DS6 started off this year with pretty poor behavior but has gotten much better. Most of that improvement was solely time and his anxiety level decreasing. He's still occasionally been directly rude to teachers. But it seems like it's now completely acceptable to the school. He does not have a lot of natural empathy and is not highly social, so unfortunately appealing to that side of him was not a useful strategy for us. He does respect us as parents, and feels we act fairly and reasonably, and that's what we've relied on.
Initially we did the "we support the school 100%". That made sense because on paper the discipline system seems very rational. But sometimes his teacher would ignore the policy and just react on what seemed like more a personal level, for example jumping discipline steps and giving him a weightier punishment than a first infraction warranted. Not that we didn't sympathize with her, we are not always as consistent as we want to be either, but it was a bit unpredictable. And it just felt like lying to him to act supportive to the school about things we didn't care about or actively disagreed with. We went to the following:
a. We have a written list of very basic house rules at home. The list contains things such as: no hitting, kicking, etc, no telling people you don't like them, help when asked to unless you have an excellent reason not to, share, and so on. DS is generally very good at adhering to these rules at home. Some things we do NOT have on the list include: "listen politely at all times", "do not interrupt your elders", "do not wiggle a lot", "do not make loud sighing noises" or anything vague such as "respect others". Our list consists of what we feel are clear and concrete rules we know he can achieve even when under stress. We reminded him of this list and that we expect him to follow our family's rules at school, always. If we're told he did the things on the list we'll follow through with the same consequences as if it had happened at home.
b. We tell him the rest is optional to us as parents. That we do see his side of it that the rules are annoying or picky or overly strict. But that we certainly do not feel comfortable defending him in any way, it is not up to us, we are not in charge in that building. It's solely his choice. We say he either needs to follow the rules and express himself in acceptable ways, or just make himself at peace with the punishments. We now do not mention to him anything the school mentions to us regarding that latter list of things. And we don't comment to the school either on any of that, it's solely his arena.
c. We tell him that it's a very slow process but we are working on making his day a better experience for him. And that it will help us help him if teachers and school see him as a mature and polite student. That teachers will not be going to go out of their way to make school more fun for a child who they find difficult.
A couple times recently he has come home and with a sort of questioning bravado said he's made unpleasant noises, quietly and on purpose, while walking down the hall in the line of kids between classes. He's basically checking with us to see how we feel about it. If his teacher doesn't notice is it bad? We tell him that we don't care, but he needs to be aware he'll get in trouble some day when randomly he's caught.
As much as I wish he didn't feel the need for that release of tension, he does, it's just how he is in this less than ideal environment. I'm happy for him to find any moments that decrease the direct friction between him and his teacher.
I feel like if we told him he's got to just buckle down and follow every rule always, or if we went with general statements such as that he should respect others, that he'd either crack at school in a big way now and then or that he would just get more generally anxious/depressed. He's healthier when he's acting out a little bit, than when he's not.
