The one where cheesehead explains herself... Part 1
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Gentle Readers,
Those of you who are my faithful few readers have been praying/thinking good thoughts for me. I can tell, because my situation has gotten better.
My life at home has been thrown into crisis. (I'm going to tip-toe through this as best I can.) The crisis involves my son, the 18 yo Charging Towards Adulthood. Life with CTA has aways been an adventure, to say the least. He was never what you'd call a "normal" child. Or maybe, he's never been what you'd call average. Sleeping through the night at three days old, spontaneously self-toilet-trained at 20 months, reading science fiction at 4 and 1/2 (another spontaneous phenomenon), etc. I never quite knew how to mother him. He seemed to seldom need me. He's traveled all over the world, he has frends everywhere he goes, and he is enormously popular among like-minded people.
I guess I was lulled into a false sense of security. Then suddenly he was in the fifth grade and refusing to do school work. He could have done fifth grade work easily in 2nd or 3rd grade, he was just refusing to do it. At the advice of his teacher, and quite alarmed at what was happening we schlepped him off to the pediatrician, who, with a psychiatrist and a nuerologist, of course, diagnosed him as both extraordinarily bright and suffering from ADD.
So...we do the medication route, the counseling route, the family therapist route, we use the carrot and the stick, we read every book we can get our hands on---nothing. This is kid who has had his room stripped of everything but his bed in an effort to get him to do his school work. Nothing ever worked.
High School was a joke. On paper he has maybe enough credits to be a H.S. freshman. All of his friends have started college. While in California, one of the many family counselors we tried invited us to try a different approach: to let CTA's consequences be of the "natural" variety. He said to us:"What would it be like if every waking moment of your family's life was *not* revolving aroung getting CTA to do his school work?"
I was stunned. It never occured to me to not spend time every day trying to change this. It took a lot of effort, but we changed the way our family lived each day. I did not say the word "homework" to my son again. Instead we tried to help him see how his decisions would impact him later in life.
See Part 2
Those of you who are my faithful few readers have been praying/thinking good thoughts for me. I can tell, because my situation has gotten better.
My life at home has been thrown into crisis. (I'm going to tip-toe through this as best I can.) The crisis involves my son, the 18 yo Charging Towards Adulthood. Life with CTA has aways been an adventure, to say the least. He was never what you'd call a "normal" child. Or maybe, he's never been what you'd call average. Sleeping through the night at three days old, spontaneously self-toilet-trained at 20 months, reading science fiction at 4 and 1/2 (another spontaneous phenomenon), etc. I never quite knew how to mother him. He seemed to seldom need me. He's traveled all over the world, he has frends everywhere he goes, and he is enormously popular among like-minded people.
I guess I was lulled into a false sense of security. Then suddenly he was in the fifth grade and refusing to do school work. He could have done fifth grade work easily in 2nd or 3rd grade, he was just refusing to do it. At the advice of his teacher, and quite alarmed at what was happening we schlepped him off to the pediatrician, who, with a psychiatrist and a nuerologist, of course, diagnosed him as both extraordinarily bright and suffering from ADD.
So...we do the medication route, the counseling route, the family therapist route, we use the carrot and the stick, we read every book we can get our hands on---nothing. This is kid who has had his room stripped of everything but his bed in an effort to get him to do his school work. Nothing ever worked.
High School was a joke. On paper he has maybe enough credits to be a H.S. freshman. All of his friends have started college. While in California, one of the many family counselors we tried invited us to try a different approach: to let CTA's consequences be of the "natural" variety. He said to us:"What would it be like if every waking moment of your family's life was *not* revolving aroung getting CTA to do his school work?"
I was stunned. It never occured to me to not spend time every day trying to change this. It took a lot of effort, but we changed the way our family lived each day. I did not say the word "homework" to my son again. Instead we tried to help him see how his decisions would impact him later in life.
See Part 2
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