<p>Glad she is in counseling. </p>
<p>If she just wants to explore interests, maybe try signing up for a few MOOC’s? Perhaps that would help.</p>
<p>She wants to marry a guy she is lying to about something that is obviously important to him? This cannot end well.</p>
<p>I think you’re doing the right thing by not making any major decision at this time. Your daughter is upset and not acting in the most rational way right now (note: I’m NOT saying she’s an ‘irrational person’, or can’t make good decisions generally, or will never be able to make them - I’m talking about right now as in this week/next week). You and your DH are emotionally and physically exhausted and upset, and I don’t blame you. Counseling with a good therapist that ‘gets’ your daughter - it may take some experimenting to find the right one - working, auditing or going part-time (one or two courses) at a CC if it won’t affect financial aid - take it one day and then one week at a time. If things can go o.k. day by day and week by week, eventually it will be a year and things will still be o.k. if not great. Life goes up and down and things may never be perfect but they can be o.k. It sounds like there may be some more deep-seated family issues; if so it’s very difficult to move on to career, college, etc. while those are going on. Improving the underlying issues will lead to improved outcomes in the future. There are lots of people thinking of you and wishing you the best, so take heart in that.</p>
<p>Glad to hear you are moving ahead with counseling. I hope it helps. I agree that lying to the BF about her religious involvement is not a good sign for that relationship.</p>
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<p>Could this explain why she freaked out about the kids drinking and smoking at the party? Is it part of her boyfriend’s beliefs that you don’t do things like that?</p>
<p>Not only is lying to him a bad sign, but the mere fact that she’s trying to make herself into someone she’s not (a highly religious person who goes to church all the time) in order to be with him, is also a bad sign.</p>
<p>OP, I think counseling is a great way for your D to start figuring this all out. But honestly, when I read through this thread it seems that the whole thing has been blown out of proportion. You have a D with a serious BF who went away to college, had an awful start through no fault of her own and came home. It is not the ideal situation but it is not a tragedy either. I think this sort of thing happens more often than you think. If I put my hand in the proverbial “bucket of problems” and pulled out this one, I would be heaving a sigh of relief. </p>
<p>She will figure it all out and life will go on. </p>
<p>Beyond a bad sign in my book. It’s conclusive proof that she’s not ready to marry anyone. Not that it would help the situation for mom to tell her that.</p>
<p>I feel for you. We are just at the high school freshman stage, but also wonder at where to draw the line between supporting them through their immaturity and allowing them to make mistakes and experience the unmitigated consequences. It seems that each parent responding has a strong opinion on this dichotomy but both ends of the spectrum are represented. </p>
<p>I am motivated to comment on another issue. Your daughter seems to be exhibiting very black and white thinking. She seems to be looking at something as all good one minute and all bad the next, when life is really a spectrum of more favorable and less favorable. She is acting very impulsively. Her behavior toward you verges on being manipulative, whether she realizes it or not. Her relationship to her boyfriend seems perhaps a little imbalanced, where she is extremely attached while he seems to have his own life. Maybe she is so strongly attached to him due to fears of abandonment, and is copying him to try to prevent rejection. I do not mean to be insulting (I am an MD) and you know her the best. Is it possible that she is developing some mental health concerns? These often begin in late teens or early adulthood. The one that comes to mind here is borderline personality disorder. Terrible name, common disorder that is considered a milder mental health issue (“Axis II” per psych). More common in females. There is an effective treatment, dialectical behavioral therapy, which can improve abnormal behaviors and reduce the black/white thinking. See the great article in the New England Journal of Medicine 2011. <a href=“http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp1007358”>http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp1007358</a> </p>
<p>I honestly don’t know what to tell you except that I was in the situation many of your kids were in not so long ago.
I was too immature for college myself. I went to an engineering school from 1999 to 2003. I messed up at my classes and my part-time job and took too many extra-curricular activities. I got really burnt out with stress and started having to take pills. On top of that, my Mom died during my junior year. I started losing my temper a lot and nearly got into a lot of trouble in school.
