Long Beach Fitness Expert

I’m concerned about my son. He’s 17 years old, he’ll be graduating high school this year. He have been taking a college course at community college ever since he was a junior. He also is highly ranked in ROTC and leader for raider team and is one of very few to be on physical fitness for three years. He also is an accomplished varsity wrestler. And have been doing mixed martial art ever since wrestling season was over during his freshman year. He even had done a couple boxing, kickboxing, and grappling matches and always did very well in them.
I’m very proud of everything he did. But what bothers me is, lately I’ve been learning lot of things that really bothers me.
Outside of ROTC and mixed martial arts, he has very few friends. Almost all of them are female friends from college who are rather odd. They all dresses really odd, many have unnatural hair color, and other things. Most of them appear to be in early 20’s. My son hangs out with them way more than anyone else. I tried to not let it get to me at first.
However I start to find blood stain on his shirt, I start to find scars on his body that he’d try to hide if asked about it, and other things.
We also notice he never panic when he saw his own blood, in fact he seems to like the sight of it.
A couple days ago, we installed a software on computer that would allows us to see what our kids are doing on the computer (we’re more worried about our three younger children). To my shock, I found a couple pictures of some of those girls he hang out with drinking blood and playing with blood.
We also found from his online journal that he basically do wrestling and mixed martial arts simply because he get thrills out of it and hurting other people and getting hurt.
He also states some things he have done that we didn’t know of. He talks about sneak into abandoned building, climbing then reppell down a very tall building in our city at night, falling off cliff and crashed through branches when he went on some rock climbing, biking sixty miles to beach and almost died when he got caught in rough wave, pulls some pranks off, getting in fight, and other things.
We also learned that my son have been lying about where he was majority of the time. Often he’d say he’s at library, training late, and other things so he can do all those dangerous things. We also learned on weekend, he’d regularly go out to meet foreigner tourist and hang out with them and play guide for them.

We haven’t told him anything about this since we don’t want him to find out we were spying on him and other kids.
Not long ago, he came and told us he plans on joining the army and wants to go to recruiting office. We thought it’d be ok since he’d probably get accepted in a good university. But now he wants to go in as 11X (infantry/special force) with airborne school as option instead of attending a university that he got accepted into!
I am having very hard time to deal with all of this. I don’t even know if I should approach him about any of those things. I used to think he was a really good kid. But now I feel like there may just be another whole world that we didn’t know of.

I would be very concerned. Not so much about his friends because that really isn’t the most alarming part of your story. What concerns me is his reckless behavior with his well being. But 17 year olds do some very daring (and sometimes stupid) things because they see themselves as durable and indestructible. But meeting with strangers, lying, thrill seeking or fighting would be concerning.

I would definitely start getting more involved with him and asking him to bring his friends around. His friends may have weird hair but meet them and see who they are and how they treat your son, then make the judgment.
You need to start getting involved. Having a computer program and watching from afar won’t be interactive enough. Does he have a curfew? Do you do things together? Make dinner together? These are key times when you get to ask your kids pertinent information. Get involved, ask questions. You have to show him the parent(s) are/is here, in charge and care. Be interested. He might possibly need some counseling.

I would have him postpone his Army tour and direct him towards college. Go slow and don’t lose your temper. The minute you start getting angry they stop listening.

I wish you patience, tolerance and the best.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 2:10 am and is filed under Long Beach Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.