I didn’t see this when it was originally posted.
My son is 12 and acts very much like the OP’s son, except that my son doesn’t have that many friends and has trouble socializing with kids that aren’t already his friends.
We took him to get evaluated about a year and a half ago and found that he has depression and ADHD-PI. Even with his meds and visiting the therapist, he has problems in school. Very similar problems to the OP’s son where he will do the homework and not turn it in. Like a lot of responses here, he feels that he can skip a lot of the homework and ace the tests. He scores very high on the standardized testing but we struggle to keep his grades above a B.
We’ve tried reward based approaches in the past. Everything from money rewards for good grades, to the “you must do A before you get to do B”. When faced with such choices, he ALWAYS decides not to even try for the rewards. He’d much rather sit around and do nothing than do something that he doesn’t want to do to get the reward.
His favorite thing to do is watch youtube videos of people playing video games. He would rather watch people play the video games than play the video games himself. It blows my mind. Though he does play video games a bit, 90% of his free time is watching other people play.
With the help of his therapist and psychologist, we came up with a program where he is grounded from all electronics if any of his grades drop below a B. We also got the school to agree to an IEP. He was doing much better for a while, but his grades dropped from A’s and B’s to D’s and F’s by the end of the quarter. (The school has the teachers do all of their grade books online, so we get an email each morning with his progress. And he knows we get these emails.)
He loves to find loopholes that allow him to do as little as possible, so I think he let his grades drop at the end of the 3rd quarter thinking that it would all reset at the beginning of the 4th quarter. We didn’t think about this issue until we realized what was going on, so he is only grounded from electronics through Spring Break next week. But we were very clear that if it happened again, the consequences would be more severe for summer vacation.
I guess the whole point of this is let you know that you are not alone, and to hopefully give you an idea of the road you might be in for even if your son is diagnosed with ADHD and/or depression.
Also, I would suggest getting him evaluated. Getting a firm diagnosis helps to know which issues need to be addressed. The diagnosis will also give you access to tools (meds, IEP, coping mechanisms, therapy etc…) that would otherwise be unavailable to you.
I don’t like the thought of having my son on meds, but since we started the meds and therapy, he is doing so much better - both in school and socially - than he was last year. We hope the trend continues to the point where he becomes an active participant in his own life.
