New Problems with our Teen

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@JuliaLang - thanks for your response, but it is not really in point.

I appreciate this is a rather longer thread with over-detailed responses on my part which are a bit much to wade through, but as indicated earlier our son quite likes his school. He is not bullied there. Yes the school is a larger school without individualised attention but our son is comfortable there; in fact we went to a lot of trouble to get him into this school which is out of zone. Really, the school is not the problem.

The problem is the demands which virtually any school would place on him (perhaps the Montessori school we had here previously might have been different, but that closed down in the recession), given his difficulties as an ASD/ADD child and possible lesser intelligence (although how much that arises from his ASD/ADD I am really not sure).

What we are really having to do is to review what will work for him. Rethink as DW_a_mom has suggested his situation so we can find some productive activities which he can really enjoy. Temporarily we are continuing with his academics, against the advice of the school, but what he has indicated he wants. In part depending on whether he can scrape through his subjects again this year, or in fact whether he does so or not, we need to find some other answers, as the conventional schooling just does not seem to be working for him.

Dear Hoegaandit,

I usually would have written you a response by now, but I have had a hard time putting one together. That and I've been busy with my book and other stuff. The problem I am having is that any advice I can give seems to be the exact opposite of what you are willing to do. Which makes it somewhat hard to give advice when the person has said they have no interest in it. But that being said, I am going to try.

Basically, my advice would be to pull your child out of school. Because I don't think your current plans are going to work. As you have said yourself, your child is years behind in his classes, and if he somehow pulls off a minor miracle and passes classes this year, he will likely only get a C or D, and only because you pretty much dragged him through the course. Next year isn't likely to be much better. At best, if you stand over your child's shoulder, and pretty much do his work for him, then he might pass high school, but I doubt he will get good enough grades for college. And even if he goes to something like a community college, without your assistance, he isn't likely to succeed there.

I hate to sound pessimistic, but going with the 'fake it till you make it' approach doesn't really work with school. If your son doesn't have the skills that he needs to handle school now, then dragging him another two years isn't going to teach him those skills. All it is going to do is just make him feel more overwhelmed and unsure and confused.

And furthermore, while this usually isn't an issue, your son is already at an increased risk of developing schizophrenia. And as was pointed out earlier, common early warning signs include social withdraw, and school avoidance, which your son is already showing. Is now really the best time to try to force him through things which are way over his head and causing him stress?

What your son needs right now is to learn the skills he needs to function. He needs to learn how to handle his stress and anxiety so that he no longer feels overwhelmed and feels the need to hide. He needs to develop enough self confidence and self worth that he feels up to going to school, not just because you make him, but because he is confident enough to be willing to do it by himself. He needs to develop organizational skills enough to keep track of his assignments and tasks. He needs to develop his communication skills enough so that he can clearly convey his thoughts. And then once you have these basics in place he might do well in school.

But trying to force school when your son is clearly not ready only serves to make him feel more overwhelmed which is causing him to shut down and just go through the motions. And when that happens he not only learns nothing, but the fact that he learns nothing makes him feel even more overwhelmed and at a certain point he just gives up and stops trying. Seeing how is already staying home, I think he is at that point.

Trying to push now would be like beating a wounded horse and thinking that if you just beat it hard enough, eventually it will move. If your lucky, the wounded horse might make it a few more steps before you beat it to death, and then you will be beating a dead horse. What the horse needs is time to rest, and recuperate. It may not be moving now, but if you give it time, then in the future it will be moving again, and you will go a lot father than you would simple beating it till it dies.

Likewise, if I were in your position, I would abandon the idea of school for this year. Have your son drop out, and just leave him at home. He is 16, so he should be fine without supervision for a few hours during the day. And just let him recuperate. As DW_a_mom said, and I agree, your son has lost the point in living. He needs time where he isn't constantly overwhelmed and told, "Not good enough". And as much as you mean well with help him with homework, all you are doing is asking the impossible of him and then telling him, 'not good enough' in so many words. He needs a break from that. He needs to enjoy life, and find meaning in doing something he enjoys and have a life worth living.

Once he is feeling less depressed, you can then work with him on things like dealing with adversity, having the right mindset when facing challenges, and dealing with problems. You can teach him to handle his stress and to not let himself get overwhelmed. You can teach him to balance work and relaxation. You can teach him to organize himself, and set up a time to work and a time to play. You can help him learn to communicate better by introducing him to some online games. And basically you can get him on a solid footing.

