what would you have done / do ?

[thriftychic]

had an issue with ds2 (13) this morning , have had similar lots , anyway,

normally walks to school but recently he has been riding to school on his bike , locks it up when he gets there , fine.

today we cant find the key anywhere for the bike lock. so after turning the place upside down and time running out i told him he would have to set off walking and i would sort lock for monday.
he just refused point blank , would not go to school unless he could go on the bike as planned.

I called school told them what was happening , they said that as there are building works going on at school at the moment the site manager would prob lock it up for him

so , i tell ds2 this and no, he wont have it. he says he wont go anyway now because i have told them whats going on .
i tell him that if he doesnt go to school he wont be playing his xbox as normal (goes on after school EVERYDAY) , then that he wont be allowed his bike next week.
no , wouldnt budge.
he is currently listening to music in his room.
i have had similar before and got stressed with him , this resulted in a meltdown where my house got trashed (as usual)
so , i have remained calm . but not sure how best to handle it really.

was diagnosed on wednesday with AS.

Polter's right. He won't see any logic in this at all, and there will be no compromise. He's not being a pain, his world will end if things don't go the usual way. I wouldn't remove his x box privileges, he can't control this.

thankyou, he has come downstairs now a lot calmer , he said he might walk to school at lunchtime . i think because he thinks now that he wont get to go on the xbox otherwise
The xbox is his world so im not surprised really

seems that he takes a while and sometimes then starts to think rationally if left alone , usually its all gone to meltdown by now and theres no thinking rationally but since the diagnosis on wednesday i am beginning to do things differently and understand more...i think.

We have similar incidents with DS1. He's only 8 but reacts very badly to routines being disturbed and things being "wrong"

Like you, if he can't be persuaded (and we have the advantage that if he won't leave the house, it means he's stuck with DS2 all day, so it's thankfully rare that I can't get him through the school door at all) then he doesn't get to do normal home things in school time. No TV or computer until his brother's home. And I give him work to do at home, even if it means printing off worksheets from the Internet. He does it very willingly, surprisingly enough.

We also use the time to get to the bottom of why he didn't get to school that day and make a plan with him of how we can prevent it from persisting as an issue because the law says he should be at school every day (and yes, i do emphasise this).

yes, he always really over reacts when things dont go his way.
he did it over his karate suit , i couldnt believe how he ended up not going to the class at all , knowing he was letting his sensei and others down as he was cadet leader all because he couldnt wear his new suit . we had discovered it was faulty and needed to be returned so instead of just putting his old one back on for one class he sat on his bed in turmoil.
at the time i thought he was just being difficult and babyish so ended up shouting at him
being 13 its hard to tell whats purely bad behaviour and whats AS.