DS6 has been having some social and emotional problems in school lately: I'd really appreciate any BTDTs and tips.
Background: he's in our equivalent of 1st grade, in a small class in a private school. Intellectually things are going pretty well, thanks to a lot of effort from his teacher and weekly communication between us. He seems to be being given work at his own level, consistently, in maths and reading; as far as I can gather, in other subject areas he's being appropriately challenged by their normal processes, at least most of the time. So we're very fortunate.
However, apparently DS is often getting upset at school and his teacher feels a though she is "walking on eggshells. Or broken glass", while he rates each day primarily by how much she got cross with him and says fairly often that he dreads school (although it's clearly more complex than that: he is cheerful on arriving there and when we collect him, and obviously enjoys a lot of it).
I think we have two main kinds of issues, probably related:
1) He is terribly concerned about doing things right, according to the rules, and often gets into trouble because of the "analysis paralysis" that results when he can't work it out and is too scared of getting into trouble to just go ahead and do something. Typical example: he came back from a music lesson and wasn't sure whether he should knock on the classroom door or just go straight in - so he stayed outside until he got into trouble for not returning from his lesson!
2) When he does get into trouble, it's the end of the world for him and he behaves in ways they see as immature. E.g., in a recent episode where his teacher was telling him off, there was a genuine misunderstanding (his teacher had asked one question, he'd answered another...) and I think if he'd stayed calm and explained it would have been OK. But his teacher describes him as having "chosen to throw an enormous temper tantrum" which then became the focus of the incident. (Incidentally he's never, even as a toddler, been tantrum-prone at home; we can't remember the last time he got this upset with us; but in social situations with other people, we do see him get upset and give up in situations that really just call for a little negotiation - he normally runs away, but I can imagine that if not allowed to do that, it might well escalate into what they describe.)
His teacher also describes him as having social problems with the other children ("His idea of starting a conversation is to bark a scientific fact", "He doesn't interact like a normal 6yo") but I'm not so convinced by this as a problem. He can name friends, talks happily about playtime, gets invited to parties... I think here he may be weird but taken on his own terms more by the children than he is by the adults. Hard to tell of course.
Clearly we have some OEs here, especially emotional OE, and I've sent his teacher an article on them, which she said was interesting. We have a parent/teacher meeting in a couple of weeks, we've asked for the special needs teacher to be present, I've ordered a copy of Misdiagnosis...
Any ideas what we can do directly with him? We're talking through incidents as we hear about them, trying to get him to use his strengths e.g. in logic to handle the situations he finds difficult, encouraging watching what other children do and considering using that as a guide to his own action [he's capable of sitting doing nothing because he hasn't fully understood an instruction, when copying what the others are doing would have been the obvious low-risk course!] trying role play a bit, suggesting imagining his teacher has a chicken on her head as an aid to not getting into the cross-upset-cross vicious cycle. I also tentatively mentioned the concepts of OEs and giftedness and how they often go together to him yesterday - previously we've stuck to the "everyone learns differently at different things" line - and his relief was palpable, so I wonder whether I should talk to him more about those things.
Any BTDTs or suggestions?
