Horrendous Day Yesterday

This back to school transition sure has been tough.

Monday, the start of the second week and the first day with homework, Sunny did fairly well. He earned stars for both Doing Homework Nicely and Reading Nicely.

Yesterday, at 4pm, I got a panicked call from Guy. Sunny was screaming in the background. He'd been asked to write just one sentence, and was having a total meltdown. I tried talking to him on the phone but he just kept repeating that his feelings were hurt because dad called him a three-year-old, cry, scream, cry, cry, cry. I tried to talk Guy down, then I called my mother, who was able to come over.

Guy managed to calm both of them down a little bit. Then, once my mom was there, they tried the homework again. More crying and screaming. He eventually did it after about an hour and a half of emotional storming. At least there wasn't any hitting, although he did call Guy a bad name.

He was allowed to go out and play for a bit afterwords. Then his friend came and told us that Sunny had just called him a bad name. His friend is a LOT more honest than Sunny, so Guy believed him. Sunny was grounded from playing outside for the rest of the day, and more screaming of course resulted.

When I got home, things were better for a while. I had some quiet time with Sunny, just lying together with him in the bedroom with the lights low, and that calmed him down a lot. I cooked us dinner, and then Sunny watched a video. I carefully outlined what we would be reading tonight, and reminded him that he had lost almost all his stars for today, but he still had a chance to earn his Reading Nicely star.

It was not to be. We ended up with more crying, screaming and holding down in the hallway. I was prepared to draw the line with reading. Last week he had five out of six stars for Reading Nicely, so I know he can do it. At one point he said he was done... if I let him hold the book, he would read it. I gave it to him. He bashed me in the face with it (I'm OK). I had to hold him down for a while longer. Finally, once he was all raged out, he read the book. It took just a few minutes. Then I put him to bed.

Guy was doing well for a while with the fits, but he seems to have reverted, and did not keep control of his temper when it came to yelling. He's very depressed and demoralized.

Homework was a big issue last school year, especially anything having to do with writing. If he actually sits down and does his weekly homework packet, he would do the whole thing in fifteen minutes, but there's always some kind of emotional problem. A bad homework session goes like this: half an hour of we're not helping him enough, it's too hard, cry, we're helping him too much, he knows how to do it already, scream, cry, crawl around banging his head on the carpet, throw the pencil, scream, cry, attempt to bargain, cry some more, then three minutes of actually doing the homework, finished.

I totally gave up doing homework with Sunny because he reacted very badly to my help. Guy was able to help him through it with much less storming. But if that's changed, "holding the line" on homework will not be tenable anymore. It would make all of us too miserable and hurt our relationships.

I'm planning on holding the line on reading before bedtime. But I came up with a better solution for homework.

One potential solution would be just not doing it and letting him take the consequence. Another would be to try having "no homework" written into his 504 plan. I decided to just throw money at the problem instead. Thank goodness for our generous adoption subsidy! So I've added extra time to his weekly tutoring session, and starting next week, he's going to do all his homework during that time. His tutor charges $35 an hour, but she's an ADHD specialist and boy is she worth every penny. She can get him to do anything learning related using a magical combination of positive feedback, distraction, small food bribes and firmness. She asked me yesterday if I had any special requests about anything that she shouldn't give him during a session, and I told her, "at this point, I don't care if you give him a pink pony!"

There will definitely be a lot to talk about at therapy tomorrow.