11yo school refusal when with mom, aggression

[Pastrysam76]

My son is 11, and newly in middle school. He has ADHD, ODD, and is mildly dyslexic. He’s on Qelbree and clonidine. He sees a psychiatrist and a just started with a new child psychologist.

The first month of school was ok, then something changed and he did not want to go to school. Said everyone is mean to him. He stopped doing his work, and got failing grades in 2 classes. I’ve been in contact with his school this whole time trying to work with them. My son has an IEP.

His father and I are not together.

When my son is with me, he refuses to go to school. He just refuses for hours, then will sometimes break down about the kids bullying him. He will get physically aggressive with me, break things, say mean things, it’s exhausting.

When he is with his father, he goes. His father’s parenting style is the coercive “do as I say”, aggressive type. So my son has been at his dad’s more then usual bc he gets him to school.

His father and I have been doing parent training weekly with a therapist, and I just read The Explosive Child, and it opened my eyes. So I’ve been working on finding the underlying issues to his behaviors.

His father blames me and my parenting for my son refusing to go to school, and says stuff about me in front of our son constantly to belittle me. His father is a bully, and I see that in my son too. I feel like a lot of the aggression towards me is my son taking out his frustrations he has with his father on me. I try to have as little contact with his father as possible, especially around my son.

There’s also an issue with Fortnite. His dad got him a PlayStation, and it’s been an issue coming back and forth between the houses. I hate it, my son is a different kid when he plays, he’s hyper fixated. So we’ve tried removing the PlayStation, limiting it, rewarding him with the play time, etc. Nothing seems to work. When he’s at my house with it, more often then not I cannot get him to stop. Sometimes he’s fine, and will stop, other times he’s in this frenzied state and cannot stop. At his father’s, it’s still an issue, but he overpowers him, so he gets him off.

My son has few friends in school, and really enjoys the social interaction he has with friends on Fortnite, so I’d hate to take that social interaction away completely.

I’m just at a loss, I feel like I have little support. Not only am I exhausted from my son, I’m exhausted dealing with his father. He will never just co-parent with me, support me, be on the same page- he’s just against me, and blames me for it all.

Any advice?

[Treadingwater13]

I don’t have any advice but I just wanted to say I’m in a similar situation. My ex won’t coparent or communicate at all with me and it’s impactful for the children. My son saves his agressive meltdowns for me as well. I sometimes feel like I’ve escaped an abusive marriage but now I’m being abused by my son. I hate Fortnite with a passion as it’s so bad for my child and actually he’s falling out with his friends on it but I don’t know what to do about it as he swears it’s the only thing that makes him forget about his troubles. I feel like he’s obsessed and it exacerbates his adhd massively.

My biggest problem at the moment is how rude and unkind he is to everyone yet hypersensitive to the slightest change in tone. It’s like walking on eggshells to avoid an explosion. His little sisters live in fear of him.

It’s awful.

[Pastrysam76 in reply to Treadingwater13]

I feel all that you mentioned. It’s a really hard spot to be in. Have you read The Explosive Child? It helped me see that my son reacts like he does bc that’s all he knows to do. I’ve been doing a lot of work on myself, surrounding my emotions and keeping more calm, but it’s hard.

I hate Fortnite too. My son was more agreeable when getting off of devices when he was just into Minecraft and YouTube videos.

[Treadingwater13 in reply to Pastrysam76]

yes I have read it and totally understand the premise and have really adjusted my parenting style because of it. I realised that my son was feeling unloved and disconnected so we have been spending some quality time one on one together and I’ve been showering him with love whenever I can which is helping somewhat. I understand he can’t help himself and it’s coming from a place of pain but my goodness it’s hard to do alone isn’t it? I often feel like my ex sabotages all the good I try and do which makes it even harder. Feel fre to message me any time it’s hard doing this solo. Sending love and strength xx

[Aloysia]

First, your son feels safe with you. That is why he feels he can let out his true emotions. Believe him about school. Get as much detail as you can out of him. What parts of school make him not feel safe and why? What parts of school make him feel safe and why (if any)? Are there particular kids or does it just feel like everyone? Etc.

Set up meetings with his school counselor and the vice principal to discuss it all and come up with a plan to support him.

Help him make some friends at school (school clubs, etc.) or to deepen those friendships. Help support any friendships outside of school by setting up play dates.

Second, either get a router with parental controls (so you can set when the wifi will work and when it won't). Or use another way to control the wifi - even if it means unplugging it.

If you're able to use an app, you can usually set up a schedule of when it would normally be on. But you can usually grant extra time or shut the wifi off when needed. Many apps allow you to control by device or by person so that the rules just affect a small portion of your household. Implementing this will help a great deal.

He will not have the self-control to stop himself from playing for a long time. Explain how the new app works and what the time parameters are. Set some alarms to go off 5 and 15 min before his time will stop so he has some warning. Also set up the time rules with him as well as why it would be taken away or how he could earn extra time. Allow him input so that he buys in to it. Write it up as a contract, both of you sign it. Then post it on the wall, as well as keep a scanned copy for yourself.

[Hidden in reply to Aloysia]

This sounds like exactly what we are doing from ABA therapy and it works with our son. He was the same, very aggressive and obsessed with the device and even more aggressive when it was time to get off. We drew up a contract and we have a chart of all the positive behaviors he needs to do and I check them off during the day. Each behavior is worth a certain amount of time on the device. I also have Family Link from Google, which is free if you have a Google account, that locks the device when his time is up and I can grant bonus time if needed. He is eager to earn time, which means to behave.My son also had issues at school. Everyone was mean to him according to him. It culminated into an unfortunate episode after which the district sent him to a special school. He is doing much better there. I guess the kids are more accepting.