And then, in one year's time, when things are going better, you can enroll him in his junior year of high school again. Yes, he will graduate a year late at 19 instead of 18. But at least he will graduate with confidence, and an ability to handle his challenges. Which is better then your current path which is just as likely to wind up in a mental breakdown as much as passing half his classes.

I understand that you don't want to give up and just abandon any hope of passing classes this year. Probably because you think that you have to do something and this seems like the best option. The problem is that all your doing is working on arbitrary and unimportant topics like writing essays. Real life isn't going to care what your son wrote on his 11th grade essay, but it will care whether he can maintain himself well enough to function in the real world, and your son is currently too stressed out and overwhelmed to work on both right now. So I say pick one. And pick the one which matters.

Tracker, I got the impression the teen doesn't want to leave school or give up on any of his classes, even though he is clearly struggling with keeping it together.

As a parent, I tend to think that if the child is telling you they want to stick it out, you have to let them try.

Are you assuming the child may feel pushed into expressing that? How would a parent know the difference, though? Sometimes we tell kids a hundred times to tell us the straight up truth, and they insist this is what they want, and sure sometimes we find out later it was just what they thought they were supposed to be want, but how is a parent supposed to know? At some point you do have to let kids make the mistakes they insist they want to make (even if not in those words), because a parent's job is to transition the power of choice onto the child by the time they reach 18.

I don't think there are any easy answers here.

My gut feeling is that Tracker is right. DW_a_mom - I understand what you are mean about the child saying they want to stick with school - but I would worry whether this is just what the child thinks they are expected to say.

Let me give you an example. When my daughter was at school (for the second time) aged 13 or 14 - she was really struggling (although not really academically). You only had to look at her to see she was way beyond miserable/exhausted/stressed. It broke my heart just to see her. I asked her if she wanted to stay in school. Her mouth said yes, but every other part of her seemed to scream NO.

I decided to take her out. In theory we home-educated her. In reality she did what Tracker said above - she recovered. For two years she did more or less what she wanted to do.

It was as though she had to wait until she was ready. She chose to go on a music course at 16. Then the year after she decided she wanted to return to education. Three years later than she would normally have done she went back to college. She was ready to handle it by this time - still had a few struggles. From there she went on to University.

I'm not saying this would work in all cases. But is certainly an option worthy of consideration.

I don't think that the child is lying. I just think that what he wants and what is possible are not compatible.

Children are repeatedly told that if you work hard, try hard, and do your best then you will get good grades in high school. You can then go on to college and get good grades there. And then you can get a good job that pays well and life will be happy. Conversely, if you drop out of high school, you will be a complete failure at life and wind up on welfare and be very unhappy. It is part of the whole 'stay in school' campaign.

This message is given by teachers, principles, parents (usually), television, and pretty much everywhere. You seldom hear people talk about high school drop outs with high regards. And it is very likely that Hoegaandit's son has heard this message and believes it. And since he doesn't want to wind up as a failure, and wants to have a good life, he has decided that it is in his best interest to go to college. And as such, he is trying to do what it takes to go to college.

Unfortunately, while he may intellectually want to go to college, he is in no way ready for it. Emotionally, he just can't handle the decision. As they say, actions speak louder than words. And pretending to go to school and then staying home is a pretty obvious action which says, "I can't handle this". He may want to do it, because he has been told all his life that it is in his best interest, but he just doesn't have the maturity or ability to back up that desire.

To use a sports analogy, it would be like a 8 year old child trying to dunk a basketball on a 10 foot rim. He may REALLY want to do it, but it just isn't going to work. He isn't physically ready to do that yet. If he keeps trying over and over and over to do it, then all he is going to do is keep falling flat on his face, and eventually he is just going to get discouraged and stop trying. And when he gives up, he is never going to get better at basketball.

It is far better for that 8 year old child to work on things like dribbling, passing, and shooting hoops on a lower 8 ft. rim. That way he can work on the fundamentals and eventually when he has grown up and is taller and stronger, he can then add dunking to his skill set.

Likewise, hoegaandit is trying to get his son to dunk on a hoop too far out of his reach when he can't even dribble the ball yet. And the son may REALLY want to dunk because he has been told he should. But it just isn't going to work out. I think at this point you have to take a step back and say, perhaps we need to work on the fundamentals, like dribbling. We can come back to the dunking later when he is ready.

