Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional extreme procrastination and ADHD

My HG, ADHD DS13 has entered into an all out guerrilla war against school and homework that involves huge amounts of procrastination and disinformation. He literally WILL NOT do ANY work unless I am directly watching him. If I leave for the store, make dinner, wash dishes, take DD to a birthday party or go to the bathroom all work ceases. He will tell me he has finished work that he simply plans to finish tomorrow, tell me assignment due dates have changed (which they actually have, sometimes) or tell me whatever he needs to say to be "done."

When he is "working" he is often surreptitiously googling items of interest instead of his assignment. He will literally sit and pretend to work for several hours on an assignment that should take 2 hours at most. He is so quick and such an expert at hiding his distractions on the computer that it is difficult to catch him unless I have direct eyes on his screen. DS would rather sacrifice his whole Saturday doing nothing and pretending to work than do the 2 hours of easy work he dislikes (research and design a Powerpoint explaining baseball) than actually do the work and have most of the day free.

He has a poster due tomorrow that he didn't start until this evening, telling me that he just had to "put it together." But no, his preliminary research sheet was poorly done, turned in late and handwritten for a 72 so he had to redo that assignment to even start the poster. When I asked him why such an easy assignment was late and not typed he told me that he "thought he could do it before class at school."

We have been over and over losing all his free time to procrastination, his inability to do homework at school on the day it's due, taking away privileges, the opportunity to score easy As on easy assignments, every positive and negative I can think of. I have rewarded good grades (rare) and punished bad grades for poor work. We have talked and talked and talked. Why do you do this? Do you see how you are ruining all your free time? Don't you want free time? You know you're only hurting yourself, right?

I have posted before about DS' lying which continues apace. If he wants to avoid an assignment, he lies. Simple as that. The assignments aren't all difficult or unpleasant. Some are hard and some are quite easy. We switched DS to a school that supports LD students in September. The move made a difference for a while but DS has slid back into complete intransigence about doing schoolwork.

I am out of patience with being the assignment police but he will not do anything without intervention. In response this disaster weekend of dissimulation and procrastination, I am installing spyware and making him do all computer work displayed on the Apple TV. At this point due to last disaster weekend and disaster grades, he has lost all technology privileges, his phone and his Xbox to no avail but I can't completely suspend computer privileges because he is dysgraphic.

The loss of digital privacy seems to have made a deeply unfavorable impression but I am not sure that even that will be enough. What can motivate an ADHD kid who has decided to go on strike from school? He has experienced plenty of failure too. That doesn't affect him in the least. Any suggestions?

I'm not so sure that this is entirely attributable to ADHD.

My DD did this when she was 8-11yo, too.

In her case, it was simply that there was more reward in NOT doing as she was told than in doing what she WAS being forced to do. Simple as that. Avoidance > working. Period.

Not hard to see that when you translate that power struggle into
Parents vs. Child in autonomy, it's also not going anywhere good.

She just shrugged about consequences. Literally.

You'll have to keep the spyware up, I am afraid. And grit your teeth as much as it takes. They eventually figure it out, but it's a rocky road until then.

When was the last time your son had a whole day to do as he pleased without school work? Maybe it's worth reminding him of the opportunity cost of procrastination by offering a particularly exciting and enticing day as a source of motivation for slogging through the busywork. You've likely already done this, but if he's responsive, you could create a reward system whereby he earns a day of exciting activities on the weekend if he can finish all the drudgery during the week.

As HK says, it's a question of incentives. You can certainly go the penalty route for noncompliance, but leaning on the organizational psychology literature, you're more likely to achieve compliance by offering a bigger, better carrot for success. In your shoes, I'd choose a day with few consequences for missed work and just seize the day for fun.

What happens if you do nothing? What is the worst case scenario? He fails and has to repeat? He gets kicked out of school? Enforcing homework is really not your job.

I just heard an interesting talk where the speaker mentioned that when we hear the words 'get tough' that is usually a red flag to dig deeper. It perhaps means that we don't actually understand the underlying factors --- he was referring to countries and diplomacy but I wondered if this also applies to parenting.

Your ds needs to do the work, but otoh, digging deeper might help you get to a solution on motivation more quickly. I imagine you've been trying to get to the bottom of the issue, but I would not stop trying even if imposing new limits on your ds are showing some progress.
Is there an issue with friends, bullies, girls? teachers? the school admins? the material? and so on. Does he feel distracted or is his adhd under control? if that is substantially eliminated from this problem, other more common issues may become more obvious.
Is he just trying to spend more time with you? (crazy I know, but possible). How is his emotional state? does he otherwise seem happy?

Best of luck to you.

I'd definitely go with the dig deeper idea.

Is he being intellectually challenged? Are there issues at the new school? Bullies?

It could be a sign of needing more personal control.

