Parenting Teenagers (12-18) Support Group
This community is focused on the joys, challenges and concerns faced by parents of teenagers (12 to 18 year olds). The major areas of child development include: physical development, perception and sensory development, communication and language development, cognitive development, emotional development and social development.
Hang in there, you are immensely valuable.
Best wishes.
I suggest that you begin to live your own life. Go out to dinner. Date. Find friends of your own age to pal with. You son is a man--almost. Ignore him.
He will begin to come back to you, perhaps when he is in his mid-twenties with children and too many responsibilities of his own. Face it, lady, if you haven't already solidified that mother-son bond before now, it's likely that you will never have it. But I think you do.
Go out and begin to live your life. Force him to do all the things that at 15 he should be doing by himself:
Making his own dinners,
Homework
Keeping house (cleaning and stuff)
Laundry
You are raising an adult. You are not raising a child. He is a child, to begin with, why would you want him to remain one? Your job is to peek in on his progress here and there, now and again. Be that safety net, but no more. After he is showing signs of needing you to teach him a skill or skills that he did not have, help him. And in those quiet brief moments alone with him remind this boy that you love him and get out again, In less than 3 years he will be on his own and playing the part of an adult. Demand he do it. That front door rarely swings both ways and you gave a solemn vow to God to nurture and love and then let go.
“Something has spoken to me in the night...and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: "[Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.” ― Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again