I have not been on this forum in ages. We have been stumbling through the ups and downs of life with our two lovely but intense twice exceptional children. Today marked the first outright school refusal of my DS9. We have had many resistant mornings requiring encouraging, coaxing, and firm assertions that he has to go to school. He is having a really tough year. As I have mentioned on here before awhile ago, he is grade accelerated, so he is quiet young for his year, and he is diagnoses with HFA and ADHD. He is currently unmedicated due to cons outweighing pros.
He is being teased, and he does not have any real friends. As far as I know, he does play with kids at lunch and recess most of the time, but when it comes time for him to have a birthday party, he has to think of who to invite, and he does not get any invites. The pain of this is compounded by his younger sister seeming to have a stream of incoming birthday party invites.
So current status from his perspective is that kids at the school do not like him, they tease him, he has a reputation, and no one will ever like him at that school. He has very articulately informed us that he would like to go to a different school next year. He says that school itself is very good, and with different kids it would be a good experience. I am not convinced that a change of school would solve his problems. Ideas that have been going through our mind are, undo the grade acceleration, as he does seem to get on a bit better with the kids in the year below. Send him to the local public school for year 6 next year, and then come back to his current school in year 7 to start secondary when there is an influx of new kids and he might find a like-minded peer, or just work very closely with the school and hope that the mix of students in his year 6 class is better than what he has now. I think there are some kids in his same year who are with a different teacher this year who he might get on with.
In the mean time, for this year, I think we need to meet with his teacher again and see what can be done. We have met a few times this year, and I think the teacher was going to try to foster some positive social relationships for DS. DS sees a psychologist and he has been going to a social skills group, so we are trying stuff on our end. But he feels that nothing is being done on the school end to deal with being teased. It is hard because he tends toward vagueness, which he always has. So it is everyone teasing him all the time. That is hard to work with. He has identified one student in particular who he thinks incites it, but he says everyone follows along.
It breaks my heart, and I don't know what to do. He is still such a little boy, and there he is, in tears, saying he can't go, he can't take it anymore, he just wants people to like him and to have friends.
