Short answer to your thread title? Yes, sort of.
Alas, when DS decides upon a course of action, wild horses can't drag him away from it. He is incredibly stubborn and totally overwhelmed with anxiety.
I think it's because he has so many projects due all at once. He has never had any significant test anxiety. Projects are the bane of his (our) existence.
Has anyone ever experienced this, and what did you do? I dropped him off this morning and he seemed better than yesterday--when I had to pick him up early, because he was sending me frantic/panicked texts. Picking up early is a new request.
Stern discipline is ineffective. Heart-to-heart communication is occasionally kind of effective. Taking away privileges is ineffective.
I have a child who has a similar profile in terms of personality-- she's VERY stubborn, and you can always tell DD...
just
very little, as it happens. {sigh}
OK.
How old is your child? How FUNCTIONALLY old in terms of executive function? How old FUNCTIONALLY in terms of emotional regulation?
Those things govern your response, IMO.
Don't tolerate what you
know that your child CAN help but just doesn't
want to-- that's enabling, and it won't help anything.
So if you
know that your child is manipulating you into managing his anxiety... refuse to
take ownership of what doesn't belong to YOU.
"No, I'm sorry... I need for you to stay at school until {time} today... Can you think of some ways to do that so that you can manage your anxiety until then? I know that you can figure this out. If you want to discuss ideas with me, I'm happy to do that with you."
Does that make sense?
OTOH, asynchrony
does mean scaffolding in unique ways sometimes. If this program is basically demanding executive skills that are more like college-appropriate, then some behind the scenes scaffolding on time management, task initiation, and breaking projects into manageable steps, planning, etc. might be in order.
We found that when DD would get mentally stuck in panic mode like this, the next step was always
avoidance-- with predictable results.
Soon she'd be where your DS is, flailing in full panic, and asking to be removed from the situation. We usually said "Nope-- you got yourself INTO this situation by ignoring some pretty reasonable demands early on, and now it's time to pay the piper and get to work. You own this-- and you're going to follow through, because that's what we do in this family."
We
did help her with the executive tasks which were beyond her ability at that point... which usually meant that because she had ignored (for example) the annotated bibliography due date... the source list due date.... the notecards/outline due date.... that NOW she was faced with a task that would be daunting for many college freshmen. ("Produce a 10 page rough draft of your research paper this Friday.")
Does that make sense?
So what we DID do was have that heart to heart, express sympathy for her emotional state, but firmly tell her that SHE got herself into the situation, and she could certainly work her way OUT of the hole, too...
and then we got her cooperation in PLANNING just how to do that.
Without her cooperation, btw, this never-- ever-- works with her. It has to be HER plan. But emotionally, her asynchrony and anxiety also means that she needed mom or dad to GUIDE her, and reassure her that she's capable of doing it.
Good luck. I'd sit down for some project planning with him, but start with that heart-to-heart conversation. Let him know that QUITTING isn't an option-- so he can forget about that-- but that he is free to work within the allowed solution space, and that you're there to HELP him.