I begged my dad to let me take a year off from school but he wouldn’t let me. I used to say to myself “If I could have some time to myself, I could regain my composure.” Then again, I might have became a college drop out or some junkie loser or something like that.</p>
<p>I also want to mention that college is a very scary time for many kids. It’s the first time when they are on their own. If they mess up, they end up having to pay the consequences without mommy and daddy bailing them out.</p>
<p>To that point, mommy and daddy bailing a student out, here is an anecdote about my brother.</p>
<p>He didn’t apply to college on time. He graduated HS with decent grades in mostly honors and AP classes and my parents asked where he was going to college and he said “I don’t know”. So the first bailout was my dad scrambling around to get him a spot at a college. He ended up at a decent engineering school because of family contacts, in July.</p>
<p>Then he went to school, started out okay but then plummeted due to his frat and starting smoking pot as much as possible (tried to get me to start, thanks for that). He flunked a year and my parents were able to give him an ultimatum - live at home and commute to campus, and be back home every night by 10 pm. Stay at home all weekend every weekend. The trade was that they would keep paying for his college, and he graduated in five years after two years living at home.</p>
<p>He and all of my siblings lived at home after college rent-free. He was able to find and keep a job within the first year, but had to do landscaping because my mom wouldn’t let him live at home and not work while he was looking for a job. Fast-forward 25 years, he has a great management job and is very responsible. Not sure how much he appreciates what my parents did for him. As someone who was never bailed out by my parents (and all three of my siblings were in various ways, none as much as the brother I mentioned), I am very happy that they helped my siblings, I am not at all jealous and know that the outcome for me would have been much worse if they were all sent to the wind.</p>
<p>If my parents were not able or willing to bail him out, I really believe he would have been dead or at least a college drop-out working in landscaping. </p>
<p>The ending can be happy, but in the mean time, it is really difficult. </p>
<p>Interesting seeing “dead” in the same sentence as working a job requiring physical labor. My brother also dropped of college and took a construction job just to have some spending money. He’s owned his own construction firm for many years now, has won awards and has many wealthy customers for his custom work. His oldest D is at work on her third Master’s-somehow I don’t think I’d put him in the same line as “dead”. lol. </p>
<p>My brother started at cc (actually, at the time, one of those very fine community junior colleges that many kids in our cushy suburb did go to,) lived at home, maybe got a D average first sem. Tried again, barely brought up grades. He took a breather, picked up two trades, worked alongside adults. But at the time, my grandmother lived with us, would take care of his every need. At that time, what he earned was not enough to move on and he was personally going nowhere. He tried cc again and no better.</p>
<p>My mother worked to find a residential college he’d be interested in and that would take him. He caught fire there, went on to a masters and work in tech. But before that, he wasn’t sitting around making the family life miserable. He chipped in on groceries, maintained the family cars, accommodated himself to family requests, etc. So, whether or not he was too immature to tackle the academics, at first, the family concern was would be ever get at least half a degree- not increasing depression and frustration and concerns about an early marriage or how truthful he was. </p>
<p>“Dead” because my brother was turning to harder drugs. I didn’t mean that those two things were equivalent. My parents had already paid for three years of college when things really hit the fan.</p>
<p>Physical labor is fine, if that is what you want to do. I am trying to get one of my kids into vo-tech and then either apprentice as a chef or go to culinary school. He has a very high IQ and has tested perfect, not just the highest score but none wrong, multiple times on standardized math tests. He is choosing between computers and being a chef and I don’t know which one he will pick. And I refuse to push him one way or the other.</p>
<p>I see too many kids in college who were pushed to go, and really wanted to do something else. My parents were there for my brother to realize that he did want to go to college to prepare for the career he wanted. At the time that he was failing out at college, my brother narrowly missed getting arrested for having felony (in our state) quantities of pot. That was when my parents decided he could not hack it under the rules and conditions his three siblings had when they went to college. (my parents’ rules and conditions being - “I don’t want to get a phone call from the college about you. I don’t want to read about you dead in the paper. Otherwise, you’re on your own.” My brother violated the first rule several times before my parents “kicked him off campus” and they were worried about the second rule 
)</p>
<p>I’m glad your brother ended up doing so well. I do not know if my brother would have.</p>
<p>Perhaps it would be useful to put yourself in her shoes.</p>
<p>It sounds like what she wants to do is be with her boyfriend. College in incidental.</p>
<p>Will this change with time? Probably. Can you changes this at the moment? Probably not.</p>
<p>I’ve just caught up with the entire thread. I’m now much more sympathetic to your daughter’s decisions. (I’d be a touch more worried about meth than cigarette smoking, but that’s just me.)</p>
<p>I hope you don’t blame yourself - you’ve done the best that you can for your daughter, and that’s all you can do. It sounds like your daughter just needs some time.</p>
<p>@imkh70 so sorry about the crises you have been facing. Hugs. Breathe.</p>
<p>I think by the sound of things your DD can have a ‘fresh start’ next year with school, taking a gap year. Sounds like the rough start at the one place had a conclusion that could have worked out differently, but you do the best you can - just as you thought you were doing the right thing at the time.</p>
<p>She obviously has a judgment issue when the job ‘interfered’ with her one hour chat with boyfriend - all she would have needed to do is send him a text and reschedule. She should be working full time, two part time jobs, whatever - deliver pizzas, fast food job … </p>
<p>Reflecting on her last year of HS, was she anxious about the decision and change and that is why she was so nasty to be around - or was it she was angry that you didn’t have the resources to ‘give’ her whatever college she desired to go to and was admitted to?</p>
<p>Perhaps the counselor can help her with talking about her emotional issues. Maybe she also needs an overseeing psychiatrist if she needs meds.</p>
<p>Hopefully your H and you can talk things through and be a united front on seeing clearly what is going on and moving forward.</p>
<p>You have a lot on your plate. Hang in as best you can to continue to do what your head and heart tell you is right - and do not be sucked into feeling ‘guilty’ about your DD’s circumstances and then make bad decisions now and in the future. She does have to grow up emotionally.</p>