Ok, I thought I had explained in an earlier post but maybe it was a different thread.
My son, we'll call him John, has been acting out in several ways, and for some time now. First, he hates school. Well, who doesn't? Except his way of hating school is refusing to go (he started school refusal in sixth grade and the school filed a truancy complaint against him which put us with a probation officer for two years), or walking out. When anyone tries to tell him that he needs to do his work or go to school or behave or stop talking or whatever he will sometimes "go off" on them. Going off includes outrageous profanity, I mean the worst of the worst along with very direct insults, and sometimes threats. He has failed every core course in school every year that he has been in middle school.
By the end of sixth grade he was such a mess that I pulled him and homeschooled him. I had talked with his teachers, his guidance counselor, the principal and vice-principal on numerous occasions. I asked the teachers to help, they declined saying that didn't have extra time. The guidance counselor suggested therapy...we did that and still are.
During sixth grade he would also break curfew by several hours and was already experimenting with pot. He was 12.
I homeschooled him and everything calmed right down. He stopped giving me a hard time. He was respectful, and not because I demanded it, because he just was. We rarely had arguments. He enjoyed several of the things he was doing and picked up boxing and bass guitar. I was so happy to have him "back". He wasn't perfect and I don't expect him to be. But he smiled and laughed and seemed to be enjoying his life again.
But he did miss his school friends so I agreed that he could go back to "regular" school. As soon as school started he was suspended three times in a row. Once for coming to school under the influence of speed (that is the only instance I know of of him doing speed), another for "threatening" a teacher, and another for throwing milk in the cafeteria. None of these by themselves are earth shattering. Even the threat which was said to a smug teacher who enjoying Zach being in trouble so he said, "wipe that smile off your face before I smack it off." I spoke to the vice principal who was the disciplinarian and was also someone who seemed to understand him and she worked out a deal with him that if he was feeling angry he could come sit outside her office and he didn't have to ask anyone to do it. She wouldn't talk to him unless he wanted to talk. This worked well and his behavioral problems decreased, but no one dared "make" him do his work at school and he was constantly lying about his homework to me.
At that point I started asking for an IEP eval and it wasn't until this year that they complied and came back with a diagnosis of "depressed and angry". This year, in the beginning of the year he started getting suspended right away again and in the first quarter was suspended FOUR times. He walked out of school twice and was in the office more often than in the classroom. He is not allowed to go to his science class anymore for being so disruptive and disrespectful.
As the pressures at school mount he gets increasingly irritable at home and avoids home as much as possible because he doesn't want to deal with homework. He breaks curfew almost every day. If I ground him, he waits until I have to leave to be at work or class and then leaves. I've tried adjusting his curfew. I've tried coming to an agreement with him about what is reasonable. I have taken away TV, computer, etc. All that does is give him more incentive to be elsewhere.
When he's angry at me, and usually what he's angry about is that I've asked him to do his homework, or go to school, he flies into rages where he, again, uses the worst profanity and sometimes breaks things or walks up to me in a threatening manner. He has said he wishes I would die, go get raped, or other equally hurtful awful things.
He is in therapy regularly. I am on a long wait list for a Neuropsych evaluation, we tried one anti-depressant that made him more aggressive so now he's scared to try anymore and I finallly have an IEP in hand for him but I'm not sure the school can handle him even with the IEP. He lies and manipulates on a minute by minute basis. I also sat him down and gave him other choices for school, including homeschooling again. Instead he is just skipping school and refusing to go.
And he only gets more defiant if you tell him that going to school or doing his homework is non-negotiable. I've also tried a reward system and that didn't work either.
Today, I had to report him as a missing person. He walked out of the house and refused to discuss where he was going. I told him it wasn't ok for him to leave right then because he hadn't been to school and it was still during school hours and he stated that he didn't care. He wanted to live his life "his" way. He didn't care about school or anything else for that matter. And I knew that he had been helping a kid who had run away.
And here's an example of his temper. This happened a couple of weeks ago. We were on the interstate and stopped at a rest stop for a bathroom break. We had our cat with us because we had been away and she couldn't be left alone in the car. So I went in with my daughter first and then John went in. He was in there for two minutes when I saw him running out. Right behind him was the guy who runs the small rest stop and he was yelling. I jumped out of the car and stopped them and asked what was going on. The guy said that he was upset because my son had used a bathroom that had an "out of order" sign. When he reprimanded my son, John got angry and swore at him and then on his way out threw a large cigarette ash container over.
Now I think the guy was being a prick about the initial situation, and sometimes adults are jerks. They could say the same thing without all the attitude and power struggle. But the fact is, it's not ok for my son to react so violently every time someone is a little bit of a jerk to him. His therapist says he misperceives the level of infraction and then stores it and adds to it the next time someone "bugs" him.
He justifies his behavior by saying that "so and so" pissed him off. When he calls me names, he justifies it by saying that I made him angry.
So there's just a sampling.
