Teen that won't get up and go to school
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Anonymous
| I turn off the Internet early, take away devices, beg teen to go to sleep in plenty of time and even turn off the lights and try to make sure they are asleep. Teen with ADHD is depressed, angry, and combative and each morning is a nightmare. What more can I do? Melatonin is not working either. |
Anonymous
| What are you doing to treat the depression? |
Anonymous
| How old and what grade? Is this a 7th grader or a junior in HS? Big difference. We have been there with school refusal and had a year of hell in high school before things got better after therapy and compromises all around. |
Anonymous
| Junior in high school. Meds and therapist for depression |
Anonymous
What do the psychiatrist and therapist advise? Does your child need a higher level of services (ie, PHP)? Do meds need to be adjusted? Are there intermediate steps that would work temporarily (maybe going to school late)? |
Anonymous
| Do you have an IEP? Schools will provide services for school refusal. |
Anonymous
What kind of services? Everything I've read leads me to believe they can't do anything. |
Anonymous
You should do a search on this forum. There was so much in terms of services and ultimately got a non mainstreamed placement and private transportation. |
Anonymous
Depends on the district. Some will do home/hospital tutoring for depression, some won't. |
Anonymous
| Go to your doctor and rule out things like iron deficiency, low vitamin D, mono, etc. Then consider a sleep study. My DD was just like yours and we thought she must be depressed. Turns out she has Narcolepsy. |
Anonymous
| There are IoP programs that might help. Also, hopefully the school can provide services so he could finish the year out virtually. Next year maybe he could just do a half day to finish off his credits to graduate. |
Anonymous
Try and focus on finding out why the kid hates school so much. That is usually the root cause of school refusal and can direct you to how to help. |
Anonymous
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Is the issue that your kid doesn't want to go to school or doesn't want to get up? Or is your kid just extremely slow in getting ready? I ask b/c I'm in the same boat. My kid likes school, but can't manage to get to school on time. He has many of the issues that you list, but we really truly cannot figure out why he can't get himself out of bed, dressed, and ready to go. He is now failing a class because of it.
If the issue is waking up, there is medication that you can take the night before to get your kid up. If the issue is school inertia, that's a different ball game. |
Anonymous
How many days has he missed? How extreme is the school refusal? In our case, the school offered a reduced schedule for the following year with a combination of virtual classes. Homebound or other schools weren’t an option, even with an IEP and mental health issues. We decided not to fight the school on any of that and our junior is currently in virtual school will finish out senior year that way, taking a couple of classes at NVCC too. What does your kid want to do? Can he verbalize? As others said, we had to deal with the depression first and that meant stopping the battle of daily school fights. This took a long time for us to get to that point and lots of therapy (for us). |
Anonymous
| From my personal adult experience, some meds for depression cause me to have a VERY difficult time waking in the morning. One actually caused me to have trouble settling down and sleeping at night and waking up; one allowed better falling to sleep, but still hard to wake. My adhd 13 year old sleeps a ton if left alone, easily 13 hours. |