To have lost it at DS aged 11

[FluthyFeaffers]

I have yelled at him this evening.
He is 11, soon to be 12.
Started Yr 7 in secondary school 3 weeks ago.
He is struggling so much with his (lack of) organisation in the mornings before school, I am at my wits end.
I spent the whole of year 5 and 6 battling, absolutely battling with him to get ready for school, but never succeeded. We were late every single day for 2 years.
"Eat your breakfast" gets distracted eating breakfast.
"Clean your teeth" goes upstairs to clean teeth but wanders around doing something else.
"Get dressed" goes in to bedroom to get dressed but ends up doing something else.
Etc. Etc. All through year 5 & 6.
It made us late because whilst this was going on I'm racing around trying to get myself ready for work and trying to get my other younger DC ready. Then I'd go and check on DS and he'd never ever have done what I'd sent him to do.
Nothing worked to motivate him. No reward system, no sticker chart, no amount of explaining about the repercussions of not doing as asked, no amount of explaining about the knock on effect of being late for school. I tried it all for 2 years. Nothing worked.
But because it was primary school, all that happened to him was we missed the school gate and had to go roundcto the front reception to be let in. He got a warm friendly greeting from teachers and I got a look of "Why can't you get your poor child in to school on time" and then I'd arrive late for work and get reprimanded for it.
So I spent the whole summer drilling it in to him that in Yr 7 he must must must get to school on time, because in secondary school if you're late you get a detention, because you're causing your sibling masses of stress by making them late for school every time you're late for school, because I am getting in to serious trouble at work because of arriving late every day because I drop you in late because you're not ready to leave on time, because it creates SO MUCH STRESS when you won't get ready in time to leave on time for school.
Yes yes yes yes yes mum, he said every time I brought it up over summer.
I promise, promise, promise I will change, he said.
4 weeks in to secondary school, and it is a nightmare every single morning.
He cannot, cannot get himself ready for school in time to leave.
I spell out for him every single morning what he needs to do. It's soooooo eeeeeasy. It's the same god damn things every single day! Nothing changes! Do x, y, z.
"Yes mum" wanders around.
"Have you done x, y and z?"
"No, sorry, I forgot. I'll do it now"
Wanders off.
"Why haven't you done x? Ive asked you twice now"
"Sorry"
"Do it now"
"Why haven't you done y? I've asked you 3 times"
"I'm sorry. I'll do it. I'm trying my best"
Last week he needed to take his PE bag on 1 of the says.
"Remember to take your PE bag today, it's hanging in the cupboard " I said.
"Oh yeah!!!!! PE!!!!! I forgot!!!!!! Thanks for reminding me!!!!!"
20 mins later:
"Have you got your PE bag?"
"Oh No! I forgot! I'll get it now...."
15 mins later, after non stop constant continuous marshalling to get ready, do this, do that, do this, do that:
"Right, come on, we're late again, pick up your rucksack and your PE bag we need to leave NOW"
DS hovers around putting on tie and blazer which I'd asked him to do the the past hour sling with all his other things he needs to do.
"NOW" I raise my voice, as he's making my other child late for school and me late for work.
He runs out the door, jumps in the car.
We get to school.
He turns pale and says "I've forgotten my PE bag"
"Tough" I say. " I have told you 3 times this morning to take your PE bag. I reminded you for the 3rd time right before we left home."
DS starts crying
"I will get a detention!!!!!!!!!"
His worst, absolute worst fear, is getting a detention. He's never had one, and is terrified of getting one.
"Maybe you'll learn if you get a detention " I say.
Then he starts begging and pleading with me to take him home to get his PE bag. He's crying sorry over and over again. He looks physically ill, sweating, clammy, pale.
So I drive him home to get PE bag.
My other child starts crying because now she is horribly late for school (different school) and is too young to go in by herself plus she has SEN and isn't mature enough to cope with going in by herself.
I drop him back to school. He's late. I drop DD toschool. She's late. I get 'the look' from her teachers. I drive to work. I'm late. I get disciplined by my boss.
That evening, I talk to DS for a very, very long time about the impact of his disorganisation in the mornings.
We work out that it would help him if I wrote down for him everything he needs to do in the mornings.
So I write it all out in very clear, bullet point steps. I show it to him, he thinks it's really helpful.
Great, I think.
Why didnt I think of this before.
1 week on, it's of no help at all.
This morning, he's wandering around telling me he's ready whilst simultaneously having forgotten 7 instructions in his morning list. I pointed each of the 7 things on the list out to him, staring each thing that was on the list that he hadn't done.
I told him to do them.
Went off to get other child ready to leave, I'm ready to leave, DS still not ready to leave. We were all late again.
Yesterday, he had something really important to take to school. His timetable. I askedchim SIX TIMES to put his timetable in to his rucksack (he'd got it out at home and I'd seen it in theclounge). I told him the night before, and again in the morning, 6 separate times in total "Put your timetable in to your rucksack now, otherwise you will forget" . 6 times. The 6th time was just before we left. I mean, I was getting more and more stern each time. "Put. Your. Timetable. In. To. Your. Rucksack. NOW. NOW!" We got to school. He turned pale. Panicked. "Mum I've forgotten my timetable!!!!!!!".
I point blank refused to go back and sent him in to school without it. He was really upset. Told me after school today that he'd gone to the wrong classroom at one point in the day as couldn't remember without his timetable. So I said "Go and put it in your rucksack now then, do it now".
"Ok" he says.
Dinnertime:
"Did you put your timetable in your rucksack?"
"Oh No! I got distracted! I'll do it now!"
Evening time
"Is your timetable in your rucksack?"
"No.......I forgot......."
"Go and do it immediately "
"OK...."
Bedtime, he's in bed, reading:
"Darling, is your timetable in your rucksack, did you do it?"
"No, sorry, I'm sorry mum, I forgot"
And that was that.
I lost it.
Yelled at him. For ages.
I have NEVER yelled at him before. Never.
He was devastated. So remorseful. Said sorry over and over again.
And finally, he broke my heart by sadly and quietly saying "I'm so sorry for being me. I really struggle with my short term memory mummy. I know it causes problems butvi cant help it".
He's soon to be 12.
He has not got SEN.
He's bright.
He's average at school except for maths where he's below average.
He's amazing in every other way.
He's such a good boy.
He tries so hard all of the time to do his best.
He's a clever boy.
He's a wonderful personality.
Fantastic sense of humour.
Loving.
Kind.
Affectionate.
Funny.
Friends love him.
Teachers complimentary about him.
What the hell is wrong with him in tbe mornings?????????
Am I being too hard?
Am I expecting too much????

