Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello everyone,
My 16 year old son has HFA and is studying for his A Levels in a mainstream sixth form college. He has always found it hard to be in school socially and is exhausted when he gets home, needing to sleep for hours and finding it hard to do the work that he needs to do in the evening.
He has recently really started to fall behind with his work and has lost all motivation and interest in his subjects, the teachers want to see me because they’re concerned that he’s falling behind but the thought is making him so anxious and he feels like a failure. Does anyone know if there’s a way to slow your A Levels down? What happens with full burn out? I’m trying desperately to find other options than him continuing to try to push himself as hard as the other students without the mental resources/strength to do so.
Any help would be hugely appreciated!
I don't know if he could slow it down, you could ask the teachers when you see them. It might be possible for him to go part time, or reduce the number of subjects, or possibly even study at home and just take the exams there, depending on the subject, would work better for say history than for science!
Have you talked to him about what he really wants out of life? It's far to young to really know of course, for the whole of life, but he might like to discuss it or be encouraged to consider it. Or have you asked him what he really wants to do next? Did he want to do A levels? Does he want to go to uni? Or might he be happier getting some different kind of training? If he has lost interest in his subjects that might be due to burnout or it might be that he has discovered they no longer interest him as much as something else, so he might be better changing subject. He needs to know that now is a good time to change subjects and there is nothing wrong with dropping the ones he is doing now and starting completely new ones next year. Better to take a bit of time now to switch than get stuck in the wrong subject and have a worse burnout down the line.
I did science A levels and they were OK and interesting but when it came to uni I didn't actually want to continue any of those subjects further. I changed it up a bit and went for geology, but I'd have been way better to be brave and try archaeology. And sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I'd done art instead!
Full burnout is bad! Especially if it caused his body to break down too, and trigger some lifelong medical condition. I got arthritis at uni trying to do the wrong subject, though I don't know for sure if stress was a factor in that, it might have been, and I don't know if it was autistic burnout, but it might have contributed. Better avoided anyway!