Is my son too inflexible to homeschool?
My son is constantly overstimulated, and school was just making it worse, so now we’re homeschooling. But honestly? It’s not any better. I wanted to have flexibility to adapt to what he needs.
He doesn’t listen to me, he argues about everything, and nothing gets done unless it’s something he picked and it’s easy for him. I keep telling him, he’s not going to learn anything that way but he doesn’t care. He just shrugs or walks off like I’m the crazy one.
Everyone keeps saying, age eight is so sweet because they’re still listening to adults. Really? That is not my experience. I feel like I’m constantly chasing him, and dealing with his energy, and maybe this is just who he is. We had him evaluated and the report said he’s smart and there’s nothing wrong. Great. So it’s just me, then?
I’m a very flexible person but I don’t know what to do. Do I just let him do whatever he wants? I don’t know anyone else dealing with this. I’m overwhelmed and I know I’m failing at this. What do other parents do? What did you do?
The flexibility you offer him is exhausting both of you. The great thing about homeschooling is you can have flexible curriculum. The days still need structure. We all need structure but especially kids.
1. You are the same your son. You listen to what people tell you and you pick and choose based on how hard it would be and how much you care. It’s all people with autism because we have less ability to do hard things than other people. (Hard = not interesting to us)
2. Your son does not need to evaluate everything to see if he wants to do it. He is a child. If he has a routine at home that you keep the same every single day then he will do the routine. If you are always doing something different then you model for him that we change things every day so he is doing that too — deciding what he wants to do on a daily basis.
3. Routine is the only way to parent. Neurotypical people do it easily. Autistic parents think parenting is boring and definitely a parenting routine is boring, so routine comes harder to an autistic parent. A routine for your son is that every hour of every day he knows what he’s doing. Then you can clearly see that when you change that, you make your day (and his) harder So you think twice about changing the schedule Right now there is not a schedule so you don’t even think about “am I changing the schedule”.
4. Start doing this do it with dinner to bed. Dinner the same every night. Same time. After dinner routine to bed the same every night. That means no going out. No staying up late. No “this will be fun and different”. If you get that set then you can think about doing other parts of the day.