I have this kid...

In My Humble Opinion
1

…my son… he’s 13. He’s bright. Socially well adjusted. Great sense of humour. Kind hearted. Makes friends easily. Never any behaviour issues in school. Teachers always say he is a pleasure to have in class…

In fact, that’s how most conversations with his teachers begin when I’m called to meet with them… “Your son is a great kid. He’s a pleasure to have in class… but he can do better.” And so I sit, face to face with one, two, sometimes all of his teachers, and we discuss why he isn’t doing as well as he should. They ask me question about his study habits. They ask me questions about his home environment. They ask me if I can enlighten them in any way about his consistant under-performance. And you know what?.. I can’t. And they can’t enlighten me either.

The list would be too long in what I’ve tried over the years to remedy this situation. You’ll have to accept that short of seeking a professional therapist’s help, I’ve tried everything.

Forget assignments not started or not finished. In a nutshell, the problem seems to be an inertia so deep that it even prevents him from handing in an assignment that he’s actually completed. At times, I see the inertia in his face while doing math homework. The pain in his eyes in having to do simple multiplication like 8x7 seems almost physical. It’s not that he isn’t capable… he simply cannot will himself to do it at times. But fine, I say. Math has never been his strongest subject. I am learning to accept that.

But in the past year or so, the inertia has become much more pervasive. I will ask him to get up on the weekend and tidy his room and come down to breakfast (at the ungodly hour of 10am!) and he will be up but he will not come down for an hour. He just gets stuck in his room. When I go up to check on him… he’s still in the same position I left him, as if I’d just left the room a second ago and walked back in. What’s more, he acts as if I had done just that. He’s puzzled why I’m irritated with him. He cannot explain the passage of an hour or what he’s been doing in that time. And this happens more and more. Last night, he went to do his homework and when I checked in on him 45 minutes later, nothing had been done and he could not account for what he’d done in that time. He sat there, music quietly playing in the background, staring into space.

And when I ask him to explain and account for what he did or thought about… he can’t. He’s an articulate kid. He is engaged and fun over dinner and generally in all situations. But not when he needs to focus on school work or simple every day tasks like getting up and brushing his teeth and making his bed or clearing the dishes off the table after dinner. Left to his own devices and without intervention, he’ll just go into mental pause mode.

I don’t get it. What’s more, I fear he won’t get through highschool with these habits. Certainly he won’t have the marks for college. And how will he be able to hold a job without constant supervision?

This actually keeps me awake at night with worry.

Any of you experience this with your kids? What advice can you impart? Am I dealing with an issue that needs to be escalated to a professional of some kind?

2

I think an evaluation from a nurologist would be in order.

Your son may also be clinically depressed, so you ought to investigate that, too.

I feel for you. Something’s not right with your son, and it’s a mystery.

That must suck, and so I hope you get answers soon. And find an effective treatment for what’s going on with him.

Best of luck.

3

Is it possible that he’s using drugs?

4

I was a bright student who could have done better. Looking back at it, the simplest explanation is that I was lazy, with little sense of self discipline. Also, teenagers are notorious for sleeping late. It’s in their biology.

However, what you describe seems to go beyond a simple lack of discipline, especially that it seems to be getting worse. Until someone comes along with something better (possible drug use is always something to consider), I’d take him off to the doctor just to rule out anything physical and go from there.

5

You said he hasn’t been to a therapist, but has he been evaluated for ADD or similar attention-related issues?

6

I used to think that I knew what “lazy” meant, but now I’m not sure.

Sometimes what can look like lazy can actually be a symptom of mild executive dysfunction.

HOWEVER, I would not race him to the doctor right away. I would first talk to him and find out his level of self-awareness. How does he feel about his sub-par performance? Does he ever feel frustrated and guilty? Does he ever complain about being overwhelmed? Does he have a low opinion about his abilities?

7

Drug use… hmmm… unlikely, but I’ll certainly consider the possibility.

Depression? Despite the fact that he seems otherwise engaged and sociable and outgoing? Maybe… I suppose that’s one more thing to consider.

I’ve gone with “just lazy” for a while. Also “it’s a phase”. But I worry it’s something more.

8

I second the neuro consult. The first things that popped to my mind were petit mal seizures - to me that would account for the spacing out. Also sounds like a form of ADD possibly - more the ‘feminine description,’ lost in space variety.

In any case, it can’t hurt to get workups done for those things. Best of luck as you both figure it out. :frowning:

9

No evaluations for learning disabilities of any kind.

Given the attention his teachers have paid him over the years and taken the time to talk to me about his academic performance, not one has suggested ADD. I imagine they deal with cases of ADD quite regularly so they might have mentioned that if they believed it.

10

I don’t know what it is and can’t offer you any advice, but I know of two other cases where this happened to kids at about the same age. So it might be a thing with a name and a course of action to take.

11

I dunno, I was a terrible student in junior high. My grades were good when I wanted them to be, but then I got lazier and lazier, and at some point stopped doing my homework altogether. My parents were called, everyone was frustrated because I was a good kid and a smart kid who was lazy and unmotivated. I never cleaned my room (hell, I still never clean my room), and would get irritated when my mom would want me to come out of there. No, leave me alone. I had friends, but if I wasn’t at the mall or movies with them (the only places to go when you’re 13), I was in my room either gabbing on the phone for hours or just hanging in there doing nothing, because what else was there to do? Talk to my parents? Pshyeah, right.

I got better grades in high school because I knew I had to in order to get into a decent college. Went to college, am all grown up, mainly well adjusted, ta da. Of course, I can’t diagnose a kid I don’t know over the internet, and there might be a problem. Just giving you one data point of someone who sounded a lot like your kid when I was his age, but the only problem was me being an apathetic, lazy, teenager.

