This board is so rewarding. You guys pick up the issue and examine every potential angle. Zen's thoughts on digging deeper on control and self-loathing strike me as closest to true for DS along with HK's point about age. DS did just turn 13. He is a "young" 13, not yet in puberty but the attitude is there. That may be a factor in the new secretive, underground aspect of his work resistance.

DS has struggled with school for so long that he completely loathes it at this point. He is also socially unhappy and has failed to make friends at the new school but had no real friends at his last school (there since K and no one will respond to his texts to keep in touch any more.)

Last night as he was slapping together his low quality poster with glue at the end of the evening, he said musingly, "You know, I did pretty well in 2nd grade. Do you remember that?" It tore my heart to hear him say that and think that was the last time he remembers being happy at school. OTOH, he is quite capable of saying something like that to produce exactly that sympathetic response to get out of trouble. He knows how troubled I am about his school unhappiness and uses that to manipulate me at times. Sigh.

DS just finished some more testing to explore other root causes for his continual and extreme academic struggles. The audiologist gave me an oral report of CAPD, written report to follow tomorrow, the speech pathologist found a mild expressive/receptive language disorder based on the CAPD and the optometrist found rather significant tracking and convergence issues. Perhaps these issues are part of the root of DS' desire to avoid all schoolwork? They certainly don't help anyway.

I don't think he is a perfectionist. I have one of those also. Perhaps there is an element of boredom with the easy work but he doesn't exactly dive headlong into the challenging stuff either. DS is a math kid but his lowest grade is his algebra, his most challenging subject. Baffling but I think the CAPD is playing a role in that grade.

He does struggle with task initiation and persistence. I think the background music idea is recommended for ADHD kids but I am not sure it would be good for CAPD. I will ask the audiologist tomorrow.

DS is also intrinsically motivated as well so if I let him do nothing he would happily go into a free fall/Xbox/Minecraft orgy from which I would just have to pick up the pieces ultimately. The bottom line seems to be that he is one of the kids with a pretty complex profile who has amazingly cognitively masked his problems with until now. I do think, Zen, that this coping struggle has taken its toll on him.

Thanks all for your thoughts. I will keep you posted.