And yes, it may delay graduation by a year, or two, or maybe even three like AspergerFiction's case. But if you work on getting him the skills he actually needs in life, and give him a good foundation, then eventually he will be able to graduate and be ready to handle the world without feeling overwhelmed and hiding in his room. And I would rather he graduate a bit late than never graduate, or graduate only to find out that he can't handle the real world.

And in the long run, a year or two doesn't really matter as much as people act. I went to college for engineering at 17, and graduated at age 21. Most people came in at 18 and took 5 years to complete college so the average graduation age was about 23. Probably 75% of the students were aged 22 to 25, but there were plenty of older adults who came back to college and finished it up in their late 20s or 30s. And do you know what? We all face the same job market, have the same degree, and are pretty much in the same situation.

The fact that I finished 2 years earlier than average hasn't helped me. And the people who graduated at age 25 aren't at a disadvantage either. Because in real life, it really depends on your skill set, not your age. So if a 4 year gap in graduation age makes almost no difference in getting a job or accomplishing your goals in life, then what is so bad about a year or two delay in graduating high school?

Wow – a lot of suggestions. Thank you Tracker, DW_a_mom and AspergerFiction

Just as an update, it is looking at the moment as if the wheels are coming off. Latest reports from the teachers of two of our son’s subjects (Graphics and Art) are that our son has further failed the internal assessments for both. He was doing those courses in consequence of his talent at cartooning, and initially we had naturally assumed that he would have a career in the field of art or graphic design or some such.

However his extreme talent for cartooning was limited to pen/pencil outline drawings, and he never extended his cartooning to learn different styles, let alone explored different mediums of art like painting. And despite his very considerable cartooning talent he has struggled to get through Art. He passed it last year, but not with sufficient marks to take it this year, and had to get a dispensation to take it this year. Not being artistically inclined, I am not sure exactly what the problem is, but think that our son does not follow instructions, does minimal work (eg had no backgrounds to his first assignment this year) etc. It is a real shame he has not followed through on his talent in art. His tentative subjects next year included three Art subjects; now it is looking pretty unlikely that he will be allowed to do any of them, as he is further down the track of failing his internally assessed Arts course.

My wife and I have already pretty much decided he could not continue with Graphics next year, given that it contains some mathematical content (think geometry) which is beyond him. Well, he had a major assignment to design a Sports Pavilion and I get the impression he has probably only done 15% of the work for that, and has dismally failed it. (Excuse the use of the word “fail” here which I’m aware is politically incorrect, but I’m a somewhat older father who came from an environment where sometimes pupils were held back – failed – in their very first year of school, and I prefer to call a spade a spade). So we are accepting that a potential career as a graphics designer is now almost completely off the table!

Add to this my assessment of our son’s efforts at his (home practice) exams for two other subjects as both being around the 25/100 mark, and I can appreciate the suggestions of Tracker (and AspergerFiction) for our son to take a break from school.

AS DW_a_mom has pointed out, this is not what our son wants to do. Although he has skipped school a few times, the issues are not with school per se, but rather with him not being able to cope with the academic pressures with which he is increasingly being faced.

In this respect it may be worth clarifying that our son has only skipped school a few times to our knowledge. School is the only place where he is obtaining some socialisation, where he is talking and interacting with people his own age. He wants to be a part of that, and to fit in with what the other pupils are doing. He expressly did not want to take the non-academic courses available next year, I think because that would make him appear “dumb” to his classmates. You need to appreciate that our son appears normal. He looks you in the eye, and while he sings and talks to himself, and when very stressed will (very rarely) stim (shake his hands), I do not think he does those things in public. So our son wishes to look “cool” and seem to be one of the guys.

I think I also need to stress another point. I am not sure how stressed our son is. It is more as if he is living in his own little world and is not much stressed at all. He really does not seem to have an insight into what is going on. If we tell him off, or he is experiencing an immediate stress, he will get upset (and maybe that is why he skipped school). But a short while later it is as if the issue is past, and he does not have a care in the world. In general I also do not really think our son is depressed. He was a very happy child and in general remains easygoing and still not infrequently will be laughing away to himself.

It is possible that he is hiding from the world and masking his stress, but I do not think so. He seems more to be living in somewhere other than the real world. This lack of insight is one of our biggest concerns with our son.

