I have absolutely no idea what he means by restorative punishment. Is that some punishment to earn back his game? Sorry, my brain is a little fried today, and for no apparent reason.
Aspergers should give a different approach, but it shouldn't be a get out of punishment card. If I knew what restorative punishment was,
I do advise that you to contact the game sooner rather than later and let them know this is a child with challenges. They truly do understand usually and they can work with you. Let them know he has never done this and you are taking steps to make sure it doesn't happen in the future. It just seems like it would be silly to not make a phone call to them about this. The absolute worst they can do is say No, and then you still have the credit card company to appeal the charges to. So it doesn't harm anything to ask. If it was a smaller sum, I might say it was best to just pay it (say under $100 if you could afford that), but this is a huge sum and it was done by a child who truly did not understand at the time. The rest of the issue will be easier to deal with if you know you are not having to face that huge bill, won't it?
FWIW, my son has Aspergers. If he got away with it without consequences, like having to work off some of the money doing hard work or at least boring work, it would be vastly more likely for him to do it again. There had to be some consequence tied to it that made it less pleasant to do the thing than the reward that he got in the moment. This was also a reason that we would take a game away from him for doing something like this. It made the opportunity to do the same thing again less likely, which saved us all a whole lot of problems. With Asperger's, if the reward they get for doing something, even something they know is wrong, is pleasant enough, they will want that reward again and again.
Video games make this a bit of a problem. There is research that shows that video game rewards light up the same part of the brain that using drugs lights up, and the reaction can be as strong. So it is a very potent reward that we all get from video games. Given a child with a disorder that makes them fixate on events that give them rewards, sometimes it is safer for all concerned to simply remove temptation from them, at least for a period of time until they get a break and can later go back and learn to moderate themselves. It is much harder to learn to moderate (for most human beings) without that break from the item that is so tempting.
Of course this is just what I observed and learned, and your son could be very different.
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