My DS has SEN. I had to make him tick lists. He gets picked up by a school bus, and I tell him whatever state he's in, he'll be getting on the bus. If he wants to roll out of bed in his pants and get on the bus with his uniform in a carrier bag, then so be it. I remember him saying to me that I wouldn't actually do that. I put his uniform in a bag and left it by the front door. He rushed to get dressed with minutes to spare. That's up to him.

Even though he has SEN, he still needs to get himself ready and out the door in the morning. I also don't let him have his phone until he's ready for school which works pretty well. He can have it once he's ready.

This screams at me, my DS who is currently being assessed for ADHD we pack rucksack at night and I stand over him while he does it then check everything off. If he has PE pack that also then leave fully packed bags by the door. He brings his uniform downstairs so I can watch him dress while preparing breakfast, I get up 20 mins before him to shower and dress quickly then he gets up 15 mins before younger DS so I can supervise him showering on a 1-1 it is the only way. He comes downstairs with me to dress while younger son showers and dresses. They are now both at secondary Y9 and Y7. It is labour intensive but we have done it like this for two years now as it is the only wAy I don’t go bats**t. If we don’t do it like this he just wanders aimlessly fidgeting the whole time or picks up a book and starts reading without having done anything.

FFS, do yourself a favour and re add some of the thread. Better still, read the OPs posts alone and see the context of the situation. Your advice is not helpful but patronising and borderline rude.

