This is very long because I'm giving you actual, practical advice from my own experience helping my daughter--who is your kid's age and has a major mental illness. She's probably more seriously ill than your child, but maybe not. Also, from helping a teenager with cutting, borderline personality disorder, and bipolar disorder. Also, from helping myself--I have bipolar disorder and am functional enough that I'm a successful novelist. You can check that--it's not a bipolar delusion--my name is Julie Cochrane and you can find me on Amazon.
Anyway, it's long, but I've done this kind of parenting before, myself, still do, and I hope you'll find some of these things useful for you.
Most people with financial problems don't know what's available from their county services. Call the health department of your county and ask. In our experience, county therapists and pdocs are usually okay, school counselors are worse than useless.
Usually, county services are based on ability to pay, and what they expect from you is usually quite reasonable in the context of your situation.
Get your kid in a support group if nothing else. Yahoo has good support groups. If there isn't a support group that fits your kid, make one and advertise it, gently, on appropriate chat boards.
Join CABF. Even though your child is probably not bipolar, the parent forums can probably help you a lot, if only to be a listening ear.
I know all this because I have bipolar disorder and our eleven year old daughter has bipolar disorder.
Ask the school to have your child tested for eligibility for services under federal disabilities law. They have to do it. If your child has a learning disability, he qualifies for an IEP. If he has a mental health problem--which he obviously does--then he qualifies as EBD (emotionally or behaviorally disabled) which means he qualifies under federal disabilities law, section 504 of something or other, for what's called a 504 plan.
Learn everything you can off the web about federal disability education law. You'll need it. The schools will not help you unless you know your rights and know how to be a squeaky wheel.
Your child is entitled by federal law to a Free, Appropriate, Public Education (FAPE).
What this all means in practice is that if your child is too mentally ill to manage homework right now, they have to modify the homework to an amount he can do, or not count off, or not count off as much, for him not having it.
My child used to lie a whole lot and still occasionally has relapses. I found great advice on the web from other parents:
You never ask the child a question that would tempt him to lie. Instead of, "Did you do your homework" you say, "Show me your homework."
Instead of, "Did you do the dishes?" you say, "Show me how well you did the dishes."
Never ask about anything, check everything. Every time you check, you have the child show you so he has an opportunity to get caught doing something right. Praise him for doing whatever it is well. If you can't get him to do big things, start with little things he will do and work up. "Can you get the towels so I can wash them?" "Hey, show me where you put the towels." "Thanks. I really appreciate you helping me with that."
Start with things as little as you can be sure he'll do. The important thing is to set him up to succeed, and build on those successes.
You can't go head to head with an oppositional child. Well, you can, but your results will suck. You have to find things the child wants to do better, talk with him sympathetically about what he wants to do, then help him find multiple options that he could try that might work for him. You have to start very small and work up. What you have to do is make yourself the child's ally in solving the problems that are most important to him one by one.
Blow off the homework and the grades for now. Work on the lying and whatever of his problems are highest on his list of priorities.
Guess how I know? :-)
Avoid punishing an oppositional child if at all possible while you're building this alliance. Give him every opportunity to get caught doing something good, and make sure you openly appreciate it when he does--even the smallest things. Read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." It could serve as a manual for working with an oppositional child.
After you have a good, solid rapport and have been checking everything and never, ever asking him anything he might be tempted to lie about for about a month, then you can start occasionally scolding him for bad behavior. You absolutely must pick your battles. Focus on the bad behaviors that do the most damage, that you haven't been able to find a way to handle with positive reinforcement.
How do you handle a bad behavior with positive reinforcement? If there's not an obvious good behavior you can reward, then you think up something neither good nor bad that he can't possibly do at the same time as the bad behavior, and you make a virtue out of that neutral thing. Ask him to do it, appreciate it--visibly and vocally--when he does. Make it another opportunity for him to get caught doing something right. Try to make the neutral, incompatible thing to be something as easy and pleasant as possible.
Usually, parental praise and open appreciation work much, much better than tangible bribes. Bribes have their place, like taking him out for a spontaneous special treat when he does something great. Mostly, in Carnegie's terms, you want to be, "Hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise."
You have to use a strategy with an oppositional child that you got used to using with him as a two year old--anticipate and outmaneuver.
Another thing--you don't have control over what he does, but you do have control over what you do. Read everything you can find in the library or on the net about having healthy boundaries and model them for him by giving him no outright control over what you do, but all control over what's within his healthy boundaries. Frequently, brattiness in kids involves trampling all over other people's boundaries. Frequently, the parents aren't all that clear on healthy boundaries and where the lines are. Learn. Make ferdamnsure you are not trampling his boundaries, and don't allow him to trample yours by letting him pull your strings. You having to do the work of healthy parenting does not constitute him pulling your strings.
John Bradshaw's books have a good load of touchy-feely crap in them, depending on your point of view, but they do a fantastic job of teaching healthy boundaries. Your library should either have them, or be able to get them for you on inter-library loan. Read them. Read each of them through and then go back and read them again. Take notes.
We've worked with our own eleven year old and we get told all the time, out of the blue, what a great kid she is.
What we did about homework was in our child's IEP (you can do it with a 504) we insisted that the school send home a notebook with all her assignments written in it, and make sure all her homework assignments and her notebook were in her backpack when she left school each day.
Then for a whole year (coincidentally, fourth grade) I sat down with her right when she got home and walked her through every bit of her homework. Then I made sure it was all in her backpack for the morning when she went back to school.
It helps to have two complese sets of books, one for home and one for school. You can specify this in his 504 or IEP, too.
By fifth grade, she wanted to do it herself instead of having mom looking over her shoulder and I had only limited, sporadic trouble getting her to do her homework. She only called me in when she was stuck.
We worked with a 17 year old foster daughter (living with us informally, not through the state) who was an unmedicated, freshly diagnosed bipolar, survivor of horrific child abuse, borderline personality disorder, cutter, psychologically unable to attend school.
In short, she was the kind of kid Program Parents throw up their hands over, ship off to a Program, and then tell us we just don't understand and nobody else would ever take their child in and help the poor kid. Her parents were also dirt poor and we had to rely on county mental health services based on their abiliity to pay.
That's why we had her, by the way. Her mother was leaving a rotten bum stepfather and had to get her financial and mental health act together to the bare minimum liveable level.
Don't even ask about her bio father, whom she had nothing but contempt for and called, "the sperm donor." He was the one didn't protect her from the horrific abuse by the wicked stepmother. She had good reason for that contempt.
So anyway, same methods. In the six months we had her, we got her properly diagnosed, started on the process of finding the right med combination to stabilize her bipolar disorder, continued her therapy and supporting her through it, stopped the cutting, got her solidly started on experiencing healthy boundaries, and got her past several of her significant phobias and blocks to taking care of her own basic needs around the house.
She went back to her mother a much healthier child, much easier to live with, and well on the way to stability and functionality than she came to us. She wasn't back in school, but she had a solid plan to work homeschool with a licensed teacher, prepare for taking her GED, and prepare for continuing her education at a junior college, preparatory to going to art school. She is a fabulously talented young artist.
So I do know what I'm talking about. The strategies I described above are gentle, compassionate, and they do work.
Other parents you can meet on CABF will be gentle, compassionate, and welcoming to you and will have a lot of their own tricks and tips for kind, loving ways of helping your child that work like all get out.
You will never get a child who functions as well as a child with no problems. There is no magic cure to go from big problems to no problems. There is no pill that reduces problems to just swallowing a pill in the morning, although depending on your kid's problems medication can be a flat out necessity.
However, you will get a child whose functionality is like night and day better for him.
Julie
