How to deal with DS while waiting for a diagnosis
DS is 7.5 and we are in the process of getting him various evalutions - psychoeducational, neurological, social, anxiety, etc... He's had a really rough time in school this year. The evaluations will take time, though. Somehow, miraculously the psycho-ed one through the school had no wait, so that will start this week but will still take about a month to complete. Appointment with psychiatrist is in June. Still waiting for neurologist appointment.
I've been in touch with his teachers and the principal who have all been super amazing, understanding and helpful and have been trying to help DS as much as possible while we try to figure out exactly what is going on. Basically, they are not giving him consequences for every poor behaviour or inattentiveness. They send home a note in his agenda just to let me know what's going on when he has a rough day.
On nights when he has trouble sitting down to do homework, I sometimes tell him he doesn't have to finish everything and just write a note to the teacher. They are ok with that.
My bigger issue is with his behaviour at home. It's really hard to distinguish between inappropriate behaviour that he should be able to control vs. something that he really is not doing on purpose. I don't want to come down hard on him for things that are part of whatever issue(s) he is dealing with because I'm probably handling it all wrong right now. Not knowing what the actual issues are, I don't even know what techniques to attempt. However, I don't want to give him a free pass to misbehave for the next few months.
As an example - Tonight I told him to go take a shower. He recently claims to have developed a fear of being alone upstairs and didn't want to shower if nobody else was upstairs. Fine, told him he could wait until I took DD1 upstairs to get changed. All was fine, he walked into the shower in my bedroom and confirmed with me that I would stay upstairs in DD1's room until he was done and that I would come back when I hear him turn off the shower. Two seconds later, he came out of the shower and went to sit on the landing at the top of the stairs so he could see what the twins were watching on TV. I saw all this and warned him numerous times that when I was done with DD1, I was going downstairs and not coming back up so he should get in the shower if he didn't want to be upstairs alone. He never got back in the shower and threw an absolute fit when I went downstairs, begging me to come back up with him. Warned him there would be consequences. He ended up in full tantrum mode. I came very close to losing it with him and had to give myself a time-out in the kitchen to keep my cool. When all was said and done, he lost all screen time for 1 week plus his allowance. He never ended up showering. He was very apologetic at bedtime and promised to never do this again. Now here's the thing - we have had this exact same scenario happen 2 other times in the past 1.5 weeks. The other two times the consequences weren't as severe but now that he has done it 3 times I have had enough.
I dunno. I'm still wondering if I did the right thing or if I came down too hard on him. To me it seems like he needs to be able to follow his simple evening routine and if he doesn't, there will be consequences. But on the other hand, his extreme reaction gives me pause to think that maybe this is because of some issue that he has and I need to go easy I him.
Sorry, this got a bit long. Thanks for reading this far. I'm really just at a loss as to how to proceed to parent DS while we wait for answers. I'd appreciate any words of wisdom from those that have BTDT. Thanks.