Is My Teen Lazy, Depressed, or Stuck? - Weekend Wisdom

Question: Should I tell my nephew that by the time he turns 18, he has to be in school and passing his classes, or have a job, to continue living with us? He will turn 18 at the end of this school year and will inherit a small amount of money that could get him started. He is currently in school, and he doesn’t have a job or any interest in getting one. Anytime someone asks him about his goals or future plans, his answer is “I don’t know” or “I don’t care.” I know that he is depressed and apprehensive about growing up, so part of me worries about pushing him too hard, but on the other hand, without a push, I worry his situation will continue to deteriorate. 

Resources:

• Prenatal Exposure, Part 2: Parenting Tweens and Teens
• Practical Ways to Connect with Your Tween or Teen
• Supporting Kids with Prenatal Exposure in the Transition to Adolescence and Beyond
• Raising Resilient Kids
• Raising Kids for a Lifelong Parent/Child Bond

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Welcome back to Weekend Wisdom. My name is Tracy Whitney. I'm the content director for
creatingafamily.org. Weekend Wisdom is our short podcast offered every Saturday morning that gives
you practical answers to everyday common dilemmas that are part of raising adoptive foster and
kinship families. Today's question is... Should I tell my nephew that by the time he turns 18,
he has to be in school and passing his classes or have a job in order to live with us?
He will turn 18 at the end of this school year. He and his younger siblings have lived with us for
about four years since the death of their parents. I feel like we have tried everything over the
years to try and engage him without much success. He's currently in school, but not doing any of
his schoolwork. Although he is bright and capable, all of his grades are in the single digits. He
doesn't have a job or any interest in getting one. Anytime someone asks him about his goals or
future plans, his answers are, I don't know, and I don't care. I know that he's depressed and
apprehensive about growing up, so part of me worries about pushing him too hard. But on the other
hand, without a push, I worry his situation will continue to deteriorate. He has been in therapy in
the past, but he generally claims to be fine and doesn't participate. At my request,
he is currently seeing his school counselor once a week. He is close with our other children but
rarely talks to anyone else. He spends most of his time distracting himself with video games and
funny videos. We have tried limiting his screen time but he finds ways around our restrictions.
Thank you. Your podcast has been so helpful.
I hear you, listener, and I hear the love and the worry that are going hand in hand with this
question and the struggles that your family is facing with this young nephew. Thank you for sharing
your story with us. I appreciate your vulnerability. And I hope that we can talk through some of
these issues so that you can kind of craft a plan to move forward. The situation that we're dealing
with here that you explained first requires that we acknowledge the tension that you're feeling
between protecting your nephew from failing and preparing him well for an independent,
productive adulthood. And those are normal, common tensions for anyone who's raising a young adult
or a teen. And so I hope it helps you to know that you're not alone. These struggles are more
common when a young adult has a history of trauma loss, prenatal substance exposure,
or neurodivergence. And you indicate that your nephew is living with you,
with his siblings, and with you because they lost their parents. From what I can gather,
that means that you all have faced some really hard stuff and this stuff has left its mark on you,
on your nephew, on his siblings. So before you lay out any big house rules or age-related
milestones or ultimatums, I think it might be useful to ask yourself, What does my nephew need to
succeed and not just comply with what we're asking him? His behavior is telling you something about
what he needs. And regardless of the specific need or the lack that he might not even be able to
express in words, there are a few things that you can do to help move him along this path of
launching into adulthood. You have to remember, though, that your timetable may not match his.
That's okay. The mismatch is hard to navigate. But if you can kind of flip the way you're thinking
about it to his stage of development versus his chronological age,
that would probably be really helpful to you. There's likely some middle ground that you can find
when you look at what he's experiencing and what he's trying to express through his action or
inaction through that lens of developmental stage versus age.
The first is to consider where you can increase connection and felt safety between him and you.
Teens who have experienced significant loss or trauma often interpret pressure from the adults
around them as rejection or threat, threat to their status quo,
which feels safe and comfortable, rejection of who they are. It doesn't just become about their
actions. It becomes a rejection of who they are internally. And when a young person seems
unmotivated, it's often not laziness. It's more often anxiety,
grief, hopelessness. unresolved trauma, all of the things that you know are already going on inside
of him. Increasing felt safety can fuel his motivation, but it can also make him feel safe to
express where he's feeling stuck. Some of the practical things that you can do to increase that
connection and felt safety would be spending low pressure time together, car rides, gaming next to
him, asking him to teach you a new game, sharing mealtime together. You can also try communicating
your empathy and your presence and your commitment in those low pressure times by just saying
simple things like, I know it feels pretty overwhelming to grow up. I know that life after high
school feels pretty scary. But always follow up those observations with the reassurance.
