were a wreck, and my mom was dealing with some problems that stress made a LOT worse so I tried to ease her into it. My gfgbro hasn't outgrown this. Sobriety helps, but doesn't fix it. When he was trimming trees and doing remodeling for people, he did some work for his psychiatrist in trade for treatment. My kids saw a therapist in a building she owned. We were there one day and heard a HUGE thud, the building shook like an earthquake had hit! We all ran outside (well, I had a pretty good idea who was responsible and I walked veeeerrrryyyy slowly as I was incredibly embarrassed) and saw that gfgbro's chain had broken, resulting in dropping a HUGE limb on the building!!! NO WAY should that chain have been used - and he knew it was in such bad shape that this was going to happen. He had taken off part of it because it dropped a limb a couple days before! This type of "mishap" is incredibly common for him. If he is going to be ANYWHERE at a certain time, he will be late and have a litany of things like that that are the reason - and he will make you listen to it over and over. It is another reason why I do NOT let him near us. You son may also have the "I know better than you" syndrome. My gfgbro is rampant with this. Just like with the oil and the lawn mower, if you tell him ANYTHING is needed, he knows it isn't. And will "prove" it to you. The last time I EVER let him take my kids anywhere - and I do mean EVER - I was flying back home with 6 month old thank you and gfgbro wanted to take the other 2 kids to the lake. I was unhappy about it, but my parents had already said it was fine - and they were to be in charge of the kids at that time. I was told it was going to happen whether I said OK or not. I gave gfgbro sunscreen and said it was really important to apply it every couple of hours. I also gave the kids (4 and 8) a second bottle of sunscreen and said if gfgbro forgets, you still have to put it on. He took it away from them to PROVE that you can spend all day out in the July sun in OK and not have it hurt you. He was supposed to be gone for 3 hours, and was gone for almost 7. My kids had to be taken to the doctor (and Jess almost to the ER shortly after that!) and their vacation with my parents was destroyed. They also lost the next 2 summers. Sunburn with blisters larger than a 50 cent piece were what he gave them. My mother refused to press charges because "he is miserable too" - the doctor told us that if my mother hadn't PROMISED that he would NEVER be alone with the kids again, and that he did NOT live with them, then she would have called CPS. We spent an incredible amt of money on pediatrician dermatologists and were told that IF we could keep the kids completely out of the sun for two YEARS then they MIGHT not end up with skin cancer. The entire next summer if they went outside during the day their skin hurt like they had a mild sunburn. My kids had NEVER EVER been sunburned before. NEVER (I don't tan so I was very careful about sunscreen on them). To this day gfgbro says it wasn't "his fault", that they refused to use the sunscreen when he gave it to them. But he was so drunk he couldn't find his dog - when the dog was licking his face, and my kids were at his mercy and forced to be in his car with him. He even made my kids lie about the cop who pulled him over, and the cop who chased them out of the ice cream/dairy place because he brought his filthy dog in. Those I learned about in the paper, and from the officers themselves when I called for details. This is just the bare minimum of the extent of the "I know better" that gfgbro is infected with. EVERY safety rule is for others, he can do everything perfectly, and if you tell him how to do something he has to skip the first parts and the safety stuff because he must "prove" to you that he can do it better. It always, 110% of the time, backfires. I wish I could be more reassuring. A new evaluation is in order because otherwise the concerta would be helping with the impulsivity. I hope that your son has a very on-the-ball guardian angel. I swear that is the only thing that has kept my gfgbro alive all these years. That and the grace of God looking out for idiots. [/QUOTE]
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