Good luck.

12

Your OP describes me as a teen, almost eerily so!

Part of the issue was that I wasn’t challenged by the work and thus didn’t really care about anyone else’s opinion of my homework, including the teacher. I knew that I knew the material.

It did drive me crazy that I couldn’t seem to make myself do the homework. I’ll bet I swore to myself at the beginning of every semester that this would be the semester that I turned it all around and started turning in my homework, but somehow that never happened.

Fast forward to me at 34 years old when a kind friend suggests I talk to someone about ADD. Yeah, turns out I have all of the major and most of the minor associated behaviors.

I’d have the boy checked out for ADD, here are the inattentive symptoms:
[ul]
[li]Fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork[/li]
[li] Has difficulty keeping attention during tasks or play[/li]
[li] Does not seem to listen when spoken to directly[/li]
[li] Does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish schoolwork, chores, or duties in the workplace[/li]
[li] Has difficulty organizing tasks and activities[/li]
[li] Avoids or dislikes tasks that require sustained mental effort (such as schoolwork)[/li]
[li] Often loses toys, assignments, pencils, books, or tools needed for tasks or activities[/li]
[li] Is easily distracted[/li]
[li] Is often forgetful in daily activities[/li][/ul]

13

He’s aware that he tends to space out.
He feels both guilt and frustration.
He did complain of being overwhelmed when starting middle school but not recently or for a while now.
He has a low opinion about his abilities. Lacks self confidence in some ways but can and certainly does stand up for himself when situations call for it. Isn’t intimidate by injust authority. (Tough little bugger in that respect, actually.)

14

Trust me, my parents could give the “joy to have in class, but…” speech. My mom still talks about how much my teachers were both delighted and frustrated by me. I don’t think many teachers consider ADD when the hyperactivity element is missing. You can be ADD without being ADHD.

15

My son was diagnosed at 13 with ADD. No real indicators before because he was bright and compensated well. Don’t rule it out.

16

I’m not ruling anything out and certainly not ADD.

Thank you all for your thoughts so far. I’ve got to head out but I’ll check back in later this evening or tomorrow.

Enjoy your weekend, all.

17

I’ve played both parts in the OP. I was a bright kid who consistently underperformed academically. Now my fifteen year old son is described the same way. He is more social than I was.

I’m not saying it’s automatic, but for me a switch flipped between junior and senior years of high school and I started working in my classes. Ended up graduating tenth in the class (of 160), which doesn’t count for anything in the real world, but in 11th grade I was ranked around 70th.

Still to this day I cannot explain why I started to work, or why I had stopped in the first place (in second grade, much earlier than my son did).

I cannot offer any successful strategies - yet. He had to retake biology in night school to stay on track for graduation. We had to go half a county away for that and he didn’t enjoy it so I thought that would be some incentive for him to work on his grades. It was, but just for a week or so.

If I happen on anything that works I will certainly share it…

18

For housework, you should do something that my mother used to do with me and my sister. I am a disorganized ditz, but my mother was clueless about how bad I was as a kid because her method worked so well.

What did she do? She made lists.

We’d wake up on a Saturday morning and find the List. It would be something like this:

  1. Clean up the bathroom

    -Clean the toilet good
    -Clean the bathtub good
    -Clean the sink good
    -Clean the mirror good
    -Wipe the counters good
    -Sweep and mop the floor (you get the idea)

  2. Clean the living room
    -Put everything in its place
    -Dust the tables
    -Vacuum the rug

  3. Clean the kitchen
    -Empty the dishwasher
    -Scrub the stove and replace the foil on the elements
    -Wipe the counters and the table
    -Sweep and mop the floor

She could have just said “Clean the house”, but she was wise enough to know that you have to break things down.

She’d also give a deadline. The List had to be completed before she came back from work. And if she came home early, she better catch us in mid-activity, not watching TV.

In retrospect, it was condescending treatment that devalued our individual childhood liberties. But it was treatment that worked.

While trying to find out if your son has a medical explanation, I would be more explicit in your instructions. Instead of saying “Clean up your room”, try “When I come back here in fifteen minutes, I’d like to see a tidier place. Put your toys and clothes away and make your bed. Understand?” Apologies if you already do this.

19

Sounds like me. When I finally went to the neuropsychiatrist at age 24 (was headed back to school), he said something that cracked me up. “So, Lab. You’re a nice guy, plenty smart, tons of friends, no trouble with the law, and you do well with the jobs you’ve had. Why are you such a fuck-up in school?”

I was pissed at first, but I got his point pretty quickly. It was just his way of saying that he didn’t think I was a fuck-up, and that he wanted to help me get to the bottom of this issue. My GPA went from 2.0 to 4.0 after meeting with him.

Oh, it was ADD, by the way. Really bad case of it. I’m not qualified to diagnose your son in person, much less online, but I’d definitely take him to someone who is.

20

He could be a normal teenaged boy. He might also have some minor issues that make schoolwork a little difficult for him. Or he may be perfectly fine and school is just not his strong point.

In some ways it sounds like ADD or possibly anxiety. He just can’t focus on things at any old time. Even normal motivations may not be sufficient for him to concentrate on a particular task at a particular time. But this can also be seen in young teenagers who are in the midst of maturing. Not everyone’s brain switched into adult mode at the same time. Lots of teenagers wake up one day and start acting responsibly. Sometimes things just need to click.

At least as far as school goes, you may want to de-emphasize the problem right now. At 13 he’s got plenty of time to get his act together, so he doesn’t need any extra pressure right now.