We're in this with you. You don't have to do this alone. We will not leave you unprepared.
And so when you're pairing that empathy with that reassurance, you can be building that felt
safety. Then when you have to enforce a house rule, like... on screens or anything like that,
your rules will make more sense and will be easier to tolerate because he's got more trust in the
relationship between you. And he's not fearing what that might mean for him or might mean about
him. Another thing that you can do is to spend some time observing him and asking yourself a few
questions. And this is kind of a step back. mentality, you're going to take your mindset from will
he work to why won't he work? And why is he only gaming or isolating to what skills does he need to
get out there and make friends or get out there and get a job or get out there and enroll in higher
education? You can ask yourself, does he feel confident in the skills that he has now and how they
might translate to a job? But those are questions that you're asking internally because you're
observing what you're seeing him do. So some of the common delayed skills or lacking altogether
skills that kids might have when they are dealing with trauma or loss or prenatal substance
exposure, et cetera. would include executive functioning skills, which is how to plan,
how to follow through, and how to manage the time needed for a task. Emotional regulation,
which you're already seeing, he's just kind of shut down. Hope, vision, and future thinking.
Again, you're seeing some of that already. Social confidence is another skill that is often a
struggle for kids who've had this history like your nephew has had. And mental health issues.
Again, you know he's depressed. So you can ask yourself a few questions while you're assessing
these skills. Like, it looks like school isn't working for him right now. What is getting in the
way? He struggled to make it to his part-time job every day last summer.
What was it that made it so challenging for him to get out the door on time? And if you have a safe
and nurturing relationship already building with him, you can start to ask him what he thinks about
some of these questions that you've been asking yourself. He might not have the language or the
skills to be able to answer you, but you could frame it in a, I wonder.
It seems like you had a really hard time getting out the door on time for school this morning. I
wonder if there's anything I could do to help you. make that better. So remembering that his sense
of competence and confidence needs time to grow after all of what he's experienced.
So he has to kind of feel it internally, feel motivated, feel confident,
feel competent before it starts to show up in his behavior on the outside is what I'm saying.
Another thing you can do to kind of boost up his skill set and also his sense of safety and trust
in your home is to look for and create opportunities where he can shine.
So when our young people... only feel or experience failure,
whether it's actual failure or perceived failure, they stop trying. It's demotivating for them.
You might need to look around for experiences that are kind of low stakes ways for him to taste
success. You mentioned that school is a challenge, so maybe consider some experiences outside of
academics. You're looking for maybe some strengths that he hasn't identified in himself yet,
or some passions and interests that you or he haven't seen in his life yet,
and experiences that will help build a positive sense of identity and maximize those interests or
those passions and those strengths that he's not sure of yet. His confidence will grow when he
starts to experience success. It often develops into a willingness to try new things or retry
things that felt unsuccessful in the past. You can help build his confidence in a lot of creative
ways, very low stakes, very low cost. and very low pressure. So one of the things you can do is ask
him to help you fix something in the house. Hey, this door is hanging funny on its hinge. Can you
hold it for me while I tighten the screws? Or how about I hold the door and you tighten the screws?
You could ask him to help you chop up vegetables for dinner. Very low stakes.
And when he does it, praise him up. oh my gosh, thank you so much. You really lightened my load
today. You seem to have a knack for your knife skills are fantastic, that kind of thing.
You could ask him to teach a younger sibling or a cousin a new video game that he has.
You could ask him to teach it to you. Hey, I think this game sounds really cool. Would you teach me
how to play? If you know that one of the other kids in the house is stuck on a level that he's
already attained in the game, ask him to kind of help them unlock how to achieve that new level.
You could also... Look around for volunteer opportunities that might be tied to his interests or
his existing skills. You know that he's really good with animals and animals just seem to respond
and feel calmed in his presence. So maybe you and he could volunteer once a month or once a week at
a local shelter, just walking dogs or... petting cats or whatever the shelter might need to keep
functioning. And you could give him the option of pursuing part-time work rather than expecting
him to have a full-time job, especially after he graduates in June.
The key in all of those creative attempts is to remember that your presence with him in those
experiences will increase his sense of safety and his trust in you, that you have his back,
that you are shooting and rooting for his success, and that you believe that he can accomplish
great things. Another thing, number four, that you can try is to give him plenty of opportunities
to learn and even to fail safely. This is another area where your presence with him will make a
significant difference in his confidence and his desire to seek growth and so on.
