22 year old son is driving us crazy

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My step son is 22 and very intellligent. All he wants to do is play on his computer all day and all night. We can't get him to do anything around the house. He did have a job then quite it. How can we motivate him? He would rather stay upstairs and starve rather than do some work around the house and get paid for it.

There are people in the Parenting Forum who will be able to help you with this.

Welkome to WrongPlanet.

The WP Kink

Make him pay for his internet own connection.

I also suggest the parenting forum.

Well I would echo what was said above about making him pay for the Internet connection.

Another suggestion is to make sure you are giving him clear instructions on exactly what you want him to do, at what day and what time. I know that if my parents just said they wanted me to help more around the house, or even that they wanted me to clean up after dinner, for instance, I would feel lost and end up not doing it. I need to know exactly what the want me to do, when they want me to do it and how often. E.g. Wash up after dinner, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening, at 7pm (or whatever time you finish eating).

Also, try to make it into a routine, since those of us with AS tend to prefer sticking to routine.

At 22 he should be out of the nest and on his own unless he has something seriously wrong with him other than just laziness.

We had a chart for chores growing up. I now prefer a color for each person. Definitely make him pay for internet or separate phone. My son uses the car a lot and so has to pay for gas and oil changes. I agree with the others about being clear in the instructions. Maybe even have him watch you perform them and encourage questions. He needs to be aware he is an adult and able to contribute to his own needs. Good luck.

I'm not a parent so what I say might sound sucky, but my Mum wouldn't have been complaining if I had sat in my room all day. I'm hyperactive and used to be quite violent. I suppose I can see why you are worried though...

I think it's time for your step son to realize that he needs to do his share of the work if he wants to live in the house. First off, discuss it with your wife. What do you think would be appropriate for him to do? Pay for his internet connection, pay rent, do certain chores (and which and when)? That way you have a clear image for yourself about what you think he should do. And you avoid bickering in front of your step son if you and your wife disagree about something.

The next step is to have a conversation with your step son about this. Off course with both you and your wife present. Make sure that your step son is in a good mood, and announce the conversation if needed. The way I think is most effective, is to tell him that to live in a house as a family, certain chores have to be done to make living there comfortable. And that you think that he can also chip in on that, as he is living in the family home. Then ask him to think along what he thinks would be appropriate for him to do. Don't tell him what he should do, but let him think what he finds doable. That way you can work to a compromise that everyone can live with. That's important because you have a bigger chance that he will do his share and not bail out. He's an adult and wants to be treated like one.

If he for example hates doing laundry, it wouldn't be wise to force him to do that because you want him to. He can also do the dishes, mow the lawn, put the garbage out, or clean the living room. Or (help to) cook a meal once a month. Or whatever you and he can think of.

If he can't think of chores he can do, you can also make a list of chores that should be done in the house. He can then select four (or whatever number you prefer) chores that he wants to do. That way he has influence (and he can avoid chores he hates) and you get the amount of work done that you want him to do. Make the list together with him, he wants to be in on it. If he thinks along with you he hopefully sees the need for him to do something.

All together he definitely needs to do some work. It's not fair that you pay for all and do all the work, as he is old enough to help out. He needs to understand that in order for him to keep living in the family home. Be careful bringing that last thing up, but do it if you have to. He's an adult and should be capable to live on his own if he doesn't want to contribute.

Let's see:

* he's a young man with AS (age 22, a young adult)
* he's not your child, he's your husband's child, but he's living in your house
* he's very intelligent
* he had a job, but he quit it
* he does not work around the house, even when offered money as an incentive
* he constantly isolates himself on the computer, to the point where he goes hungry
* you are frustrated with the situation, the stepson is "driving you crazy"

Are you resentful of the fact that your husband's adult child is living in your house? Do you think he ought to work (whether inside or outside the home) and contribute to the household? Are you resentful of the fact that he sits on his computer for much of the day? Are you at a loss in terms of what to do to change the situation?

When you say this person would "rather starve" than work, does that mean that you are refusing to feed him? Have you resorted to forbidding him to eat your food, unless he contributes to the household (with money earned from an outside job, or with work inside the home)? Is this how you are trying to "motivate" him?

