Thx all, HK, yes..I do see task avoidance in him and myself, but mostly just on school. I can't tell if he really is over the top confident or if it's a front in things like sports because he dives right in, usually does either ok or great. He's happy if it was fun...that seems to be his criteria for everything. We've deliberately tried to set him up with things he has to work at, like guitar lessons HE asked for, to aid in perseverance. Too hard, gave up after 3 months...yes, I let him, I wasn't going to drop $200/month for him not to practice. He paid for 1/2 of his guitar so I know he really wanted to try it..keeping it just in case the desire returns as he ages.

He makes these Rainbow rubber band bracelets with singleminded concentration. At first, he was so frustrated, he cried and said he was too dumb to figure it out. Shortly after, he found YouTube tutorials and was at it again. Multiple bumps in the road, but he's doing really complex bracelets now and wanting to figure out a way to sell them or teach a class to kids on making them..so progress.

I know he CAN focus and try harder, transferring it to school is something else. Trying to figure WHAT will engage him..obviously, some sort of movement seems to help.

I did read somewhere recently about not asking your kids to do their best all the time, but to do enough saving their best and that level of effort for the really important things. I'm attempting to convey that currently.

I just looked up dysgraphia again after all the comments, he has none of the symptoms I can find online. He can write with speed and ease if he knows what he wants to say. I typically have him stop writing and verbalize what he means first, that seems to help a great deal. I guess he has a hard time composing a sentence structurally at the same time he is writing it down. It is usually when he's starting, the flow gets better as he continues. For example, he put off starting a bio paper on Alexander the Great though he'd done his research and had lots of organized notes. He went outside and came in 10 min later with a full page written. He ended up only tweaking what he wrote before turning it in for an A. He is also a very intuitive speller, he rarely misspells anything. If I'm still missing something that his full psych eval at age 8 would have missed, pls let me know.

Shannon L.

Last edited by sblora; 08/07/13 11:44 AM.