Tracker makes a cogent case for taking our son out of school, and AspergerFiction’s daughter seemed to follow that route successfully. In a general way I of course agree that a year or two in a lifetime is neither here nor there. However if we were theoretically to take him out of school for now, I would see several very significant problems. (a) Our son would then lose out on the socialisation he gets at school (to the extent that he has friends of a sort there). (b) If he were to return to school later, he would effectively be put back a grade, something he very expressly does not want to happen (c) there are probable significant legal difficulties for our son to continue in school past about nineteen (he is already probably the oldest in his class at seventeen), and eg correspondence school to get round this would as a practical matter be out of the question (and not provide socialisation) (d) taking him out of school would require considerable family backup and support, which would be extremely difficult to impossible – with one full time and one not far from fulltime working parents.

There is no doubt that Tracker (and others) general (and wise) thoughts that our son should get the basics right (eg how to organise himself, a realistic sense of what he can do, a sense of self-worth and confidence, proper communication) to allow him to move forward, rather than the charade that is going on now.

As historical background I think the problem has arisen because, although his headmaster toward the end of junior school (perhaps at a guess seven years) ago was the first one to raise the issue of possible aspergers, following which our son obtained a diagnosis of ADD-inattention, replaced by a diagnosis of HFA only earlier this year, our son looks normal, was a very happy child, had friends, seemed to cope sufficiently until a year or two back. As mentioned our son is a poor communicator and in general has always indicated that things were all right. He has unfortunately become extremely adept at pretending that things are all right, to the extent that he has even (I am sure not really deliberately) pulled the wool over his parents eyes (and most likely his own). Last year we managed to get him through all his courses albeit with some intensive coaching in English. We knew that the last two years at school would be a bigger challenge, but hoped with increasing maturity he would get through, and did not expect him to crash out as badly as he is doing this year.

In hindsight additional intervention at an earlier stage would have been advisable. I have just been corresponding with my sister who is a teacher and who just attended an education autism conference. She indicated that reasonably significant educational resources can be applied for for children diagnosed autistic, but that this is normally for younger children than our son.

Still, we need to look forward.

Obviously our son needs to learn proper basic skills of self management and coping with the world. I hear what Tracker and Aspergerfiction are implying about school simply being too difficult and possibly stressful, and counterproductive to learning these basic lessons.

There remains the problem of insight. If our son does not (and conceivably even in a worst case situation cannot) develop adequate insight, isn’t this going to mean he will always only be doing things by rote, rather than because he understands what is needed?

While I hear the very sensible comments of Tracker, I think we continue to back off our original expectations in an incremental rather than dramatic fashion. For instance, I think given how things are going we are going, as encouraged by the school counsellor and teachers, to drop Graphics this year. This will mean he is no longer proceeding with normal school progression, as he almost certainly needed to pass all courses this year to have a chance of fully completing his final year. So our plan of trying to keep him on academic track seems to have come off the rails.

This does mean that we have to give serious consideration to re-thinking our son’s future entirely and, ideally, following the sorts of ideas that Tracker has kindly mentioned, to ideally allow our son to re-enter the real world with the skills necessary to make a go of life, instead of just hiding from it.

Thanks again for your comments.

Dear Hoegaandit,

I think that my objection to your plan is that you are still trying the same thing, just with a bit less difficulty. In other words, your reducing his class load by one and hoping that he can manage the others. In my view any number of classes isn't a good idea because it distracts you from other priorities.

If you see your young child who can't dunk on a 10 foot rim do you just go out there, lower it to 9 feet and encourage him to keep trying? Even if you lower the rim so low that he doesn't even need to jump, are you really helping him be a better basketball player? The problem isn't that the rim is too high. The problem is that dunking isn't going to help your son at basketball if he doesn't know how to dribble or pass the ball first.

Or to put this another way. Imagine you were building a house, and you wanted to work on the third floor. You would first build a strong foundation, and then a sturdy first and second floor. Then you could add a good third floor on top. But if you had a house built on sand with Popsicle sticks and chewing gum for the first two floors, then you stand no chance of ever building a good third floor. You could get the most skilled architects and engineers and spend years of time and effort designing the best third floor ever. But any attempt to build it would result in collapse because the foundation and first two floors just can't support it.

Likewise, you are trying to work on things like essays, which is like building a third floor, and you are worried that the essays keep failing. Well the problem isn't the essay itself. The problem isn't that your son isn't trying hard enough. The problem isn't that you need more time. The problem is that you don't have the foundation to build it on.