Regardless of whether the above is accurate, please consider:

1) Have you considered whether the way you are interacting with your stepson is an appropriate way to treat a person with a disability?
2) Are you and your husband well-educated about your stepson's medical condition, and the specific ways in which it limits his abilities?
3) Are you and your husband currently receiving outside help from a social worker or other professional, with the specific purpose of learning how to navigate the process of living with a disabled family member?
4) Is your stepson receiving professional support (therapy, job training, education) to help him integrate into his community?
5) Have you considered that in the absence of appropriate support and understanding, that your stepson may have developed depression?

Please tell us more about the situation.

When I was 22 I worked at a resteraunt where I was picked on non-stop. I would come home and watch horror videos and avoid leaving my room when I came home from work to keep from having meltdowns involing my parents. (I did not use the internet back then or had a computer otherwise that is what I would have been doing the samething as your son.) He might not be lazy but frustrated with his situation. At that age I was stuck in a deadend job, no other job would hire me, I would only rarely go out with friends, I could not get a girlfriend, and all my friends were graduating from college and moving away. I felt my life was collapsing in on me so I did not want to do anything but read or watch horror films trying to hide from life. I tried to quit the resteraunt job but my parents made me stick with it because they kept saying you are not going to get any money for your videos from us. I was essentially stuck there for nine years until I had enough and quit the job after 9 years of constant harrassment. It took me 6 months to find a new job with a temp agency who hired anyone who got jobs that noone else wanted because they were filthy, dangerous, or a combination of both.

Like autism, for example.

I wasn't ready to be on my own at 22.

Does he know the things he needs to know to be on his own? Because if he doesn't, then there's no good expecting him to do it. And I don't mean just physically knowing how to do laundry or wash dishes; I mean knowing how to organize yourself, inhibit one impulse or encourage another, remember to do things, switch tasks from one to another, etc.

It looks like, at the very least, he has extreme trouble switching from one task to another. Does he have a normal sleep schedule? Usually, if he stays up later and later each night playing games, and only goes to sleep once he is so tired that he's asleep on his feet, that's a dead giveaway that he physically can't switch tasks until his brain is forcing him to sleep. Do you, for example, have to remind him to shower, and then stand there for ten minutes or more, repeatedly reminding him, until he goes? This would be another indication that he has problems with transitions.

Last edited by Callista on 23 Dec 2010, 12:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Mom?

Make him pay rent. He'll quickly have to do something to make money then. If the thing he does to get money involves setting up an online business, let him do that, BTW. What matters is he's actually doing work and making his own money.

Responsibility is a requirement of a non-parasitic life. What must be determined is behavior that aligns with ability. It is possible that an autistic cannot bear to full load of a typical adult life. But this does not excuse shirking what duties CAN be shouldered.

Absolutely agree. He is being sheltered and will never grow up this way.

I'm glad someone said this, because this thread was really disturbing me.

Why are so many people assuming that this man is lazy? Because he's "intelligent"? (Intelligence has nothing to do with the way practical skills pan out among autistic people.) Because he had a job and then quit? (Autistic people often burn out of jobs.) Because he plays video games? (Video games fit in really well with the way some autistic people process and respond to information, plus they can be very repetitive and distracting from some kinds of overload. If they're multiplayer games, they can also be a less overloading way of socializing.) Because the original poster described him in a way that didn't make it sound as if his behavior was caused by very real limitations? (Just because that's one person's point of view doesn't mean it's necessarily accurate. Heck, even the autistic guy might think the same way, but that could be because we absorb the views that are most often presented to us.)

Some autistic people are indeed late to learn how to function outside of their parents' house or a similar environment. This doesn't generally mean they're lazy. It means they (regardless of "intelligence" or other things most people unfortunately see as connected to practical abilities) just can't do certain things. I'm thirty, and I would not be living outside of my parents' house without very extensive services. I was "lucky" in a way, in that I had a long record before I got to the service system, didn't appear to others to be too capable, and had a great deal of evidence that I had no capability at these things, rather than just being lazy.

