My 16 year old son has been doing poorly in school always. Now as a sophomore, he failed one class 1st semester and currently has 4 F's, 5 weeks from the end of the 2nd semester. We recently found out he has been using marijuana. He has told us not often or for long, of course we believe that it is longer and more often that he admits. We told him that we would regularly drug test him and that we couldn't allow him to do things that would put him in danger. He spewed out statistics and information about the benefits of marijuana use and told us that he had no intention of stopping... My husband and I did see a counselor who advised us on how to work with our son and it was not really working, then we found out about the pot use. We went to our counselor asking about sending our son away for an outback type of program for the summer to try to turn things around and asking what he thought of them, he said that we would send him when we had reached our limit, which I was at then, my husband wasn't... I saw Dr. Bradley 5 years ago and got my husband to go with me recently to see him again. Now my husband gets it. Thank You Dr. Bradley...then we were encouraged by the improvement in home life since we started implementing a change in the way we deal with our son and thought we could ditch the plan to send him away. Our son's behavior at home is exceptionally better since we have changed. We drug tested him and he told us he would fail, just yesterday the same thing happened. He is continuing to use, which we have told him that we cannot allow him to continue to do things that will harm him. We are going to tell him that he is not allowed to go out without us until he tests negative, but he can have his friends come to our house.
After finding out that he is continuing to use pot, an updated progress report arrived today and the grades that he told us he was working on improving are not better, tardy multiple times in many classes and detentions I am feeling that we may need to do it after all. He still has two more years before he turns 18 I feel like we really need to take drastic steps to get him on a better path before our time runs out. Since he has not stepped up to take care of his school work I am thinking that we need to have a tutor sit with him and make sure he does his homework, reading and studying until the school year ends in order to make sure he steps up and does his work. Of course I want him to graduate high school, but we need to get the marijuana out of his life. not sure what to do. He is not usually very cooperative and he has a history of running away...hasn't done that in almost a year but he might try it again.
I told him that he would need to go to a drug program and he told me he wouldn't, "I'm not addicted, I can stop if I want to, I just don't want to". I know if he doesn't want to stop all efforts are a waste of time. So how do we turn this around??!!
Thanks for any suggestions!