For this analogy, the foundation is first good emotional management. In other words your son needs to be able to handle the pressure. He needs to be able to find the motivation and interest to focus on the task. He needs to handle the difficulty of the assignment without feeling overwhelmed. And if you don't have that, then your son will never be able to complete anything on his own. The first floor is good executive functioning. Breaking down the task and understand what is involved. How to do it, where to start, what to focus on, where to look for information, how to organize his thoughts and so forth. And the second floor is good communication skills. Figuring out how to put things into words, how to express his ideas, and how to convey his thoughts.

If you have all of these then writing the essay is easy. In fact, even a moderate effort will produce a decent result. But without these in place first, and attempt at things like essays is a lost cause. And your idea to drop one class is somewhat akin to saying, "Well, if I can't build the entire floor at once because it keeps collapsing, then I will try just building the frame first. I won't try adding the plumbing or the drywall until later." At best you might be able to support the framework, but as soon as you try adding anything else, the first two floors are just going to collapse again.

What you need to do in this situation is not try harder on the third floor, or try building the third floor slower. What you need is to focus on the important things. Put the third floor on hold completely until you have the foundation and first two floors built because otherwise your just waiting for collapse.

As for the other concerns like socializing and such, there are solutions for those problems. For starters, there are plenty of after school clubs, and activities that your son can do for socialization. And as I have mentioned other places, I am a huge proponent of online gaming as a way to socialize. Its how I have done most of my socializing.

Likewise, you say that you can't stay home with your son because you have two working parents. And thats fine, just leave him home by himself. He is 17, he doesn't need you to baby sit him. The worst that will happen is that you will come home from work to find him still in his pajamas with dirty dishes around the house. Granted he probably wont accomplish much other than relaxing and playing on the computer. But right now I think thats what he could benefit from.

As far as the school, you have said yourself that they are trying to be very accommodating and are fully aware of your child's struggles. I don't think they would be surprised if you suggest taking a year off from writing essays to work on more important things.

And as far as being put back a grade, I'm pretty sure thats about to happen anyways. It may not be the cool thing, but if I had to drop back a year, I would rather it be because I chose to work on the important skills in life, and not because I failed. Furthermore, dropping back a grade by failure is going to do a lot more to harm him then dropping back by choice. You say that he isn't depressed yet, and thats great because I don't want him to be depressed. But if he keeps trying, and keeps failing, and keeps getting lectured, and tries harder, and fails harder, and gets lectured more, etc. etc. then eventually depression WILL set in. It really is only a matter of time, and by the time he is failing and repeating classes, I bet he will be depressed, even if he isn't there now.

From my perspective, trying a reduced class load and saying, "I hope he can manage this" is just accepting that he can't handle the full difficulty and trying to reduce it to the point where he can. And all that is doing is lowering the hoop to the point where he can dunk with his feet on the ground. You might accomplish something, but it will be a hollow victory at best. I would rather you cut back on the unimportant things (like school in this situation) and instead focus on the important things because if you lay a good foundation first, then eventually you will be able to pass the classes, and dunk that basketball and have it actually mean something.

Because at this point, my concern really isn't about the number of classes, my concern is that you are focusing on the wrong things and getting your priorities out of order. Get your son stable and effective first, then you can try accomplishing these things.

P.S.
As far as convincing your son to go along with this, I think that he will probably be more understanding than you think if you explain it to him. What he wants really isn't to go to school. What he wants is to have a good future, and have friends, and have a life worth living. The only reason he says he wants school is because he has been told repeatedly that the only way to accomplish those things is to go to school. If you sit him down and explain the new plan to him (taking a year off) as a better way to accomplish those same goals but with more effectiveness, less overwhelming, and more free time, then I think you can sell it to him.

It might be worth talking a little about what depression looks like in different people. In me, there is some added edgyness, but mostly just a lack of momentum. It gets so hard for me to decide to do things, and when I do them it feels like I move soooo slow. I don't seem or even feel particularly unhappy, I just ... fade and flounder.

My understanding of depression was that unhappiness was part of the definition. Perhaps malaise, or melancholy would be correct in your case, but I dont think depression is the right word. In either case, I believe the point your trying to make is that everybody responds to stress and anxiety differently.

Just because hoegaandit's son doesn't seem sad, that doesn't me he isn't being affected by the difficulty he faces. He might just be reacting to the difficulty by losing interest in life, becoming discouraged, and having difficulty engaging, but not necessarily becoming despondent.

