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What is the name of your state? NY
My ex has residential custody of our 16 year old son. Last May he began letting our son stay at my house almost full time and he has been with me ever since. The only exception was 5 days in the month of september when my son was with him and they had a knock down blow up and he ended up calling the police because my son said he did not want to live with him and if he make him, he would "kill himself". This caused my ex to call the police and say that he was threatening to kill himself and they came and carted him off to the nearest hospital psych ward for evaluation. He was released about 2 hours later and went back to my ex's house. 2 days later he came to my house for "visitation" and my ex never called me to tell me to bring him home as planned. He did relate to me in an email that he had to take care of his ailing dad so our son stayed with me. Now during this time, I continued to pay child support to him despite the fact that our son was with me.
My son has not done too well in school over the last 3 years and this year he enrolled in a technical school in the morning to learn a trade and goes to his regular school int he afternoons. He is doing well at the technical school but horribley at regular school. over the course of the years we have grounded him, taken things away, etc but he still does not like regular school and now has been cutting classes and has been getting detentions to make them up. He knows he has to work on his regular grades and not skip classes and right now is grounded at my house, but his father has not even called him in the last 2months. Yesterday, his father got a call from the school about him having a detention that he missed and told him that he was going to serve an inschool suspension. He never caled me to tell me that this was going on, and when I called his guidance counselor to see how he was doing this last week in school, I was told his father got a call about the suspension. I in turn then called my ex and asked him why he did not let me know and his answer was that our son deserved it and there was nothing he could do. He then sent me a letter from his technical course about some absences he had because he was sick and in big red letters it said "Handle this". Well when he returned my call he told me that our son should be grounded (which he is) and told me our son was a failure and it did not matter what we did that our son was going nowhere. I finally lost my cool and asked why he did not even care enough to call our son and why did he not even pick him up or call me to let me know that he was picking him up and he answer was why didn't I bring him to him?
I want to go back to court to change the custody because of status quo but I am afraid that when I go to do this (and by the way my son wants to live here and says that if he forced to go back to his father's he will just take off) the court will look very unfavorably on letting him stay with me due to his grades. When he was with his dad, he also had issues with school. Do I even have a chance to win the status quo issue with him continueing to do so poorly in school? Can anyone suggest what I should do? If his father asserts his rights and takes him back, we then lose the status quo and my son is going to do even worse**************..this is all an avoidance of having the child support that he receives removed- if he really cared about his son, he would have taken much more of an interest in him before now. When I asked him for the support he got while our son was with me, he told me he had to cover his "infastructure"- and would not even concede that he has been with me for more than 8 months and he did not contribute to his clothes,lunch money or food he eats while with me.
Please- what should I do? I want to do what is best for our son but if he goes back to his father's there will be all out war like the last time and he will screw up even worse**************.

Having boys are hard and any child that are in their teens are hormonal.

You could try...

Sitting your son down, and explain simply as posible, that if he want to stay with you, that he must show it by making the grade, becoming part of the community and your houshold by following your rules. His reward then would be to stay as long as he wanted.

Additionally, at 16 if he does show an improvment at your house court look at that very seriously.

16yrs old boys with their fathers or any males in a house go through finding their place as a male/role and sometimes it is going agianst the other male. Its a way of being different, to create their sense of individualizim [ that they are their own person]

I have three boys at home, and aggressive levels do peek from time to time. I have found that as long as Im not aggressive back and guild them with an understanding that what they are going through is really text book symtoms and have them think of other options that they have by using their behavoir [ie. good grades, comminity imvolment, and roles in my home] they have a sense of what directions to choice from.


This is all just food for thought.
One main thing to keep in mind is that they are new people on this planet, and dont understand much. This is really the first time experiencing all this, - hormones, what is expected of them from what they expect from themselves -

if you use the main core idea above, and combine it with what will work for you and then explain to the teen you will be on the right path - at lest...

Hope that helps

peace
Robin

thank you - that is very wise advice which I will gladly take!