I was painfully truthful with difficult child 2 tonight.

[Shari]

Ah, I did the same thing with Wee a while back and felt like dirt, but ya know, what I said stuck with Wee and he's made more effort since to "be like others".

Ironically, his sped teacher has picked this goal (with no collaboration between us) as the skill they are working on right now at school.

Its certainly a fine line to walk between being an individual and being an outcast.

 

[gcvmom]

He gets social skills training/classes as part of his IEP. I do like the idea of a mentor, and I will approach his water polo coach about it. Perhaps there is a patient senior on the team who can take him under his wing, so to speak.

Alan, I understand your point about the CPS approach. I suppose my backwards attempt at that was when I asked him why he chose to hang out by the net instead of going off and getting involved in the activity the other group of boys were doing. Though I could see him processing that and a realization that came with that hindsight, I think I'll need to bring that up again in a more "collaborative" tone and talk about it further to reinforce the concept.

As for the Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) traits, it was suggested as a possibility by the school therapist in elementary school, but not enough elements were present apparently based on the testing they did. And his current psychiatrist doesn't think this is the issue either. He thinks it's a manifestation of the ADHD, such as the inability to pick up on body language and problems with pragmatics, etc. The neuropsychologist felt similarly about him.

At any rate, we definitely have our work cut out this year.

School starts in one week, so I guess it's time I got busy in my annual letter-to-the-teacher(s).

 

[Marguerite]

I think those are good points, Allan. But I think it would be really effective if that approach could be used along with a mentor or some other person to basically shadow difficult child and help him stay on task and not annoy people. If there was a person with him who could (when he starts sticking his head through the goal net!) say to him, "Come one, swim up the other end and watch how the defence is handling the play," or "Why not use this time to practice your leg strength so you can use just your legs to hold yourself in position or even get your body higher in the water?" Or some other water polo skills.

But I agree, a mentor would help a lot.

When we had problems with difficult child 3 in school, the worst problems tended to be when there was no structured activity. That was when he benefited most from supervision and someone else organising him (and others) into alternative activities.

Marg

 

[gcvmom]

Yes, unstructured time is the worst! But if he has someone buzzing around to redirect him when he needs it, things usually go well.

Today he said he had no problems at WP practice -- no one got mad at him, etc. I asked if he'd thought about our "conversation" from Friday (and I apologized for yelling at him in my frustration), and he said he had and that he understood.

I'm working on getting him back into a regular bedtime since school starts next week, and hopefully that will help with structuring his day more, too. He has WP practice every day this week, which is good.