His passivity is not IMO a personality quirk but part of the neurologically atypical stuff.
We have trouble with:
--initiation (hard to start)
--not seeing the steps that lead to success clearly (being able to think ahead/organize/anticipate)
--not being able to organize the steps (much much easier to do what's comfortable than learn unfamiliar steps; worse in situations that have high stakes)
These are all EF issues very common to people who have ASD or ADHD.
Yes, yes, and yes. All of the above. One of the trickiest parts of this is that it might as well be a case of the blind leading the blind. I have done ALL of my learning without knowing how to do these things--and choosing subject areas in which sudden bursts of intellectual energy were effective. Good thing, too, because that was the only tool I had. It has greatly limited my career success. I hated teaching because of the heavy organizational load and never feeling like I had it together--this despite getting a lot of feedback about being quite talented at working with the children. I learn like my son: through obsession and osmosis. It is hard to teach a skill one does not posses herself. Like my son, I do much better when I am not required to multitask.
I would try not to dwell on the long term future (and its possible specters). Rather, I like a 3-5 year planning horizon.
This made me LOL. I think (hope?) that I am not quite as catastrophic a thinker as I appear to be when I write. I will say this: there is no doubt that much of my panicky thinking is driven by my eldest son's situation (mental illness). And *he* was quite an exceptional student all the way through high school, who required no support at home--self-motivated and driven. Clearly, this is something that needs to be worked on with my own therapist.
Look at the next few years, and decide what skills are missing that are needed within that horizon. Pick one, work on that. Let the rest be easy until that's mastered. Then pick another.
Our process is to decide what behavior we want to see, support that behavior so he knows what it's supposed to look like, and then gradually fade the support.
Here is the pickle: my gut feeling is that if DS could just get a handle on the social behaviors, the rest of it would not be so difficult. For one, I think the teachers expect gifted students to be a bit flaky, organizationally. Secondly, I think they would be more tolerant and supportive of the EF stuff if they liked him. That was certainly the case in elementary school. The reason I say it's a pickle is because the most off-putting behaviors seem to only occur in the context of the classroom, when he is with his peers. Of course, I do correct him at home when he is blunt and insensitive--but it doesn't happen as often here, and I am far less likely to take offense. Not sure how to help him generalize "perspective taking."
Yep. We cannot (still, age 12) say "clean your room." We have to break it into sub-tasks. (Pick up laundry and put it in the basket; all books back on shelves.) By teaching and reinforcing the sub-tasks you can work toward independence in a manageable way, with fewer freakouts.
This is how we do room-cleaning here, too. When I have the gumption. A lot of our home life involves my doing everything, just because there is so much to do and I don't have time to do it right. A DS "freakout" is nearly always withdrawal and avoidance. He doesn't melt down often--he goes internal, scowls, and ignores.