Explaining to him that our adult skills develop through experiences.
And then having those experiences with him is more effective than offering ultimatums that just
make him feel pressure and stress from the outside. So instead of saying,
you must be working by X date or you cannot live here anymore, try a more collaborative approach.
You could say something like, let's experiment with what feels doable right now. Or you could say,
what do you think is reasonable towards getting you on the path that you want to be on? Those are
things that kind of put the control in his hands, but don't leave him solely in control,
feeling like he's on his own. It's that collaborative language that makes him know you've got his
back and you're working with him to create a plan. One specific tool that you can think about to
learn and fail safely is setting and supporting short-term goals. And again,
not leaving him on his own to do these goals, but setting and supporting short-term goals that you
will see through to the end with him. So one class completed successfully,
not focused on the grades, but just that he completed the class. Or one volunteer shift.
consistently every week or one life skill that you know he needs and is practicing consistently,
like showing up to work on time or showing up to a volunteer shift on time or one basic life skill
like that. The goal is not perfection. The goal is progress and growth. When you observe any
progress at all, celebrate it. Make mention of what you see, call it out, and express pride in his
efforts, focusing on the efforts. And number five, gradually shift your role of supervision over
all of this to his role of ownership. At his age, control can often backfire.
You cannot and should not be doing this for him forever. So along the way, start looking for ways
to kind of hand off responsibility to him for his actions and his plans. And again,
this takes scaffolding and this takes support and this takes him knowing that you're not leaving
him alone in his role of ownership. It's saying, I'm helping you right now.
And the goal is to get you to the point where you are helping yourself. So this might look like
involving him in the decisions that are getting made about school, about his future plans,
et cetera, starting slowly and increasing as he gains skill and confidence. It might also look like
letting him shape his expectations. What does he see about himself and how does he want it to look?
And what's the difference between the two? And then moving from enforcement and accountability to
partnership with him. When they are at this age and stage, it's natural to feel stress and anxiety
about becoming an adult because it's a lot. But it's also natural for them to just want to.
push away and be super independent and not need you. And the tension between those things is that
they're not ready for all of that on their own. And then you're dealing with a young man who has a
lot of extra layers that have contributed to him completely shutting down and not feeling ready at
all. So you want to be saying things to him like, we want to support you as you become an adult.
Let's figure out together what living here looks like next month, next year.
Let's think about how to build your agency and your self-responsibility We want to trust you and
we want you to know that you can trust us. And we want you to know that we will be with you every
step of the way, guiding you as much as you need us and want us to. And then that kind of sets the
stage for putting it in his lap more and more as he gains the skills and the confidence and the
competence to do so. It's okay to have expectations for his adulthood.
I think it's awesome that you know that he's bright and capable. And I think saying that to him
with all of these things alongside of it can help you raise this child who's been impacted by such
loss and trauma to find his pace and find his path.
And it might be a little slower than other kids in your house. And it might look different than
other kids in your house. When we are focused on collaboration and skill building and slow steps
forward, always couched in that knowledge that he can trust us and he can.
count on us to have his back and be with him mentally and emotionally and physically through the
process. This connection offers him what he needs to thrive. So instead of asking,
should I push him or kick him out? You can reframe it to what support will help him make the next
steps forward? And how can I keep showing up for him to do that successfully? I so appreciate your
question. It's good reflection for me as a mom of two teenagers that are still in the process of
getting ready to launch. They're my last two. So it feels like I've kind of been down this path
before, but there's definitely things about it that are different in launching these two. And so I
appreciate the opportunity to think about this stuff and reflect. And I hope that some of the
suggestions that I've offered are helpful to you. You are not alone. We are all in this together.
Parenting an 18 year old is challenging. And when you're parenting an 18 year old who's experienced
such difficulties on the process to getting to 18, it can be even more challenging.
Surround yourself by good support and other safe adults who get what you're going through,
take care of yourself in this process, and write us a note and let us know how he's doing.
We'd love to follow up and hear about his progress. Listeners, I hope today's conversation was
helpful to you as it was to me. I hope that if you have questions like this,
you feel free and welcome to send them to us. You can always drop an email to info at
creatingafamily.org. Put weekend wisdom in the subject line and we'll add your question to our
queue and hopefully find an answer that strengthens your family. Until next week,
I hope you all are well and enjoying this beautiful spring weather.