DD is in 7th grade and and excellent student. However, she often has difficulty remembering to hand things in or fully complete assignments. She has established a pattern of lying to us or blaming teachers for these mysterious 0s that appear on her online grading account. Occasionally we have caught her in the lie (the missing paper is in her binder or folder) or gotten her to confess it by threatening to email the teacher to ask why she is giving a 0 since she supposedly turned in the work.
DD is definitely somewhat organizationally challenged, but we don't think she is ADHD. Her teachers report that she is on task and focused in class and contributes well. Always positive comments on the report card. Binders and folders are messy, but not horrifically so. I would say she is lower 25% as far as this skill. Not bottom of the barrel....but it's a weakness.
I also sort of suspect she may be self handicapping on purpose. Last year she recieived a few comments from kids about having an over 100% average in a couple of classes, and she has talked about how other kids don't get straight As, she wants to be "normal," other people think it's "great" to get Bs (when any Bs are purely the result of 0s pulling down her grade--all graded work is high As), etc. However, I also think she just has a hard time remembering to jump all the hoops. 0s often occur when something was a bit unusual--you had to turn this project in online instead of on paper, she missed that day of class and had to remember to hand it in the next day, etc. She can stay with it fine if it's within routine, but take it outside routine and she'll forget. Similarly, some teachers have an organized and familiar homework system and others are more scattered and sporadic--she does great with the former, not so well with the latter.
I want to work with her on skills and techniques to get more organized, but if I bring this up she screams at me to get out of her life, stop treating her like a baby, let her handle it, etc. With 7 current missing assignments in various classes, I also broached the topic of a conference (her teachers like to do group conferences) which was met with "If you do that, I will drop out of school" (DD is nothing if not prone to high drama), because she says it will be embarrassing.
We have already removed privileges due to multiple missing assigments and repeated failures to turn stuff in, but DD has never really cared about this and I don't think it's a good strategy. Unfortunately, middle school grades are relevant here, as she must apply to high school....otherwise I do think I'd be tempted to leave her be and let her experience the consequences as they fell. In my gut, I feel this is just something we need to work on with her with better systems, but she is fighting us tooth and nail. Thoughts, experiences? I'm also so frustrated with the lying. I have no idea when to trust her at this point. It doesn't help that sometimes teachers really do mess up, lose things, etc so sometimes weird or bad grades are not her fault. But she will straight up lie to our faces and do it beautifully, too. I can NOT tell when she's lying.
The relationship is really suffering at this point. DD has also accused me of wanting her to be perfect, which is ironic since we've been going through a whole "thing" about her being worried about her scienc fair project with her freaking out about it not being good enough (she won a bunch of stuff last year) and me telling her it's fine. I don't want her to be perfect!! I just want her to complete her assignments and hand them in. I feel like that is completely reasonable, but it's almost like she's telling me that she needs to have 0s to be "normal." I wonder if she can't bring herself to do a poor job on an actual assignment, so this is the only way she knows how to do it? But that may be a crazy way to think?
Last edited by ultramarina; 09/30/16 06:07 AM.