It could be a type of self-destructive behavior, where a low sense of self worth gets reinforced through procratination and the ensuing negative consequences. Depression and self hate are on this path.

It could be a thrill seeking behavior, such that doing something at the last minute is exciting. The more drastic the consequences the more exciting the challenge.

I wonder if a psychologist/therapist would be able to help. Maybe he would be willing to share with the psych why he is doing what he is doing, and the psych could also give you strategies for dealing with it.

Some kids seem to have very little intrinsic motivation, and I'm not sure why this is. I have a 7 and 8 year old. The 8 year old has diagnosed ADHD but the 7 year old is the truly lazy one. He does not do certain things just to feel good about himself or make his life easier, or even get praise or make people happy. He has to get something else out of it. You should have seen the drama involved in getting him to clean his room yesterday. So far at school he is cooperative and well-behaved but I don't know how long it will last. I may be in your shoes in another 6 years or so.

A couple of thoughts:

Just because an assignment is "easy" doesn't mean that a kid will fly through it. In fact, for DS8 it is often the easy stuff that he finds the hardest to get done. Recent example: he balked at doing math problems like (1/4) / (1/3), but was excited about doing (1/4!) / (1/3!).

Is it possible your son is a perfectionist? I sometimes procrastinate because of this. I worry that the work I will do won't be up to my high standards, and so I avoid doing it at all until the last minute. It also takes me a long time to make decisions, and so "easy" projects can take an unreasonable length of time to complete. (For example, we haven't had our house painted in years: what color? what kind of paint? whom should we hire to do the work? what time of year is best? etc. I strongly suspect an NT household would have just done it. Me, I worry I'll regret one or more of my decisions, so I put off making any decisions. Maybe I should be researching house paint right now, but instead I am responding to forum posts!)

None of this is advice, but just know that if there are other underlying issues, like perfectionism, offering rewards and punishments probably won't help much.

Well said!

These resources have been posted on other threads, but in case the OP may not be familiar with them... There are books which show readers how to free themselves from thought patterns which may not be serving them well. While insightful, these books are written gently for kids, in a style that is fun and engaging. Parents may wish to pre-read and decide if a resource may be a helpful tool for their child. For example, one book which seems to understand perfectionism very well and which many find supportive is What To Do When Good Enough Isn't Good Enough. Another book many like is Perfectionism: What's Bad About Being Too Good. Here is an article from the Davidson Database, Interview with Thomas Greenspon on Perfectionsim.

Some good thoughts so far, so I'll just add one more to the mix. What if the problem isn't ADHD? What if doing the work itself is so unpleasant to him that he'd rather face negative consequences (or at least take his chances, because sometimes he gets away without them)?

This is something I've frequently experienced (even as an adult), where the task is mundane, I see little or no value in it, nor receive any sense of joy/accomplishment, but it's taking up a lot of my time and effort. One coping mechanism is to escape into daydreaming or deep thought, which works great for tasks that don't involve a lot of brain power, like washing dishes or cutting grass. But when the task also requires a significant amount of concentration, there's no such escape.

In these situations, a very effective strategy is to play some music. It paradoxically provides a distraction, which helps me focus on the task at hand. In my idle brain moments I'm not thinking about how much I hate the task at hand, I'm listening to the music instead. It also helps to alter my mood from one of negativity.

These days I'd also drink coffee, or if working on something at home, nurse a beer or two through the effort. I don't recommend either of those to a 13yo boy, but the idea is to provide some source of pleasure to offset the sense of dread at doing an unpleasant task.

In law school, I would watch tv and do my work (the mundane stuff like outlining, rewriting my notes and such). I would watch mostly mental chewing gum (the Felicity series was on back then - I would watch that... 90210 type series, etc) Like Dude, it paradoxically provided a distraction, which helped me focus on the task at hand.

We also would do study-groups, get together to outline, etc. that was nice 'cause it felt almost fun - social and someone would always get us back on track if we were chatting off-topic or procrastinating too much. Hope that helps a little. And good luck. I can tell I'll probably have the same problem with my guy when he is teen.

I agree with everyone who has pointed out that the cost-benefit analysis here may look strange to YOU, but it (on some level) makes perfect sense to the person procrastinating.

Yes, sometimes it's red-lining-- particularly if that is the ONLY way to introduce "challenge" into the activity...

but it's really tough to leverage a kid who is solely/mostly motivated intrinsically. I know. I have one of those.

She's still mostly "meh" about a LOT of what the school thinks is "important" or worth her time. It's not that I can see her investing heavily in alternative activities, necessarily, either. She's just not that interested in most stuff.