*read

It baffles me that since the OPs last post, where she says she’s now researched inattentive ADHD and is going to put the wheels of assessment in motion, that there have been pages and pages of posts saying ‘ This is ADHD’ or giving the OP a hard time. It’s so rude not to at least read her posts!

nk2017 Different culture. But as an individual, no idea.

That aside, this is the nost heart warming thread. Your questioning and cry for help, has just helped a complete stranger too.

Your DS sounds awesome, and you too are doing so awesome. Well done, good luck ❤️

Blimey. Another remote diagnosis of adhd. Kids are like this at this age, they get distracted and can't be bothered, they are not all adhd. One of mine was the same, lots of his friends were too, if not worse , he gradually sorted himself out, it's called growing up, learning to be independent.
Why does everyone on MN have to be labelled. Every one of my menopausal friends would be classed as having adhd!

When he is about to get out of your car, and be responsible for himself until he sees you again, he does a mental checklist of what he needs. It is then he remembers the timetable and PE bag. You are still there then to go get it, so he doesn't feel he has to remember before that point. Whatever else might be suggested, I would think he can remember, just relies on you as you care so much and will remember for him/fix his errors no matter what the consequences for you. You are a very caring mother, who takes it personally that you can't convince him to remember. Perhaps you could discuss with the right person at the school what is best to do. A lot of schools have supportive staffing if one of them tells you to let him get some detentions you might feel more comfortable etting him have his own consequences. I hope none of this sounded rude or unfriendly. I am very similar as a mother but my kids are a bit younger. Incredibly frustrating!

Bloody hell! Give the kid a break! The amount of pressure you’re putting on him, to the point that he’s distressed and in tears is clearly too much. Maybe pick up the slack a little, take responsibility and help him, rather than barking orders at him day after day?

Your post about talking to your DS again after reading these messages and asking him what's going on made me cry, it was lovely. You'll both get through this just fine if you work together and keep that supportive attitude.

An alternative to the get up and get dressed straight away that works for us is DS always has breakfast in bed and 15 minutes on his phone while he eats it to wake up properly. Transitions are difficult if you have adhd, and waking up can be tough. Giving 15 minutes to wake up slowly before the routine starts has made all the difference for us. And a high protein breakfast is better for an adhd brain.

When DS was younger the only thing that worked in the mornings was having a race to get dressed. Competition is a great motivator for some adhd kids.

One thing I've also learnt is that you'll find something that works for a while and everything will be going ok, and then it will stop working. You have to be able to drop things and try something new. It's made me a great problem solver! And rewards are always more effective than consequences for the adhd brain. But they need to be pretty immediate. DS is nearly 15, and nothing further away than a week would work, it's too far in the distance to feel real for him.

I have huge self esteem issues from not being diagnosed until adulthood (after DS, advised to by his consultant) and being told that it was because I didn't care or wasn't trying hard enough. I constantly remind myself when he is late again or has lost yet another item that it's no different than if he couldn't hear, none of it's on purpose. But I do get how frustrating and hard work supporting someone with adhd can be sometimes. It's even more frustrating having it though.

For now I wouldn't worry at all about teaching him independence, even if that means you doing everything. He's been struggling for a while and just needs to feel understood and for things to not be so hard, to give him some breathing space and gain his confidence. You have plenty of time to work on him doing more for himself once he's had a few months of everything going a bit more smoothly and everyone feeling a bit better.

We approach new things to try a bit like a science experiment. Come up with a morning hack (he understands what hacks are so that language works for him) Try it. Discuss after a week. Did it work, could we tweak it to get better? If not, why not? Should we keep it? It takes all the blame away and keeps things calmer, and seems to get more buy in from DS

why aren't his bags packed and by the door before bed, that way clothes on pick up bags and out the door. Don't turn back for missed items again. He needs to get detention as a sharp shock for his not being prepared each day.
Better to sink a little now than when he's supposed to be at an exam or important class later in high school.

I am desperate to know why on Earth the op is running around like a headless chicken at 5.30!

