But sometimes I literally sit up in a panic in the middle of the night when I realize how little work he is actually doing.
Every day when it's time to settle in to do something productive, he starts whining/avoiding etc and I often have to shout at him to get him to do anything.
He already seems to know everything I try to introduce as subject matter. Sometimes we play trivial pursuit and I am shocked at what he knows. He knows e v e r y thing.
But he hates writing and doing math problems.
I am afraid I am sabotaging any chance he might have to develop reasonable work habits. It's just too hard to get him to do what he doesn't want to do.
Often he spends whole hours lost in a fantasy world, narrating elaborate story lines to himself... and this fantasy world seem to be a very important place for him to be, so I often let him stay there-- a mental-health luxury he would not have in school-- but am I just giving in to his obsessional tendencies?
He sounds so much like like my kid. He loved playing Trivial Pursuit, but at age 11 it is Cash Cab and Who Wants to be a Millionaire or Jeopardy or online quizzes. He loved learning about everything so he watched a lot of educational history and science shows, spent a lot of hours online reading Wikipedia and looking up any words or phrases he didn't know. In school, my son would have had to do a lot of writing and coloring and would not have had the time to learn as much as he learned at home, but I still spent many nights worrying about reaching his potential when I had so much trouble getting him to do anything that involved writing. On a good day at age 7, I could get him to do the two hours of work that I asked him to do. Most days were not what I would call good days, but we got through it. Sometimes I yelled out of frustration and told him if he didn't do his work I would have to put him back in public school, but it wasn't long before he told me he didn't believe I would really do it because I cared too much about his education. He would reluctantly do the writing but it would take him such a long time because he had motor dyspraxia/dysgraphia.
If he got through the writing, he got to play video games and he really liked online role playing games. He would often make up stories to go along with the games. He would tell me the stories but he wouldn't write them down because writing was such a problem for him. He did type a script for me once for one of his stories, and it was good enough that I decided not to push him on writing, but math was a different story. I did make him do at least a little bit of math every day but sometimes it was just online math games or mental math or I would have him write out one or two problems (I picked the hardest ones) and then I acted as his scribe when his hands got tired or found the writing too frustrating. He is so happy to have finally made it to a point where he is allowed to use the calculator more because it makes math a lot more fun for him. He also told me he would have liked math more if I had let him do more word problems when he was younger.