[Man, I cannot BELIEVE that I've actually voiced that to anyone, anywhere. Good thing she's HG+, or she'd be flunking out, with her level of intrinsic motivation to work on schoolwork. Half-hearted effort from an HG+ child is generally MORE than good enough for A's, just so you know... And no, I would NEVER admit that to any other group of parents. I realize this SOUNDS like Tiger Parenting-- but when you are adamantly, forcefully insisting on, er, well-- ~30-40% effort from your child, it's just... not.]

It's better than it used to be-- she has the discipline now to actually DO things that seem pointless, remedial, or stupid; this was most certainly NOT the case until she was about 12. Until then, it was me, applying the (metaphorical) whip as needed to make sure that she did ENOUGH to not tank her grades. Bad grades meant little to her, but being dropped back into less challenging coursework would have made the problem far, FAR worse...

That much was obvious to me.

She was impossible to punish or reward, effectively-- I could have sticker charts, rewards, etc... or even have her "just sit" with nothing to do all day rather than do a single page of too-simple math problems. It was THAT bad. She'd placidly daydream and nap-- like a giant cat. Her attitude about this was more or less--

{shrug} "Works for me, mom..."

Not exactly what I wanted. Once she dug in like that, there was NO moving her. None.

There's a reason her nickname was "Little Ghandi."


I second the recommendation for multi-tasking through low-level activities, and for making tedious ones SOCIAL in some way, if that works. I would not take activities/etc. away-- because that (at least IME) tends to fuel the spiral that Zen Scanner mentions. We've seen it.


Dude, Blackcat, and ZS's posts particularly resonated with me, having struggled with one of these low-motivation, (frankly) lazy kids for years...

It's partially autonomy, and it's partially something else. The trick is turning their powers to good and not letting them use the dark side. {ahem}

Those sounds like very typical ADHD behaviors to me (task avoidance and lack of task persistence). Obviously, you know your situation, but I would think that he cannot begin and persist not that he won't. Is it possible to get him an executive function coach - someone (other than you) who can sit with him and go over his various assignments and help him develop strategies to break them down into manageable pieces.

Procrastination has been a huge issue with my DS15. It was particularly bad in 6th grade. One thing we figured out was it NEVER worked to try and do homework as soon as he got home, or on Friday to leave the weekend free. If we did this then the entire time until bedtime, or the whole weekend was taken up with HIS homework. And more than half that time was him wasting time. Drove me up the wall and got old really really fast. And he never got anytime to do anything fun that way.

I have been working with him since 6th grade on estimating how long his homework will take, and then unless it's really necessary not starting homework until after dinner or late on Sunday. He works a lot better under a small amount of time pressure and the immediacy that the work is DUE the next day. This does mean breaking down larger projects into smaller chunks because those just can't be left to the last minute. Or when necessary if the work is particularly heavy starting earlier, but then we put a time limit on it.

The other thing we did is keep his homework area & his laptop in different locations. He is ONLY allowed on the laptop if his homework NEEDS the computer. He is much better at not getting distracted if his main form of distraction isn't even in the room. I do let my son listen to music while he works. And as a freshman in H.S. I do check on him every so often to make sure he is working.

I have been there. This isn't easy and it takes a lot of patience. But DS has improved a lot since 6th grade.

This board is so rewarding. You guys pick up the issue and examine every potential angle. Zen's thoughts on digging deeper on control and self-loathing strike me as closest to true for DS along with HK's point about age. DS did just turn 13. He is a "young" 13, not yet in puberty but the attitude is there. That may be a factor in the new secretive, underground aspect of his work resistance.

DS has struggled with school for so long that he completely loathes it at this point. He is also socially unhappy and has failed to make friends at the new school but had no real friends at his last school (there since K and no one will respond to his texts to keep in touch any more.)

Last night as he was slapping together his low quality poster with glue at the end of the evening, he said musingly, "You know, I did pretty well in 2nd grade. Do you remember that?" It tore my heart to hear him say that and think that was the last time he remembers being happy at school. OTOH, he is quite capable of saying something like that to produce exactly that sympathetic response to get out of trouble. He knows how troubled I am about his school unhappiness and uses that to manipulate me at times. Sigh.

DS just finished some more testing to explore other root causes for his continual and extreme academic struggles. The audiologist gave me an oral report of CAPD, written report to follow tomorrow, the speech pathologist found a mild expressive/receptive language disorder based on the CAPD and the optometrist found rather significant tracking and convergence issues. Perhaps these issues are part of the root of DS' desire to avoid all schoolwork? They certainly don't help anyway.

I don't think he is a perfectionist. I have one of those also. Perhaps there is an element of boredom with the easy work but he doesn't exactly dive headlong into the challenging stuff either. DS is a math kid but his lowest grade is his algebra, his most challenging subject. Baffling but I think the CAPD is playing a role in that grade.

He does struggle with task initiation and persistence. I think the background music idea is recommended for ADHD kids but I am not sure it would be good for CAPD. I will ask the audiologist tomorrow.