I felt frustrated by those comments too. i have undiagnosed adhd and was the same at school. Always late, forgetting pe kits or equipment, forgetting to do homework. Getting detentions or the threat of detention didn’t make me magically able to remember things or be on time. I just ended up with constant anxiety going to school and at school so I hated going. As I got older I stopped caring about detentions or being told off and ended up a problem student. What’s the point trying to be good when you’re constantly punished for things you can’t help? Letting him get detention will not help in the slightest. Just like giving a detention to someone with tourettes will not stop them having tourettes. So many people still seem to think adhd is a behavioral problem that can be fixed with punishments.

This is such an ignorant response.

No one here is remotely diagnosing OP's son. What many of us are saying is that he's displaying signs of ADHD and it warrants assessment. If it's not ADHD then he won't get a diagnosis but there are flags here that suggest it needs to be checked out.

There is a very big difference between laziness and genuine ADHD difficulties. What OP is describing does not sound like a typical disorganised, disinterested teenager. This is causing him genuine distress, and there is already another child with SEN in the family which increases the likelihood that he has SEN too.

And your menopausal friends wouldn't get diagnosed as having ADHD as one of the criteria is that it has to have been present from childhood to a degree that disrupts function. Brain fog arising in menopause is nothing like ADHD.

I can tell you that categorically because I am both a diagnosed autistic, ADHD woman and also menopausal.

You sound as if you're one of these people that doesn't believe ADHD exists. It's so bloody frustrating having to see these kinds of comments.

@Anothenamechange - I think you might be talking to me as I was the only one banging on about balloons 😅

If so, yes please do use it! I came up with the analogy in desperation, trying to explain what it was like to my DP and it seemed to help him understand.

And yes, just SO many fucking balloons!!!

I have to add that ADHD is such an outdated term. When you think back to school you can pick out the child who had ADHD. We were always led to believe it meant you were bouncing off the walls. Couldn't sit down. Couldnt concentrate on anything.

This is so far from the truth.

I found someone who says they have DAVE - Dopamine Attention Variability Executive-dysfunction. This is a far better term in my eyes.

RTFT and try to be supportive, like almost all other posters on this thread. OP is doing a fantastic job, has taken on board lots of advice received on here and it’s already changing things with her son for the better.

"Kids are like this at this age" Not to the severity the OP is talking about.

"Every one of my menopausal friends would be classified as having ADHD"
Its highly likely several of your menopausal friends actually do have ADHD that has gone undetected.
ADHD is affected by hormone fluctuation and recent studies have found that Menopause is one of the main factors in exacerbating ADHD symptoms that women have previously been able to mask. Also, the age that were were kids/young women, they didnt understand how ADHD presented in the Female Brain and the vast majority of us went undiagnosed and have gone through life going 'it's normal' and feeling like we're failing at something being 'scatty' or being heavily misdiagnosed with Anxiety, Depression And/Or Bipolar disorder.

Those misdiagnosis lead to incorrect, ignorant, uneducated and frankly disablist opinions like yours and other peoples on this thread.

Totally agree. For a child with inattentive ADHD without the hyperactivity, certain detentions - especially internal exclusions, can be bliss. You are allowed to go off into your daydreamy world without anybody bothering you by asking you questions in class about something you haven't paid any attention to or demanding you go here, there and everywhere, or take the right equipment out of your bag or whatever else that might cause stress. Within a few weeks of both my ADHD kids starting secondary school, they were completely unfazed by detentions - treating them the way we British treat the weather - it rains sometimes, randomly, and you just have to put up with it and treat it as part of life. In some ways the fact that school was so, so free with detentions probably helped, they were by no means the only one and didn't feel out of place at all, so never developed the detention fear that I had as a child where a detention was a real sanction that made you different to the "good" kids I identified with. To them, school life included detentions, it just did. And with DD in particular, when they brought in internal exclusion for not having one's lanyard, I was terrified that once she worked out how easy it was to miss class and get an internal exclusion instead, it would actually get left behind deliberately. Hence for years the lanyard was physically put on the child before they walked out the door. We never got an internal exclusion for lack of lanyard (and after about four years they realised that it was counter productive to have kids in internal exclusion for not having a lanyard and getting further and further behind). My dressing skills got an A*. DD didn't notice.