I know the feeling. I am having a hard time searching for jobs each week and its getting harder and harder to put in the hours to go through the moves knowing that my odds of even getting a call back are slim. It isn't depression, but it is difficult to keep up the momentum and keep trying when all you receive for your efforts is failure.

Now sorry I have not responded to the posts kindly posted here for a while. Things have been coming to a head with our 17yo son, and also we had a work and family laptop crash within days which made things difficult.

For Tracker I just want to say that I am sure something is going to turn up for you in time.

I think I firstly need to reiterate some points:

1. Our son is generally not depressed, or even sad. He was a very very happy child when young and continues to be a quite happy teenager.
2. Our son likes his school and wants to stay there
3. Our son seems to be at the high end of functioning of the ASD spectrum. eg He looks you in the eye, learnt to read easily by himself (although he is not a reader), functioned well with friends in middle school, appears in general pretty normal, got through the academic requirements of school last year.

That stated, he is not coping, and our family is having difficulty dealing with his failure to cope with normal requirements.

Shortly after my last post my wife (who has schizophrenia) got mad at him one morning (as a result of his lack of work at school and catastrophic results and some oppositional behavior by him) and hit him and he kicked her (at which point I had to jump out of bed and take charge of the situation). Our son for just about for the first time (as he usually is sad for 20 minutes after being told off and then just carries on like normal) was in a very down state after that incident for more than a day and off school for most of a couple of days).

(I know there should not be incidents as in my last paragraph but this is real life and incidents like this are very rare).

All of us had a meeting with the school, although mainly this was about what subjects he is to do next year. Basically the school was telling us that he cannot take the dumbed down academic last year of school courses we had chosen with him as he is not coping academically and will in fact need to repeat most of his courses of this year or do non-academic courses.

At this point I think I need to respond to Tracker's idea that we should just take him off school for a year, so that he can start to re-engage with life and learn proper coping techniques, instead of his current approach of just pretending that everything is or will be alright when it is not.

Believe me, I am open to suggestions. I am having to radically re-think my expectations for our son. I had sort of expected that he would somehow manage to get through his last two years of school, hopefully with sufficient marks to allow some form of tertiary education. I come from a background of reasonable academic attainment (eg two specialist doctor parents) and in general just expected that our children would at the least get into university and some form of degree. This is currently not happening with our son. He did manage to get through his first year of external examinations last year at school, but has now found the penultimate year of school too hard, or perhaps does not have the coping capacities to deal with the increased workload.

The school counsellor at our meeting did say that this past year has been a failure of both the school and us as parents, and I think this is fair comment. It was a misjudgment on my part that he would somehow struggle through this year, instead of failing it. I am a somewhat hands off, enabling parent which worked well with our NT daughter but has not worked with our ASD son.

My wife (who has her own processing difficulties so perhaps can relate to this better) has pointed out to me that the way I talk to my son is not helpful. For instance I think yesterday I said to him that he has not succeeded this year and what a winner should do is see what he had done wrong and then work out ways to correct that. My son responded along the lines of "you've told me that before dad". But the point is, he has not understood the point I am making at all. What I was expecting him to do is to review the things he did wrong, and what steps he might take to correct those, but I think that all he did was to note that I had told him this before, without trying to apply it at all to his situation. I also think I get cross when our son does not understand the point I am making, which is unhelpful.

So, as Tracker has pointed out, he has not learnt ways of dealing with matters properly. (I think that "emotional management" would more come as an outcome of being able to master the task rather than being a foundation, but this is quibbling). This would involve overcoming his executive function difficulties so that he knows what the task is and what and how to learn to deal with it, including learning how to seek the information he needs eg by communicating and asking for help.

I see multiple issues with Tracker's suggestion of just taking a year off. If we did that:

(a) Our son would just sit around at home using up our bandwidth on the internet and playing some video games, learning little except perhaps the idea that goofing off is a viable lifestyle option. Both parents work more or less full time, and we are financially stretched so cannot afford outside help. We cannot realistically give him more time that we are currently doing (much more that we would be giving a normal NT child). This would seem an idea for a lower functioning ASD person than our son who was however becoming too stressed, but would not seem a great idea for our son.
(b) Our son would not get such socialisation as he does at school. While he has no real friends he does get on with some other students, and some socialisation is better than none. I think our son as a higher functioning ASD person could conceivably get along with people in the real world unlike Tracker, who has indicated that he prefers online communication with friends; certainly our son coped quite well with friends at middle school.
(c) This would be going against the express and undoubted wish of our son to continue at school. Yes he has started skipping some school and being late for classes etc; however that is not because he does not like school per se, but because of the increased workload coming into the final part of the school year, which he is just not coping with.

