RN, in my opinion it would be a mistake to give him his car back, for 2 reasons.
One, there are jobs available, close jobs, jobs for which he has experience. Your son seems to think they are beneath him. Perhaps he needs to humble himself. He is the one who put himself in his situation.
My second reason is that giving him his car back right now might be very detrimental and even dangerous to his recovery, like giving a souped-up Corvette to a 16-year-old who just got his driver's license. Your son has already proven that he is impulsive. Why make it easier for him to abandon his program? (and why make it easier for him at all, really?)
My son made an identical argument when he was in rehab and it was time to get a job.
(As an aside, this is another instance where I wish I could get my hands on the Difficult Child Handbook, because clearly they all have copies and pull arguments from the same source.)
Anyway, we took him his car. His counselor urged us to rethink it, telling us the other residents did NOT have cars and that it would serve only to give Difficult Child an easy way to leave rehab if things got challenging. We ignored his warnings because Difficult Child said he had a great job doing carpentry work, which he loved, and we thought that would help in his recovery. He quit the job in less than a week, and he and another resident checked themselves out of rehab shortly afterward. The only thing the car did, really, was make him temporarily popular with the residents who didn't HAVE cars, and of course that was not a good thing for him either.