Oh just a tip that might help somebody. My best purchase ever was a pencil case from WH Smith that had sequins on it that flipped from blue to silver and back again. The key thing is that flipping the sequins was completely silent, and DD worked out how to do it under the desk, so people didn't notice. For some reason (and it really feels bizarre to me, but goes with the diagnosis - and it is really true. Try and get DD to memorise something without fiddling, not a hope. Give her something to fiddle with, and suddenly she is able to memorise a poem or some equations or whatever it is that she has to memorise) fiddling really helps concentration for ADHD kids, but the issue is that the fiddling itself can disrupt others (having my DC fiddle drives me nuts, I just have to swallow it, but I could well see myself struggling to learn in class with a fiddler next to me). But this pencil case somehow DD was able to keep totally discrete, even the teachers who generally told her off for fiddling didn't seem to notice it, and I think it got us through GCSEs.

Such a good point on both counts! I fully respect that people with certain conditions or traits need to fiddle or fidget, but in order to learn anything (and stay sane!) I also need to not be around it! The pencil case sounds like a really good idea. Do they make keychains or similar like it, I wonder? Something a boy could wear on a belt clip without being teased?

A lot of these tips have been so great. Many thanks. I am looking around my living area and processing the 1000s of illustrations of "If you can't see it, it doesn't exist," with the drop of a great big brass penny today. It's beyond a mess, but all these things are somehow needing working on in channels rather than hiding.

Also, the more unusual ones are the ones that sound most like they have been devised and then refined by people with actual ND or exec. function challenges. Some others that are lauded in the project management/ personal organisation world and might have come from books of that kind - I've tried them, and I'm not so convinced.

Hi, I'm aware you've asked this a couple of times.
When I said I'm running around like a headless chicken from 5:30am, I was possibly using that expression because I felt highly stressed when I typed out my original post. But what I meant by saying that, is that I'm very, very busy from 5:30am.
I set my alarm to get up at 5:30am so that I am up for an hour before DC get up, so that I can get myself organised for my day ahead and see to all my own needs before DC get up, so that when they do get up I can focus more on them.
So from 5:30am - 6:30am I'm having a shower, getting dressed, having breakfast, making my lunch up ready to take to work, making DC packed lunches for school, putting laundry in to washing machine to wash, emptying dishwasher from night before, etc. I prep for dinner so that I have less peeling/chopping/cooking to do in the evening when I'm helping DC. I also use this time to reply to texts from friends, read my work emails for the day ahead so I'm prepared, read school emails (of which there are dozens a week), etc., and then I hang the washing out once it's done.
So that hour feels like a really busy hour as it's non-stop.
At 6:30am younger DD with SEN gets up and after a morning cuddle/hot drink with her, I start teaching her a reading programme that I'm following to try and help her learn to read. Her reading age is 4 school years behind where she should be and school are not supporting her/us with this, so I am teaching her to read with the use of a reading programme that I'm following. We do this for 20 mins every morning between 6:40 - 7am.
Then at 7am I wake DS up. This gives me 1 hour 15 mins to get them both ready for the school day. It is during this time, from 7am - 8:15am that I have been asking DS to complete certain tasks whilst I am making their breakfast, plaiting DD's hair, helping DD get ready for school, and of course I'm still doing lots of things for DS to help get him ready for his day but there were also things that I was asking him to do by himself, just like there are things I ask DD to do go and do by herself too.
But that's not working for DS which is the crux of this whole thread, so I'm currently working out how to do things differently and better now, based on all the brilliant advice I've received on this thread.
I regret using the term 'running around like a headless chicken', but what I meant was that I'm super busy every morning with no time to stop.

Blu tack is a great fidget for DS. Or those rubbers that are kind of a circular wheel. Both are silent and also things that they would also legitimately have as a school item, so they don't stand out to other kids. Half of our problems in using aids in school result from DS refusing anything that makes him different from the rest of the kids, so these have really helped.

Good heavens op… why on earth aren’t you doing some of those jobs post work or…. Better yet, the weekend?

and do they really need to be done every morning ie batch cook for a start!!