Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional extreme procrastination and ADHD

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.