Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional extreme procrastination and ADHD

You reminded me. I had to watch TV during university to stop me drifting off.

So I got the final report from DS' excellent tester today. I finally found a gifted/LD specialist in my area from the DYS elists who REALLY gets 2e kids. This report is 18 single spaced pages and exceptionally thorough. The tester administered several tests for dyslexia and compiled all of his prior psychoeducational testing and school achievement tests as well as the new audiology/SLP testing and developmental optometrist report.

DS is dyslexic as well as dysgraphic, as I suspected, but has fairly pronounced dyslexia masked less and less successfully by his cognitive abilities. He has severe audio processing issues (the tester noted many instances where he misheard words or sounds in the one-on-one testing environment), had ongoing attentional struggle during testing (she asked that he come without his ADHD med administered) as well as recently diagnosed severe visual convergence and tracking problems.

This solves quite a bit of the procrastination and deceptiveness mystery for me. DS is cognitively filling visual and auditory holes all day long as well as struggling mightily with reading, writing and attention. The real question is, how has he learned anything at all? We have just started speech language therapy for the CAPD and vision therapy but he also needs extensive remedial reading work.

I need to set an appointment with the tester to ask many questions but, wow, I am sort of overwhelmed. With all the remedial work, how will he have time to do school also? He already doesn't have time to do school with JUST school. I am going to have to seriously recalibrate plans for the summer-and maybe his education in the near term? I don't know but now I understand why he hates school so much anyway. My poor guy.

He sounds like me and both of my kids. We're all master procrastinators and work-averse.

DS9 has an ADHD diagnosis. Neither DD nor myself do, but I've often wondered.

For both my kids, the issue appears to be interest. They are not people pleasers, and if homework doesn't interest them, then we're in big trouble: There is no intrinsic motivation or willingness to please the teacher to get them started.

(On the other hand, on tasks/projects/subjects of interest, they will work obsessively to the moon and back).

The only thing that works for me for the homework is to create and enforce consequences... such as a loss of electronics or other cherished activity.

As for myself... the "interest" factor also applies, but there's another one at work as well: repetition. For instance, when I write, I can't write about the same topic twice. CAN'T DO IT. OH MY GOSH I just can't handle repetition. I can do something once, and as soon as I have mastery or my curiosity is satisfied, I AM DONE. Someone needs to give me consequences. lol.

Anyway, I don't know if that helps.

So many reasons I love this forum. I think I get as much understanding of myself as my kids. I have always watched TV when studying even when everything in the world says not too. As a professor, I always watch TV when doing most work (especially grading) unless something is very complex and requires all my thought energy. It is the only way that I can actually sit down and focus. TV is my ultimate anti-procrastination tool. For some reason, music doesn't help me. Homework as a student was so mindless that the only way I would sit down and do it was if I was watching television.

A few thoughts - my two older kids (now in college) told me that the challenge of thwarting my efforts to keep them up to date on homework was far more exciting and rewarding than doing work that they hated, was boring, and that they saw absolutely no need to do. Even when they were punished - taking away iPods, grounding them, etc., they said that learning they could "survive" the punishment was still more rewarding than doing work they hated.

Gifted kids - especially 2e - do not have the same currency as conventional wisdom might suggest, so not having a teacher yell at them, not missing out on lunch with friends, not getting punished at home - we would think these motivators would drive them to suffer through the work. Not so. My daughter recently confessed that she only read one book in four years of AP English in high school because it was more fun to see how much she could synthesize through classroom discussions. She got C's and saved herself hours of miserable reading - a very fair payoff in her mind.

Last thought - could it be a memory thing? My youngest has dyslexia and dysgraphia, and he can't remember a single instruction from the time it is uttered at the bottom of the stairs until he gets to the top. It is gone, forgotten.

Have you thought about negotiating which projects can take the hit of a zero and which should be done in exchange? It might save the crazy-making of avoiding ALL of them.

I love this!! As I read it I thought "yesssss!!!" I can relate

I was SO annoyed. Not because of what she did but because she let me buy all of those ridiculous books for four years...

I don't blame you. I wonder if she would have fessed up sooner had she thought about that...

I definitely used to procrastinate just to make school more interesting. It's an adrenaline rush to see if you can finish the project in one night or learn all 50 vocabulary words in the class right before the test. It definitely helps with boredom.

OH my. I think that my DD makes up for yours-- she's easily read 3K pages for her two AP English courses... just so that she can pick "the most interesting of the selections, Mom" (because she might accidentally pick the least superior if she hadn't read ALL of the options, see...


yeah, I'm not buying that one, either. Right now she's reading Lolita "so that I can properly place Reading 'Lolita' In Tehran into context, Mom."

Procrastination techniques are infinitely varied, strange, and wonderful among HG+ kiddos, aren't they??