[Pastrysam76 in reply to Aloysia]

I’ve been saying for years- about feeling safe- I just wish all involved could understand that too.

Great idea about the router. I may ask his therapist to help with this, bc my son is always agreeable beforehand. We’ve talked about limits, when to stop, I’ve tried the setting a timer thing, but when he’s in it , he’s completely in it, and everything goes out the window. One of the issues is how physically aggressive he gets with me when I go about the steps to end his play time. I’ve taken it away, and he will physically fight me for the PlayStation. It’s exhausting.

I’ve tried to not allow the PlayStation at my house, but that turns into him calling his dad and asking to go with him so he can play.

[WYMom]

My son is 12 and adores electronics. They are the highlight of his life. I am anti-electronics and I have strictly forbidden fortnite, which has been proven to be highly addictive in the way the game is designed. We have an xbox. He gets to play. He has to do his chore first, or many chores if he’s angling for more time. He can also not be goofing off in school. We have a time timer right next to the TV and we put it on an hour. The hour is over and they GET OFF OR ELSE. The or else is no video games the next day.

The thing with kids, and people in general, is that they do what they can get away with. My kids know that I mean what I say. I may regret the stupid thing I’ve said, but I’ll stick to that stupid thing for the sake of meaning what I say.

All you can do is set clear boundaries. Clear boundaries with both of them. Your son cannot speak to you that way. There is a difference between love and compassion and being a doormat. Do my kids get upset? Yes. Are they allowed to be upset? Yes. Are they allowed to assault me with those emotions? NO! They can go feel them all they want in their room but they will not speak to me disrespectfully. Doing so has consequences. For my son, it’s electronics. Sounds like your son would also benefit from some electronic punishment.

You know how you get him to stop when you say to? You turn off the internet. Or the power. Take the chord. You have all of the power in these situations. Will these things be pleasant? No. They’ll likely be huge disasters for awhile. He will explode and attempt to blow through your boundaries. That doesn’t mean you don’t keep them. You do. You have boundaries and he will respect them if you force him to.

I have compassion for his school situation, to a point. If he’s truly being bullied then I would look into that and see what could be done. I’ve worked hard on communication and social strategies with my kids. I’ve written about it before. I got a lot of the ideas from ADHDDude. Going to school is the law though. It’s not optional. It’s not optional for you to keep him home or for him to make that decision. The end. He will go. The more unpleasant he is to you while getting ready and out the door, the less electronics he gets. Mean it. DO IT! I’ve also told my kids they had to get dressed and if they didn’t I’d send them in their PJS or butt naked. Can’t out stubborn me, I’m the queen.

Be prepared though, if his Dad lets him have unlimited fortnite he’s likely to just decide to stay there forever.

[Aloysia in reply to WYMom]

I understand where you’re coming from, but personally, I think this will just alienate the kid - given the dynamics with his dad. If the parents were co-parenting in a friendly/supportive way, things would be very different.

If she wants to have a relationship with her son, then she needs to not be the bad guy ALL the time. This means having the app turn off the wifi instead of wrestling the controls out of his hands. And it means tackling the problems at school so that he understands that the mom is on his side and will help/support him even when his dad does not.

[WYMom in reply to Aloysia]

I don't disagree with you but I've spent 14 years in criminal justice watching parents care more about easy parenting than their kids going to prison. I am a huge fan of a book called Boundaries. A lot of problems can be solved simply by having healthy, consistent boundaries.

[ADHDinmylife]

Have you considered seeking an evaluation of Autism? It's not diagnosable in the US yet but the PDA profile of autism explains so much about my son. And these kids often aren't diagnosed Autistic because they don't check the stereotype boxes. My son got the "he barely meets the autism diagnosis criteria" so we did get the autism diagnosis but I didn't know about the PDA profile before the evaluation to ask about it. Not many providers in the US are even familiar with it.

[Pastrysam76 in reply to ADHDinmylife]

I’m curious are there things I’ve described that would indicate autism? I’ve always had the thought in the back of my head, but every dr, psychiatrist, etc says no he isn’t.

[ADHDinmylife in reply to Pastrysam76]

I have read so much that PDA often gets diagnosed as ODD. So seeing the ADHD and ODD together reminded me of that. While there are more differences between the two, the big one for me is ODD is that the kid willfully won't do things where PDA shows that it's that they CAN'T do the things.

So many things you've described sound like my son. The school refusal (ours hasn't gotten so bad yet that he won't go but he asks not to go A LOT). And while we don't official have a PDA diagnosis and who knows if we ever will be able to, the school psychologist read the information I provided from the PDA society website and she 100% agrees that it fits our son. And it's helped the school know that the typical methods of helping autistic kids won't work for my son.

I would recommend reading about PDA and seeing what you think. I think the PDA north America website has a list of PDA knowledgeable providers around the country.

Here's a helpful first stop on the UK version of the website.

pdasociety.org.uk/what-is-p...

Learning about PDA and a low demand lifestyle is starting to help us. It's not great but it's better than it was a year ago.

I hope you can find things that help.

[HoldingonLou]

Wow I don't have any advice but I feel for you. I know how it goes with their games and I kept trying to use it as a reward for good behavior. The psychologist at the time me to not to that and just let him play when he needed too. She explained it's an outlet for his emotion and therefore productive play. I struggled with her advice but I followed it and it did seem to improve behavior. Hang in there.

[Pastrysam76 in reply to HoldingonLou]

Well this is what I struggle with- using it as a reward only seems to go so far, and little changes. It’s like all or nothing. Occasionally he can self regulate, but more often then not, he’s hyper focused. And it’s a social outlet for him too.

[HoldingonLou in reply to Pastrysam76]

Is there something else you can use as a positive reward?

I just read my typing. I'm sure you understood what I was saying.

Psy told me not to use it.