We have an ongoing problem with our son's behaviour at school (he is 7), which includes physical volience to peers, angry outbursts and rude behaviour. He seems to find mainting friendships very difficult. He also loses focus very easily, is difficult to engage in tasks that take patience / practice. He likes routine and we find that period when the structure to the school day is upset (i.e. ends of terms) particulaly bad. I have a gut feeling - which has been reflected by various teachers - that he has some kind of social communication disorder. When I read about aspergers some things really seem to fit but others not so much (I wouldnt say that he is totally absorbed in one thing but he does tend to revert to the default 'lego' and spend most of his day doing this if given the option; and he's not very senstive to stimulus - but before he started school he really didnt like the loud noise of handdryers). Last year we had a really bad year; and had not much support from the school including comments (in his ear-shot) such as "he's a danger to other children" "this behaviour won't be tolerated at school" and directly to him "if you carry on behaving like this you wont have any friends". We saw our GP who referred us to CAMHS but they wrote back saying they didn't assess children under 7 (he was 6 1/2 at the time) and nor did they deal with behavioural problems and suggested we do Triple P course. I contacted the school nurse but apart from listening to me she didnt do anything to help. We pushed for a referral to the educational psychologist, which happened and they came in to assess him at the start of this year. He had however made a great start to the year, got on much better with his teacher and the behaviour had seemed to settle and so was fine when they assessed him (other than saying he needed more structure in tasks to help focus); we has hoped a teacher he didnt have a clash with and a bit of maturity was the end of the issues.
Sadly however almost exactly a year after the first really bad period we're back to almost the same situation; he's being told off at school and threatened with exclusion from x or y on a daily basis. He's also emotionally up and down, overracting to situations at home (i.e i told him we need to leave to go to Beavers and he was in floods of tears because he wasnt dressed yet) and is playing up to adults who do give him kindness by attention seeking. He's also told me that he tries really hard to be good at school but he just gets told off all the time. He's started lying to cover stuff up. We have asked the school for help managing and helping him but they tend to be defensive and repsond by defending a punishment by giving us a list of things he's done wrong, or saying its not fair on the other children (We are never dening the behaviour is not OK but we dont know how to make it better either).
Strict rules and punishment seem to make it worse; the softly more positive approach doesnt seem to help either and i'm so fed up of guessing what's the best thing to do and want some real help by people who dont just think its down to bad parenting or him simply being a naughty child. I also dont want adults to keep telling him off if there is an underlying issues (which may well be borderline and difficult to identify - he can be great, kind and gentle and is VERY clever) but at the same time I dont want the bad behaviour to continue, particularly if it is *just* bad beaviour. I want to stop guessing and finally know if a)he needs specilist support because he has autism spectrum disorder or b)we need to be more firm with him; but we cant seem to get the help we need to work this out or what to do to help him.
what do we do??
