Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Aspergers and anxiety - what to do?

Hi all. I am raising DGS7. He showed many of the characteristics of the highly gifted when he was younger, but he has Asperger's and severe anxiety and really severe sensory modulation disorder. His IQ testing is only in the "above average" range, but everyone who tests him tells me how smart he is. So, I have no real gauge of his true iq, and the testers say in their reports that his true IQ is hard to summarize due to large subtest scatter.

All that said, does anyone here have experience in home schooling their autistic child? We are reaching that point. The school is trying to work with us, but the anxiety is paralyzing DGS and he has begun having meltdowns at school that they respond to pretty well, but they are increasing in frequency. He is ahead of most of his classmates and accelerating pretty fast now that his visual motor issues are being treated. He never does homework, but gets 95+ on all his testing so the academics are behind where he is, and boredom is not good for any 7yo.

So, can you help me with pros and cons of homeschooling a child on the spectrum?

TIA,
leahchris

I also have not done this, but have been very tempted (it would not work for us, though). Just off the top of my head, pros include not getting nastygrams from the teachers about behavior they don't want to deal with. Cons would include missing out on some of the social interactions at school, but many areas have organized secular and non-secular homeschool groups with regular meetings/playgroups that would go a long way toward helping with that, especially in the younger grades. Also my impression is there are a number of prepared curricula (curriculi?) from which to choose that might make your task easier, as well as online resources, so you need not reconstruct the wheel. Good luck!

Hi Leahchris,

The "never does homework" is a warning sign for me. My child with AS had issues with homework in the early years-- he felt that it was an unwarranted intrusion on his free time at home, and he resisted with all his might. If we had homeschooled, it would have been very difficult.

Our therapy team has also recommended not homeschooling, because so much of being in the workplace is learning to be flexible, take direction from others, be patient when there's a slow time, and do the assigned tasks when they're due. The team felt that school would be hard in the short term, but the long term gains would be real. DS is now finishing 5th grade, and we see the value of that very clearly. There is no doubt that had we homeschooled, he'd be further ahead academically, but our willingness to flex to his preferences would have allowed him to be more rigid, making him less fitted for the workplace in the long term. We feel this was the right call for us.

What accommodations and supports are in place at school? It seems likely to me that you can adjust things so that he's less anxious, possibly through teaching him skills and providing access to respite when he needs it. (A "moment out of class" ticket can be a huge gift for an anxious kid-- just knowing he can leave and regroup if he needs to makes it less likely that he'll have to.)

And how are you treating the anxiety? We found that our child did much better on a combination of an SSRI (for the anxiety) and an ADD medication (for staying on task). Cognitive-behavior therapy is also very useful for learning to identify anxious or rigid thinking and combat it.

DeeDee

DeeDee - Thanks for the suggestions. I didn't use to have trouble getting him to do his homework, and the enrichment we did over the summer he was more than willing to do. Right now, he is just so exhausted when he gets home that there is no more energy to do anything.

We are meeting with the school tomorrow, and we are definitely not making a decision for this year. He is allowed to go the Resource Room (spec ed) as needed during the day and it worked for a while. I just found out that they changed his schedule AGAIN. They know better than that, and now he is in normal, very loud PE, and that class was just before noisy lunch, which was just before the meltdowns. Maybe it will be as simple as not doing PE for the rest of the year. One can hope for easy solution just once! Send good thoughts our way for the meeting tomorrow.

Any anyone else with pros and cons for next year please let me know.

Thanks for the replies and the encouragement.

leahchris

My son sounds a lot like yours, and although we don't have a diagnosis of Aspergers, he has many of the traits.

As to homework, have you asked for modifications? We have a modification that allows him to do less problems in math, alternative assignments, late acceptance etc., and it has really helped with the homework battles. There are also nights that he comes home wiped out, stressed out, and I make the call that I am not pushing the homework and let him unwind on Minecraft. Then on the weekend, we spend a bit of time and catch up on missing work.

The nurses know him well, as he gets physical symptoms of anxiety that he doesn't recognize as such. They have learned to walk him through what happened right before coming to their office and then make suggestions about whether his symptoms could be from anxiety because of what he shares. Once he is able to identify it as anxiety, he is usually able to process that and go back to class.

We have yet to get a real IQ out of any testing and will try once more this semester to get I'm qualified for gifted with modifications. Do you have a similar option there? If so, you can appeal to the administration (at the district level) and request alternative qualifications due to his diagnosis. That is what we're doing. Each teacher wrote a letter requesting the gifted placement, documenting anecdotal evidence of his high IQ. They are now all in his file and will be weighted with his scores instead of scores only.

I wouldn't want to homeschool despite how tough it is at school, as I think the socialization is vital for him. Learning to cope, interact with others, follow directions - those will impact him significantly as an adult. He'll learn on his own (he devours online MIT lectures), but he can't learn the social skills that are so difficult for him without being in situations that challenge him. So, I have accepted less than stellar grades and attendance in exchange for his learning to cope.

leahchris, I'm sorry to hear that your dgs is struggling with anxiety related to school. We don't have experience with Aspergers, so I can't give you direct advice there, but fwiw, both large subtest scatter and anxiety over school can be red flags for LDs.... so jmo, but I'd be hesitant to homeschool until I felt confident that I understood what the subtest scatter meant in terms of impact on academics. It's possible that anxiety or testing conditions or Aspergers traits are driving the scatter and that the scatter isn't real and the IQ test isn't an accurate representation of your dgs' abilities.. or there's a possibility that the scatter is related to significant differences in strengths vs challenges... and that *could* potentially be driving the anxiety he's experiencing.

My ds has LDs that weren't diagnosed until 2nd grade because no one recognized them as LDs. What we saw instead was a child that everyone knew was extremely bright because of what he was able to verbalize when he was calm. At school he was becoming completely non-compliant and appeared to be spacing out all the time. At home he was refusing to do homework and having huge meltdowns. Eventually his anxiety built up to the point he was having panic attacks, first at school and then at home. Through *all* of that he was still able to get good grades on everything he actually did and turned in during the day at school. The academics in his classroom appeared to be very far behind where his abilities were, so we (parents) thought a lot of what was going on re behavioral issues and anxiety was either boredom or perfectionism. It wasn't until we sought out help for the anxiety from our ped that we were referred to a neuropsych and found out that he had significant subtest scatter in his IQ profile, and that the scatter was significant in terms of how he was able to process academics.

I realize that's a bit off tangent from the question posed in your post, but in our situation we (parents) felt that the problem was school/teacher until we had testing and realized our ds had LDs. If we'd made the decision to homeschool at that point, we might not have discovered and consequently understood what was driving the behaviors at school, he would have come back home where schooling *might* have worked for awhile, but eventually ds would have to go back out into the world and he would still have his very real LDs. In the meantime, he might have missed several years of very valuable therapies, learning how to accommodate, and remediation that have helped him tremendously. That may or may not be the case with your gds, but if you haven't received it, I'd ask for info on the subtest scatter and the impressions of the person who did the testing re whether or not the scatter is due to anxiety or real differences in abilities. If the testing was through the school, you might not get the same amount of insight and explanation from the tester that you would from a private neuropsych, but you should at the very least be able to get the actual subtest scores and a description of your ds' behavior during the testing and an impression of whether or not that impacted his scores.

Best wishes,

polarbear