First thing I thought of was “He’s being bullied.”
It took us a long time to recognize that our daughter was being bullied at school, and we were the kind of parents who asked specific questions about school at dinner time every night. The tip-off was finding out 6 weeks before the end of her 6th grade that she had not turned in her assignments for about 3-4 weeks because she was getting bullied. She had done the work, but wasn’t turning it in, because the bully at her table kept threatening her.
At that age, I basically figured that my parents and teachers knew that I was being bullied at school and just didn’t care enough to do anything about it. It wasn’t until years later that it occurred to me that they probably knew very little about what was going on.
I personally learned very quickly that not only would nothing be done about it, but I would be blamed for it. My parents’ favorite thing was accusing me of doing this to embarrass them. :mad: :smack:
As for the OP, I’m guessing that something happened at that camp that he doesn’t have the words to describe, and it might not necessarily be sexual abuse.
Something is happening at school…possibly bullying. You say he is supervised most of the time so there’s no opportunity. But that can’t be true. There is the bus ride, there is lunch, recess, and there is the kid sitting at the next desk. All of these are opportunities to be bullied, or made fun of. Maybe a quick punch to the shoulder, maybe just whispered insults and teasing.
I just had a weird idea, but maybe it’s feasible:
It is possible to wire a kid with a recording device? Like an undercover cop or something.
Maybe you could create a cover story and tell your son that it’s a medical device. (like a pacemaker, because a ‘doctor’ said maybe he’s feeling bad because of <make up some silly excuse> ,and this electronic device checks for that.
Maybe get him to wear the device around the house for a day first, so it seems like a real medical test.
Then maybe you’ll hear something in the recording that he doesn’t want to tell you about.
Disclaimer:
I have no idea if this is do-able (or even if it’s legal).
I’m just a monkey on the internet.
I am not your monkey, I am not licensed as a monkey in your state. This message should not be construed as offical monkey advice.
This sounds like a panic attack. Panic attacks often include physical symptoms such as a racing heart and adrenaline rushes - both of which would be scary for a 9 yo.
Panic attacks can sometimes be brought on by real circumstances, such as a traumatic event. Sometimes, however, panic attacks start with general anxiety and the body flips out because the mind is upset. If that’s the case here, there may not be any specific event that sets it off. Once it’s set off, it might feed on itself, and the triggering become more subtle and nebulous.
It sounds like he’s a good kid, worrying about how this affects his parents. It doesn’t sound like he’s doing this deliberately. I think getting the professionals involved - pediatric and psych - in a low key fashion is the best choice, now.
Does he walk to and from school, or ride the bus? It’s very possible that he’s getting harassed or bullied while he’s going to and from school. Most of the bullying I experienced in grade school happened when I was walking to and from school.
The morning was the same. He woke at 5:30 am and got upset, then I spent the next 45 minutes lying with him and trying to console him. It was mostly the same talk as before. I gently asked if there was anything he was afraid to tell me about someone bothering him or anything like that, and he was convincing in saying it was nothing like that. I know this kid well and I’m a pretty good judge of when he’s holding back. I also spent some time explaining to him about how Dad has felt super bad sometimes and it’s always worst when I wake up early in the morning. He seemed to get some comfort from hearing that and how I got over it, but it didn’t calm him.
He went to the bus very upset. By the time he left, I was getting skeptical because he seemed to be doing a lot of the fake crying that we’ve seen in the past, which every kid does sometimes. I was starting to lean the toward the idea that he was just faking or exaggerating for attention and because he has the idea that if he stays home it’s going to be all rainbows and video games. (It wouldn’t.) As a parent, you do have to be skeptical sometimes and not forget that kids can be manipulative, but it’s a very difficult balance sometimes.
Yesterday one of his best friends invited him to ride the bus home with him and stay for dinner. This is a long time friend and they’ve each done this arrangement several times before. He was enthusiastic about going. We thought it would be great for him to get away from the house for some fun.
When he got to school today, he went to the office and called home, saying he wanted to just ride his regular bus home. We had to say okay, because it’s hard to force him to go home with someone if he doesn’t want to.
As for the bullying possibility, it’s difficult to explain why we’re pretty confident (of course we can’t say definitely) that’s not the problem. Without going into a whole lot of detail about our personal lives and routines and what we’ve done already, you’ll have to take my word for it that we’ve explored that possibility and we’re comfortable that that’s probably not the problem. Please don’t jump on me about being naive or whatever, and I know that plenty of people have had terrible experiences with bullying that their parents didn’t know about. I accept that it’s a possibility, but we don’t think that’s the explanation.
