I wish I had the answers. I hope somebody else will post something that can help both of us.

I too am struggling to raise my son to be independent but nothing is working. He is twenty years old and still in high school. If he doesn't graduate this year he will be too old to return to school after that. My son has issues too. He has ADHD and bipolar and a big time sleep disorder. He also has a learning disability in written language but he is gifted in math and is a bright boy with an IQ of 130.

My son's biological father is a very poor father. We divorced when my son was a year old because he was abusive to me and for four years he never asked to see his son until I got an attorney to help me collect the child support he wasn't paying. His mother started bringing my son to house on occasions and asking his father to come there to try to build a relationship but it failed. When my son was a teenager his father told him that he couldn't wait until he turned eighteen and he didn't have to have anything to do with him anymore. For several years during his teen years my son talked about his fantasies to kill his father.

When my son was two and a half years old I met a man and we started a relationship and lived together for nine years. We had gone to the county office to apply for a marriage license but just never did get married. For the first seven years my boyfriend was a loving step-dad and he and I had a healthy intimate relationship. But then he met a guy who was trafficking drugs from CA to WV. I knew that but I thought it was just weed. What I didn't realize at that time was that this fellow was giving my BF meth to work on his four wheeler and ride on our farm and stuff. My BF went loco and became very violent. I didn't understand at that time why and just wanted things to go back to good again. But he repeatedly assaulted me and I don't know how many times I thought my death was imminent as held guns to my head and chest. After awhile I started filing assault charges and got a protective order. But his brother was an attorney so every time he went to jail he was out in twelve hours and then he was madder than ever. Things got worse and worse and finally he came to my house and assaulted me again and told me he was going to kill us both. Our friends had been telling me that he told them he intended to kill me so I believed him. All I could think of was how sad that my eleven year old son would grow up without a mother. When I finally had the opportunity to get my gun I decided either he was going to die or we both were going to die so I shot and killed him. After that I was emotionally unavailable to my son for years. My son was never assaulted but he heard things and he told me he used to hide in rooms in the house because he was frightened and didn't know what to do. So I know that this has affected him.

Anyway that is pretty much the background story. Despite his learning disability my son loved school and did well in all classes except English but I did have to be an advocate to ensure that the teachers actually followed the modifications on his IEP. But after my trauma I was unable to advocate and when he got to high school the teachers failed to modify his assignments and instead he was told to do assignments in written form. He began failing and after a couple of years of this he no longer liked school and his attendance became very poor. In the last two years I have been able to advocate for him again but despite meeting with teachers who said he was ahead of everyone else and me saying I want to know if he begins to have problems the teachers did not tell me he had begun to fail classes until a week before end of semester. I have talked to principal, counselor, superintendent and they all acknowledge that the school was negligent and in violation of disability act but yet nobody ever saw that the assignments were modified.

So now he received a phone call last week from a counselor saying that because he had failed classes he was no longer eligible to attend regular school but could take summer school, internet classes or evening classes. I talked to the principal last week and said what I wanted most was for him to be returned to computer drafting at the technical center. He didn't know if he could so told me to call which I did but as yet have no answer.

My son has pretty much given up. He plays video games for hours and talks online/phone with friends but seldoms sees people in person. I asked him a couple of years ago what his expectations were and he said he saw himself going down, down, down until he finally kills himself.

I honestly don't know how to help him.