Question
My son has become very disinterested in school. I have had numerous interactions with his year head, who has invested huge time and effort to get him to conform to expected behaviour. The phrase “parental responsibility” is regularly used in my interactions with the school principal.
As a single mum, it’s not easy trying to control a 15-year-old boy who seems to have lost all interest in his school life. I am finding it progressively difficult to manage his behaviour as he refuses to conform to my directions - no phone in his room at night, etc.
I try to ensure he is up and ready for school before I leave for work each morning, but he often refuses to comply.
Answer
Your dilemma is replicated in homes throughout the country, where a proportion of young men rebel against the societal expectations of how they should conduct themselves.
It is absolutely no reflection on the love and commitment that you have invested in your son that his behaviour has deteriorated to the extent it has.
A recent survey of opinion following the tragic loss of five young men’s lives on the M9 showed a strong societal belief that parents should be held responsible for the behaviour of their teenage children. This view is reflected in the use by school authorities of the phrase “Parental Responsibility”, when a student’s behaviour makes teaching and learning impossible for his fellow students.
It’s ironic that we have spent the past 20 years in Ireland redressing the treatment of women who became pregnant and were forced into institutions where their children were often taken from them shortly after birth. Today, women in those circumstances are free to choose to keep their child if they so wish, and will receive State financial support in raising them.
[ Ireland now: anxious, jumpy and no country for young men or womenOpens in new window ]
During my own teaching life and in the privacy of my guidance counselling office, many a mother raising a teenage boy on her own revealed the extent of the daily struggle they faced in trying to control behaviour. Some described being physically assaulted by their own child as they attempted, for example, to take a phone off them at night time.
Who are the adult males in your son’s life outside of his teachers at school? How actively involved are male members of your own family in your son’s life?
There is compelling evidence that the unlimited access to social media that our children are now encountering from their pre-teens onwards is generating a wave of school refusal, loss of interest in studies, exposure to bullying, utterly unrealistic expectations around body image, etc, and is hugely destructive of their healthy development.
The phrase that it takes a village to raise a child possibly contains a clue to supporting mothers such as yourself in bringing your son’s behaviour back under control. As a society, it is not sufficient to congratulate ourselves that we no longer stigmatise women who bear and raise children on their own.
Young men need positive male role models. Sadly, some of those they are now encountering in their daily experience online are giving them misogynistic images of what a man should be and a very regressive perspective on the role of women, which may be feeding into your son’s treatment of you.
Who are the adult males in your son’s life outside of his teachers at school? How actively involved are male members of your own family in your son’s life? Are there men at youth or sports club level locally, that he might look up to?
Right now, until he completes his second-level education, you could try reaching out to that proverbial “Village” to assist you in guiding his actions and behaviours.
askbrian@irishtimes.com