DS is also intrinsically motivated as well so if I let him do nothing he would happily go into a free fall/Xbox/Minecraft orgy from which I would just have to pick up the pieces ultimately. The bottom line seems to be that he is one of the kids with a pretty complex profile who has amazingly cognitively masked his problems with until now. I do think, Zen, that this coping struggle has taken its toll on him.

Thanks all for your thoughts. I will keep you posted.

I do like your idea of a reward system aquinas. I have talked to DS about it and he is interested too. He does find delayed gratification rewards to be hard to wrap his head around though.

DS did his math homework after school and kept trying to negotiate the number of problems he would have to do in one sitting. However, he stayed at the table and didn't make a huge fuss, so I praised him for being cooperative. First thing out of his mouth when I said that: "So does that mean I earned screen time?" I hear you on the Minecraft orgy. DS would play Minecraft or other similar games literally all day/every day if I let him. It makes me want to throw the computer out but then I would have nothing to motivate him and no reward to offer for actually doing work. I make him "earn" screen time, he doesn't get it for free. It's really the only thing that works with him. So if he reads a half hour, he can earn a half hour of screen time. If he does a household chore, same thing. He reads now, just for fun and doesn't do it anymore just to earn screen time. So with certain things, I think once it gets easier or they discover there is actual enjoyment involved in it, they don't need the external rewards anymore. He's 7 years old, though. I don't know about a 13 year old and what works with that age.

Glad those ideas were helpful. One reward mechanic could be a jar of positive affirmations that he pulls from whenever he feels he deserves it. He could also benefit from learning meditation as that can be a nice life skill that allows for deep introspection and sometimes reworking your own thought processes. I was thirteen when I sent away for the "Advanced Memory" booklet from the "Institute of Advanced Thinking" with my allowance from the back of Omni magazine.

this reminded me of a reward system I used for myself as a kid and do still sometimes use to get through some boring onerous task that requires attention. I'll get a bag of nuts (small bag, not going for breaking the scale) or a small number of something else I think is yummy. Break the task up into what I think are manageable 'mental bites' (2 problems, 6 lines of an essay, etc.) and after my prescribed amount of work is completed, I get to have a little bite of whatever.
I am sure this is not going to work for everyone, and I guess there could be concerns about setting up bad eating habits, but I dunno, for me it just seemed to work.

And yes, I am only a few pounds overweight.

I am curious if there are other micro-rewards like this that folks use; cigarettes come to mind, but that of course is verboten. I guess the mention of listening to music is like that for some people?

I used to do this for DS when he was in school and was having a hard time focusing on homework. We'd get those tubes of mini M&Ms, and I'd give him a few periodically while he was working.

I should try that again, now that we're homeschooling.

I do think it requires some self-discipline not to scarf down the entire bag midway through the task, which is another issue altogether.

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??

Bingo. This is precisely why my DD (and her... well, whatever he is... friend who is EG) does this.

Her level of 'full throttle' is kind of legendary at her school. It kind of makes me queasy to think about it too hard, but she ENJOYED catching up 3.5 weeks of APUSH in a few days. It was the thrill of going all-out and still earning 100%, see.

Now that she's caught up, her attention wanders and she isn't so concerned about racking 100% on every assignment. It's a weird, weird phenomenon.

Crunch time performance is probably the most useful support skill I developed in school. Far more useful than scheduling, lists, or studying might've been. When I can deliver in half the time what someone might reasonably expect it amazes and gives plenty of time to go sideways and pickup new skills or define new roles or document a process so someone else can do it next time and I can move onto something new. It also hones an awareness of efficiency, which is good for analyzing and improving business processes.

ADD, gifted, whatnot, procrastination is a solution not the problem, except for observers who are wired a little more netherly than myself and get a bit too uptight. Sometimes it also resembles a problem when it is a symptom of a different problem like perfectionistic thinking or having your decision tolerance threshold set too high or passive aggressive magical thinking that to make a problem poof into non-existence.

Yep. In my case, I was willing to read the ones I liked, and elated to skip the ones I didn't. It had nothing to do with level of difficulty or length, either, as I was content to work my way through The Count of Monte Cristo, but unwilling to bother with Lord of the Flies.

Words can't say how delighted I was to respond to my overloaded, stressed classmates with, "You mean you read it? Why??"

Classroom discussions were a big part of our grade, so I had to fake it. I'd listen to the convo for about fifteen minutes, get the gist of last night's reading, and volunteer my perspective on it... which, since my perspective was always significantly different from any that had been offered so far, my teacher was glad to have. Divergent thinking for the win.

Someone I know well can strongly identify with this!

fwtxmom - I'm happy you got your answer! Looks like you and your DS have some work ahead of you now, but at least you know what you are working on. Sounds like you found a really good tester that was able to connect the dots for your DS. What DYS list were you referring to where you found this tester?