What has been happening is that at the meeting with his year dean and the school counsellor, the dean basically told us that he should repeat the year and do non-academic courses. (Everything is politically correct these days and no-one except old fashioned codgers like me talk about failing the year, but basically that is what it is coming down to).

In fact we don't have much choice about this, because even in Art (where our son shows real talent) he had failed one unit, thereby requiring him to get dispensation to get into final year Art courses, so the school has us over a barrel here). The dean's view was that our son should not do any academic courses at all ie simply do repeats and non-academic courses. She has rightly said that she wants our son to be happy at his probably final year of school next year and to achieve. The problem with this to some extent is that a lot of doors are closing for him (eg as regards tertiary study) but I have to accept he may not really be up to this. After a lot of thought about this we have agreed to re-do the Graphics course our son will certainly fail this year, are trying to do two final year courses (Media Studies which he may have automatic entrance to, depending on his exam results, and Art - Painting, which if we are lucky the school may allow given his intrinsic ability) and will fill up the rest with non-academic courses such as financial literacy, English literacy, a cafe course etc.

It is going to be a bit of a shock to our son because he will in the main need to leave his schoolmates next year and work in with students a year younger. But this is not the end of the world. I think if we had been really proactive we could have gotten him through this year's academic workload, but it would have been a real struggle and he may not have coped even with much more help.

Who am I to say that our son has to have a more academic type career, if his mind is just not up to it? hen I read Tracker's book (which I am working my way through) I can see a mind which is highly intelligent and logical. When I read my son's essays, I see a mind which has not grasped the issues at all. I suspect our son's IQ is simply lower. if that is so, why force him to do things he cannot comprehend? (This is all a bit of a sea change for my attitudes, by the way. I am not categorically ruling out the possibility that our son with increased maturity and training and possibly medication might not be able to learn effective means of coping with academic requirements and the world, but, realistically, this is not the way things are looking at the moment).

What the proposals will do is give our son an academically easier time next year. The subject he is re-doing will presumably be a lot easier the second time round. Subjects like financial literacy and English literacy and the cafe course are aimed at non-academic students,so the level will be lower. If he is allowed to do Art-Painting then that is not an academic course. The only academic course he is doing is media studies, and he actually passed the mock exams he wrote recently; further it is easy for me to help him with the concepts in that course.

By doing this our son gets to stay at school (which he adamantly wants) and perhaps can make some new friends with slightly younger kids in his classes, and we and the school can work on him achieving and learning how to cope. (I do still wish he could get back on the academic track, but if that is not to be, that is not to be). I am hoping for a better year next year (and of course we still have to try and get him through the remaining requirements for this year, although it will be a little easier given we are giving up on one subject).

As an update the difficulties with our son are making my wife (who is schizophrenic) ill, and she missed doing her caregiving job today.

One point I am getting this forum is to be very very clear and simple and direct in my instructions to my son, perhaps even list things he needs to do. Every morning I listen to my wife telling our son four or five times to get up, then to hurry up with the shower, then to get dressed and come for breakfast and to discuss what is in his diary. Every day he does not do these things unless reminded multiple times. It is really beyond ridiculous. As my wife is ill I am going to need to get him going tomorrow morning. I've given him clear instructions this evening and we'll see how we go tomorrow!

I am sorry to hear your wife is now sick,too.

Try using visuals for the morning routine. Most AS kids seem to process that better.

Mornng routine all went well this morning, although he was still not doing this himself. We are going to need to find some routine; I don't think it is visuals that are necessary, but maybe some electronic reminders of some sort.

Check out the book Smart But Scattered. It's got some very detailed plans on how to teach your child to manage their morning and evening routines independently, including how to provide support initially and how to fade that support until they are independent.

Thanks - Smart but Scattered was recommended previously on this forum, and we got that from Amazon. My wife has read it, but it has obviously not helped her! I had taken only a cursory look so far, but will check it out further.

I would further suggest that you pick ONE thing to work on, and discuss with your wife how you are going to implement it so that you can be consistent with each other.