oh. just for what it's worth, the 9 months doesn't sound that implausible to me. My son's been seeing this woman once every week or two for a few months, and while things are improved, I don't think they're so much what you'd call a firm part of his way of thinking now. For both schedule and $$ I'm looking forward to getting out of this stage, but I really REALLY want his negative, rigid thinking to be broken up. I think it'll make a serious difference to his lifelong happiness.
We have thirteen million activities, too, all undertaken, honestly, with the social thing in mind. We were so desperate to find our son a place in the school community where he felt happy and belonged. There's another friendship book - I think it's called Good Friends are Hard to Find - that calls for active parental involvement in the friendship finding, and says lots of parents do the activities but don't follow up into one on one playdates that firm up friendships, and that if you don't have good solid playdates/friendships coming from an activity, you need to drop the activity (assuming you don't have time for the playdates, only). I'm hoping/thinking that as ds7 gets happier and more settled, we'll all scale back and do fewer things. B/c I'm tired, tired, of this running around to baseball, soccer, scouts, and gymnastics. It's beyond nuts. Oh. And then add in shrink. So I feel your pain! It's ridiculous. And not sustainable.
Oh. Here's the book. I think Unwritten Rules was perhaps more intellectually interesting, and this one more a reassuring 'this is the road-map to making things better', and more explicitly what the parent can do to help, which helps, when you've got a kid who is NOT clamoring to be taught the Unwritten Rules.
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Friends-...mp;s=books&qid=1243252480&sr=8-1
