Published on 12, July, 2020
My son is almost 11 and has always "hated" school. He had ELSA sessions in year 2. Covid hit in year 4 and we now find ourselves in year 6 with every day being a mission to get to school.
He has had 10 sessions of support from the MH support team and is on the waiting list for CAMHS. 3 year wait left. He has also had an Ed psych assessment which agrees that he masks at school which then explodes at home. He is more than likely neurodiverse too.
I am mainly looking for support as I know there are no answers.
Tonight he sobbed for over two hours begging me never to send him to school again. Once calm he said he doesn't know why he hates school.
He has a stress ball. Emoji cards. Ear defenders and a quiet space at school (he doesn't use the quiet space as it's a chair in the corridor and he says he feels he can't get up and leave the classroom and feels everyone will look and judge him in the corridor). He also arrives 10 Mins late and comes home 10 mins early each day.
I have agreed that he can go in later tomorrow and I have spoken with his teaching assistant tonight.
Although he has said he doesn't know why, a lot has happened in this last week. His teacher has been off sick so he's had different teachers. His trumpet lesson was cancelled at school. He is in the leadership team and their meeting was cancelled. They also all moved seats. He has said all those things are ok but I feel it's because it was a change that has caused his meltdown tonight.
Generally though even when he has routine he hates school. When he had a period of being away from school he is confident and not as anxious.
Thank you for reading this.
Sharon
I can readily sympathise, as I am autistic and the father of an autistic child. The unpleasant fact is that many autistics, probably the vast majority, find school a very difficult environment. The shock of starting school - I had no pre-schooling - sent me into a 3-month long period of selective mutism. It is not usually learning and being taught that is the problem, it is the vast increase in social interaction demanded by school and sensory overload, that are inimical to autistics. I loathed, hated and feared school; I welcomed the usual childhood illnesses, as they meant a couple of weeks off school.
The major problem I had was the people, I didn't understand how to relate to teachers, they seemed to have an unaccountable power over me. Many of their instructions appeared to be arbitrary, but still had to be obeyed, even if they seemed entirely irrational to me. I hardly recognised teachers to be fellow human beings, they were always 'other'. Classmates and other children were even worse. They were unpleasantly unpredictable, more inscrutable even than the teachers, and their intentions towards me were not always kindly and sometimes hostile. The combination of the autistic need for predictability and routine combined with autistic limited ability to 'read' other people is quite toxic. The autistic child can be very highly stressed, trying to work out what this horde of people are likely to do, and in a state of constant vigilance. It is easy to imagine that school for an autistic child can be an exhausting, unpleasant and frightening environment.
I hope that this 'insider view' has been useful.
On the specifics of the 'quiet place' in your son's school, I think that a chair in a corridor is very unsuitable. Your child, understandably, does not want to stand out. Having a part of a school library is a much better idea, then anyone needing a quiet place can just tell their classmates that they have permission to go to the library in class time. Which is much less of a stigma.
I’m really sorry to hear how your son is struggling. I am autistic and also work in the SEN department of a mainstream secondary school, mostly with autistic students. I have a couple of students who struggle with coming into school, and one of the reasons for that is definitely the unpredictability of life outside of the home. My students then retreat to an ‘emotionally defensive zone’ and wish to not interact or engage.
For a number of my autistic students, what has helped is having a regular slot each day (for 15 minutes) to talk 1:1 with a listening adult. This gives a chance for them to raise anything that has worried them and also to do activities like resilience building in a calmer and nicer environment. We have a sofa area in the school library which we use for that. I don’t know if your son’s school has anything similar?
Secondly, is your son able to verbalise any of the ways he would like to be helped at school? I know you said he couldn’t say why he doesn’t like it, but one activity you could try with him is to draw a line down an A4 sheet longways then write ‘good day’ and maybe a icon like a sunshine or a smiley face on one side and ‘bad day’ with an opposite icon on the other and then ask him to write/draw things that make him feel like he’s having a good day and bad day respectively. This might help him to share the things he finds difficult more as it sounds like he really cares strongly about what other think of him and wants to please them (quite common on the autism spectrum).
Also, one last thing - I try to explain to my students the problem with going/staying at home and running away from things that are difficult by explaining how their brains are growing and changing all the way up to around age 25 (and still change in some ways after that). So every time they choose to run away or not engage in something, their brain learns that response and wants to do it again next time. Instead, if we can work together to practice using a response to difficult things that maybe goes and does a 5-10 minute activity that the student likes, or a sensory break, or some fresh air (etc.), with the aim of responding to the difficulty and then returning, our brains learn that too. So each time we succeed at that, we get better at it. This could be followed through with a reward chart, or a list with tick boxes he could tick off when he gets home, depending on what he managed to achieve that day at school. Thinking and talking more about the positive reasons to be in school may help him to conceptualise it a bit differently too!