I was nineteen when I moved out, but not because I was more capable than many people who stay in. I won't go into huge degrees of detail (I've done it before here). But I will say that among other things, I starved. I starved sometimes within two feet of food. It wasn't that I didn't care. It wasn't that I had a death wish. It wasn't that I had any choice in the matter whatsoever. It was that:

* I couldn't feel when my body was hungry.
* I couldn't respond to that feeling even when I did feel it
* I had a movement disorder that made it difficult to cross boundary lines, including the boundaries from the outside of a cabinet to the inside
* Object permanence was very... impermanent, for me, meaning that much of the time I could not conceive of anything that I was not immediately perceiving with my senses, so if something was inside a fridge or a cabinet I was screwed.
* That same movement disorder often made me freeze in place, with a totally unresponsive body, for hours, and then take even longer to come out of that far enough to figure out how to move my body parts in coordination with each other.
* That same movement disorder also often made me run around the apartment in various repetitive ways without being able to stop myself or steer myself (and sometimes when I did manage to steer myself it would just steer me into another repetitive movement pattern that was different than the first, rather than into an ability to move of my own volition where I wanted to.
* I had perceptual/cognitive issues that could both distance me from my body (and be unable to find and use it when I needed it), and make it impossible for me to perceive my surroundings as anything other than a bunch of shifting colors/shapes/textures/tones/smells/etc. (and could not conceptualize the idea "food" or "hunger" in that state let alone identify it)
* I had movement issues that would sort of railroad me into particular activities, which I would be very lucky if they were the activities I actually needed to be doing to sustain (as in they were almost certainly not), and which are hard to explain, except to say that this is a real phenomenon even in people with serious movement disorders like Parkinson's as well (there's certain stimuli that make a movement/activity easy and/or outright mandatory, and others that make it impossible or nearly so, and it's hard to explain unless you have this kind of problem), and can also crop up in people with much lesser degrees of similar-looking forms of movement difficulty (which many autistic people have without it being recognized).
* And a bunch of other reasons.

I was anything but lazy. I worked hard my whole day. I even did things like (when I caught a moment of ability to do so) putting food out in places all around the house so it might be a little easier to get to. But even so, I starved until I got services that allowed me to live on my own without starvation or the many other disastrous consequences of living with barely any outside assistance. (And yes, I did have some assistance at the time and it was still extremely bad. Just take my word for it that starving was far from the only thing going wrong.) (Also, none of this was due to the "emotional issues" that I've seen people here attribute things like that to. No death wish, no self-pity, no desire to see myself fail.)

Not everyone's going to be that extreme, or have the exact same issues, but most autistic people have at least some variant on the same issues. And while many people want to think it's always possible to push through it, to "find workarounds" (I swear that's like a mantra in some places), to "demand responsibility" (the most responsible person won't be able to carry through on something if it's beyond their ability, and even if they manage to do something for awhile they may well crash at some point in the future because cumulatively it's just functioning in emergency-mode for way too long), and so forth... not all that stuff is going to work all the time, and some of that stuff can do serious damage if the person is not capable of doing it. (I should note the person themselves may not know they're incapable of something -- even people with no (or very little) use of their arms and legs sometimes grow up convinced it's a secret that they really could walk if they tried, and beat themselves up over it.) Being able to do things sometimes and not others is very typical of autistic people also, and not a sign of being deceitful, lazy, or anything else like that.

At any rate, people should be prepared for the possibility that little to none of this is just lack of work ethic or laziness or anything like that. It's fairly rare that an autistic person can do chores easily or all the time. It's very common that autistic people have problems in a lot of areas that look just like this, and it's very common for it to have nothing to do with being lazy and irresponsible. Not that an autistic person can't be lazy or irresponsible, but it's rarely the main reason (and often not a reason at all) for being unable to do various "life skills" the same way other people do them (or at all in any way). And it's not generally a good idea for those things to be the first approach to the problem.

Unfortunately, though, there's a large amount of cultural push towards warped versions of "responsibility and accountability" (warped beyond all recognition, really). Versions that have become more punitive than genuine, especially if a person falls outside their excessively narrow boundaries. Meanwhile, disabled people are already stereotyped by many people as lazy people who slack off and blame their disability for it, people who just love getting a government check when they could be working, that kind of thing. In the face of both of these forces, many autistic people try to embrace the stereotypes (and impose them on others) in an attempt to avoid being stereotyped in these ways themselves. That's not the only reason but it's a big reason. And it's a highly destructive pattern that helps nobody.

I'm not making an apology for laziness, by the way. I'm not into laziness, I run at the extreme other end of the laziness spectrum myself. But a lot of people are caught up in the idea that autistic people's difficulties doing various things are based primarily in either character defects like laziness or emotional problems like depression or self-pity (well self-pity is kind of both an emotional problem and a character defect, but you know what I mean). The idea that we might actually have limits isn't too popular in some places these days. But we do.