Some kind of social anxiety diagnosis is starting to look like the best explanation, but we’ll see what the doctor thinks.
Sometimes specific questions are too specific. If anybody asked me whether my parents beat me up (actually, a teacher did, once), I would have truthfully answered they did not.
But Mom pinched me hard enough to produce bruises, she would (still does) walk down the hallway “like a cutter in full sail” and push me out of the way (often against furniture or these goddamned doorknobs with a point designed by the Devil’s own mother) and then yell at me so I learned to jump out of the way, so I’d hit myself against furniture or the doorknobs getting out of the way (but hey, at least I didn’t get yelled at on top of bruised)…
But beat me up? No, no, nobody beat me up.
Back to the OP, I see you’re taking him to the doctor: good luck.
The fact that he’d rather just ride his regular bus home tells me that he most likely isn’t being bullied on the bus because he had the perfect excuse to avoid the bus but chose to ride it instead.
Wanting to just go home rather than go to his friends house for a fun evening says Social Anxiety Disorder to me, again.
As someone who used to suffer from crippling SA I have to say that drugs literally saved my life. I needed them for a while and was able to get off them when I no longer needed them.
Were you 9 at the time?
I’m not saying psych meds never help anybody, obviously they do help many people.
But take a kid to a doctor for a behavioral issue, and what’s the likely outcome?
I think this might be worth following up on - something horrible, that your son recognizes as silly (or just low risk) so he won’t admit to - and yet has him scared that if he leaves you, he won’t see you again. Did he see a zombie movie? Did someone you know recently die? It might have been ghost stories at camp. At about that age my son (who is now fourteen) was obsessed with Chuckie - I have no idea where he was even exposed to Chuckie since it wouldn’t have been here. But all of a sudden there was incredible anxiety about going into our basement - since that really didn’t impact our lives we just waited for him to outgrow it.
Emotions are not rational.
Frankly, I think that’s more likely that molestation.
Please let us all know how this goes. My heart goes out to y’all and your son.
While bullying and molestation seem like the simplest (if horrifying) causes, it is entirely possible that your son is, in fact, suffering from social anxiety. Was he ‘normal’ this last weekend? Did you go out as a family?
Good luck.
(Gosh that sounds lame, but I am but an humble computer scientist and humans are well beyond my ability to comprehend in toto. )
I’m reasonably convinced now that it’s not bullying or molestation or anything but it did trigger a little memory in my head.
Is one of his friends moving away? I remember when my best friend moved away in 1st grade, and then another in 4th grade, that very deeply affected me. I spent an entire day crying about it publicly at school, and several weeks upset at home. I drew some weird correlations between people dying and people moving away re: both leaving my life, forever. So I was grieving like my friend was going to die. I was even more upset when a teacher sent me to a counselor. Doctor/psych figures make me uneasy because they represent the possibility of the highest loss of freedom; if you’re weird or emotional enough, they can lock you up in an institution for being crazy and/or force you to take medication against your will. That scared the bajeezus out of me.
So it could be something like he found out his best friend is moving and he’s starting to extrapolate and add lots of other worries about that.
I can sympathize as I had school anxiety at about that age. A teacher yelled at me for breaking a rule that I didn’t even know was a rule. Sensitive as I was, I thought that meant he hated me. The funny thing was that I liked him and feared him at the same time. I certainly never told my parents why I didn’t want to go to school. If your son’s issue is with an adult at school, I wouldn’t assume his classroom teacher is the problem. I would consider other teachers, especially gym teachers who in my experience are not the most empathetic of educators.
I wonder how much sleep your son is getting. Sleep deprivation can cause or worsen anxiety. Kids that age should probably get about of 10 hours a night. The amount of sleep kids actually get has been dropping in recent decades. Also I’d suggest cutting out any stimulants (caffeinated soft drinks, energy drinks, and chocolate) especially in the evening.
What’s the alternative – a kid stays miserable? Meds aren’t always prescribed, and in the case of kids, they’re rarely actual psychiatric medicine. :rolleyes:
As a personal anecdote, I remember developing a significant anxiety about school in 5th grade. There was no bullying or abuse, it was just that this was the point where school stopped being mostly fun with learning added in and started being more about work and judgment about the results.
The stress got to me and I began pretending to be sick so I wouldn’t have to face the stress and judgement, which of course put me behind and made matters worse. It got so bad that I remember one recess curling up into a ball and crying by myself for reasons I couldn’t explain.
Taking your kid to counselors like your doing sounds like the best idea. I would trust them much more than a bunch of anonymous posters on a message board who haven’t even met the kid. No offense to the Doper community intended.
