His dad is here. He and his dad go head to head worse than I do with him. My DH is a SGT at the police department and has worked at the department for 28 years. He is very preachy and strong handed. The strong handed I do not mind, but the preachy stuff drives me as crazy as it does my son.

I have talked to my DH, (not in front of the boy of course) about making his point and then dropping it. It is a proved fact that most children will hear you for about a minute or 2 or maybe a little longer and then they begin to tune you out. Shoot, I do it myself if someone is going on and on about something. It's not intentional, but I catch myself tuning out too.

His father gets on him hard about things. We agree on punishments and things that need to be done, it's just that he gets very long winded and then I tend to lean to the more lenient side because of it. His approach needs as much if not more work than mine. Our son thinks that when we talk to him we are fussing. We can't seem to say anything even in the sweetest tone without him thinking that we are getting on to him.

I think you are right about the getting him to figure out what he thinks needs to be done, and letting him take ownership of it. I just don't know how to open up a conversation about it anymore.
He shuts down a lot of the times as soon as I broach the subject and then of course I get upset and start fussing at him, or just shut down too.
I always thought I would make sure I would have open communication with my child and tried to make sure he knew he could talk to me about anything. Somewhere I failed at that. He doesn't seem to trust us to open up to us and I guess that is our fault.


I will try again though. I never give up, I just feel like it sometimes.
I am always looking for new ways to approach him or help him.
I know he must be frustrated also, he just doesn't do anything about fixing the problem so the frustration goes away.

He really is a great kid. He's very responsible and trustworthy at home and when we go out. He behaves very well anywhere we go and never gets into any trouble at school. He's been taught to be polite and respectful. He loves to try to make people laugh once he gets to know them. He can be very silly and funny. His teachers and others usually find him very pleasant and love having him around. He can be very loving when he wants to be, but he's a teenage boy so that is not nearly as often as it use to be.

It's just school and getting work done. He test great most of the time so if they could just teach and then test, he would do fine. LOL