Trish, it sounds like there could be any number of reasons why he's behaving like this. Could have started out as attention-seeking and escalated, he could have lost his confidence at school, simply fallen in with the wrong crowd, been bullied, have lingering issues from not having his dad around much. Who knows?

The problem is, I think, even if you were to ask him "why are you behaving like this?" even he probably can't answer that question so you're likely to get the standard teenager response, "dunno" or the even better one, "guess I'm just a loser."

We had some problems with my DP's daughter - primarily from cutting classes which led to pot-smoking and stuff like that.

I kept saying to DP, for God's sake, try and find what's causing this rather than going off at her. Have a conversation with her rather than shouting at her. He's a very emotional Italian so this was like trying to tell a greyhound not to run when it sees a rabbit.

But after speaking to a very wise mum, she said, there's no point asking "why" questions, you've got to go in a lot softer and ask them how they feel about things. I know that sounds very hippy dippy but the way she explained it made perfect sense. She said if you start asking why questions, it immediately puts them on the defensive and it will provoke a one-word response. Whereas if you ask things like "how do you feel about school" "what do you think of your friends" "what are you looking forward to doing this week" and even simply "are you happy", they kind of have to put a sentence or two together to respond and eventually you might get to the bottom of it. Not straight away but if they know you're not going to go off at them all the time, then they might give you a bit more information each time.

I guess it would be a bit similar to asking a woman why she keeps going out with blokes who beat her up. If you ask her why, she probably couldn't tell you. It would only be after counselling that she could say, "well, my dad used to beat up my mum so I thought that was normal and my first boyfriend hit me and told me it was my fault for riling him so I didn't think I deserved anything better."

There's probably no simple reason behind this but I'm interested in knowing why the counsellor said he was anxious/depressed. That, to me, sounds quite serious and of less concern than the actual truanting especially if he wasn't eating.

Oh, and with boys, I've heard they recommend having conversations like this in the car - that way they don't have to make eye contact but they can't just stomp off to their room either.