Exchange Student advice please

Do you or have you had any children of your own? Would you have allowed your children to sleep the day away and just hang out on the computer? Set some rules and some boundaries. Give him chores, you are not helping him by coddling him, even if he is an exchange student. He is an exchange student to learn how you and your country live. Do you want him to go back to his country and tell his people that you let him do whatever he wanted, what kind of a message is that sending him and them?

Yes this is an old discussion I know rosebug but thought I might be able to add a little bit in case the same situation arises at some time in the future. When I was still married to my now ex-wife, our local Church sponsored an exchange student and during the 14 months he was in Australia, we stayed with several members of our local Church community. We had him living with us for just over 14 months. Normally he would have spent only 4 or 8 weeks with each family so we had him longer than the initial 8 weeks we agreed to. The next host family on the list all got sick with some ending up in Hospital, so letting him go there was not the most desirable option. It was suggested by the Pastor that we keep him with us and so we agreed. Like the one you had, ours was good in doing anything that we asked him to do. That was not a real serious issue and generally he ate all the food we put in front of him. If he did not like any food then we just asked him to at least try it before making a comment that he didn’t like it. At the time our daughters were very young and would be picky about their food sometimes. We did not want the girls to think that they did not have to eat certain foods because our guest wouldn’t. This young man was a junk food freak and told other host families he would not eat certain foods, preferred McDonalds, KFC and all the other junky foods. He told us the same thing too. However some of the other host families actually bought the junky food this young man wanted. Not every night of course but several times a week while he was staying with them. We told him straight out it was not going to happen with us as we had a budget which we stuck too, we had young daughters and wanted them to eat a properly balance diet and he knew before he came to Australia he would eat the same food as the host family. The first day he wouldn’t eat with us because he didn’t like what we were having so he went hungry. Yes we offered many different meals and types of food that we had in the house but he wanted junk which we would not buy for him. The very next day I decided to fire up the bar-b-que and invited several members of the Church around which meant the young man joined in or the next lots of host families would realise what he was like. Worked like a charm at least as far as the food side of things went and probably best of all, his skin cleared up once he stopped eating greasy fatty junk. He too slept a lot of would have done if we had let him that is. At least once a week my mother would say to him “Tomorrow we go to XYZ for you to see ABC. Go to bed early so you can get up on time as we have to leave early and you have to eat breakfast because you are a growing boy.” The first time she came he was still in bed so she marched into his room and pulled the blankets off and told him he was too lazy and she was going home. While I was making Mum cup of coffee, he emerged and straight into the shower. On the way to the shower he asked me to make him a coffee and some toast for breakfast. By the time Mum had finished her second cup of coffee, he was showered and dressed, eaten his toast an drank his coffee. Mum was a very tiny woman, standing only 5’ in shoes and with not an ounce of fat on her, she weighed 45kg and aged 75! She sure did intimidate that young man but with 4 sons I guess she knew a thing about teenage boys. His problem or at least what he confided to Mum was that we wouldn’t let him have the food he liked or to play his music loud. Mum listened to him and then treated him in the same way as she did us when we were at the same age which was to explain why certain standards are expected etc. She also realised that the young man was home sick but rather than say he missed his family and friends, he used the term “I’m bored”. He had only been in Australia for 6 weeks when he came to our home but from that second weekend he spent some time with my mother every week and that often meant riding a bicycle some 10km each way. So in future if this was to happen again, it might be homesickness that is the problem and not boredom.