Lying about completed school work and faking health problems

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Ds has been lying to teachers at school about handing in completed school work. He is 11. On Monday he was givien an assignment to write a few paragraphs about a hero, he was given the choice to pick anyone he wanted. I never knew the assignment was assigned until thrusday, and its due friday. So in an email the teachers were updating me and told me first he said he handed it in, then later we found out he lied and never did it. He was not bogged down with other homework at all this week. So when I confronted him about it yesterday after school he was like okay sorry I will do it all tonight. Well in 2 hrs time he could not, would not pick a hero. ( I let him go online to search for modern day heros) I told him you have 10 min and then I will pick one for you. He said there are no hereos really....... Thats him being difficult to avoid it all. He is smart enough to do the work, if he wants to. Then he started writting that he himself is a hero because since he was 5, he dreamed of having his own tecnhnology company. Then last summer he started doing all these drawings and ideas for it, which he referred to as master pieces. Now, I try to let him do this hobby in his free time I dont have a problem with it. However, there is nothing heroic about it. So I picked a hero for him, all the while discussing with him he must stop lying and do his work and how important his education is, and he pretends he starts having chest pains..lol... It was funny to see him acting this way and troublesome believe me at the same time. He does have a heart murmur but the doctors cannot hear it anymore and he has had no other problems with it at all for years now. It just popped in his head to do this to try and get out of the work. He is not pale, blueish in the face, short of breath, cold. I know he is faking it. So Im worried he will try pulling this at school to get out of more work. I embarassingly emailed his learning assistant and case manager and told them what happend last night, and be prepared if he complains of heart trouble its most likly not true. Im not sure I should have done that, but Im pretty sure ds might try to play that card to get out of work, and I dont need an abulance being called to the school along with a huge bill over nothing. Not to mention the embarassment of it if its false. I dont know what Im going to do with this kid. He is so smart, but he is lying and dragging his feet so badly. It kills me how much hes been lying so easily about school work the last 2 months as if its nothing. He has so many good streaks and then falls again. Im trying to be as understanding and patient as I can. Im starting to wonder if we have reached the point he needs therapy. He sees a psychitrist but maybe some kind of teen therapist. We dont have tons of extra money for something like that either. Thanks for reading my vent if you made it this far. Any advice?

Boy, have I been where you are.

Therapy wouldn't be a bad idea, especially if you find someone that your son likes. It's just nice to have another adult who ISN'T THE PARENT who can explain to your son why lying about homework isn't a good idea.

My son has lied in the past -- about not doing homework, about not studying for a test, about all sorts of things that are school-related. I think that he figures lying about this stuff relieves some pressure, even if later on we find out and get angry about it.

You were absolutely right to let the school know ahead of time that your son might try and fake a medical problem in order to get out of doing his work. If you have a very bright young man here, then you have to work together to outsmart him. Right now, he's immature and wants what he wants -- not such an unusual thing for an 11 year old. Your JOB is to make him understand that getting away with this sort of thing only works in the short run -- in the long run, it's going to ruin his life. Make him watch movies about people who are slackers, and how bad they feel about that as adults. Also, when he does fulfill assignments and other responsibilities, GUSH over how responsible he is -- take him out for an ice cream -- get him his favorite candy bar -- maybe buy a new video game. There has to be some obvious tangible benefit for him to understand that fulfilling responsibilities is a GOOD THING.

I always had trouble with assignments like that. once I got started its not so bad but answering such an open ended question is really hard for me. it sounds like he is having the same difficulty's

I don't doubt that he simply doesn't like doing homework, but the hero thing is more than simple obstinacy, I suspect. At his age, a 'hero' would have been a completely foreign concept to me, something I could not wrap my head around. Even though i'd have known what they were looking for; a sports star, a parent or relative, men and women in uniform, etc... I simply could not have brought myself to do it without feeling like I was betraying myself, as funny as that sounds. Again, I know it's harder to sympathize when he's already chronically lazy about schoolwork, but picking the hero for him completely misses the point of the assignment and doesn't teach him anything except sometimes people will tell you what to think and feel.

He complusivly lied to me about tons of small stupid things this morning. About brushing his teeth and doing chores ect. I told him his dad and I are very upset with him, because we love him and just want good positive things for him, but he keeps repeatedly doing it over and over and he is the only one who can change it. I told him he has to make good healthy choices. If he tells one lie he has to tell more and more lies to cover the first one. He is going to have to give up his screen time this weekend at the leasts, until he gets this under control. How do you stop a newly compulsive liar with aspergers and adhd combined? I hate the idea of punishing him by taking stuff away ( the wii U he got for xmas and ipad, tv ect ) until he has nothing left then what do you do. Make him sit on the bed all weekend and reflect? <--if I do that he will just sleep all day lol. If i look for movies of slackers for him to watch, do you have any suggestions that are appropriate for a 11 year old? My minds racing I cant think of any off hand. Im so worried hes going to do a not so hot move at school again today. We pulled up a huge list of heros last night and if he didnt really understand why any were heros it was still pretty easy to pick a name from a list and jot down some facts about that person, I think my kido is more than capable, he just flat out didnt want too. And he knows if he doesnt understand something, he has two parents and a ton of people at school who are more than willing to help him until he gets it. Its the making the choice to lie over and over that is alarming me. Especially about his health, I know he is just trying that one to see what he can get away with hes 11 why not, but it still shocked me he would try it. How am I going to make him understand that is completely unappropriate and lowly thing to do?

So I dont want to excuse your son. But lying about homework with 11...from my oppinion its more a typical "11 year old kids" problem, pretty "normal" at this age, and less an asperger thing. ^^

So sure it is a problem you two must handle someday, but i would not link everything to asperger, seems more of a "pretty normal nasty young teenager" theme for me. ^^

How do you figure this to be true? Why do you believe he was dragging his heels?

Your child made a claim which may or may not be true. Why didn't you question his claim? He makes the claim there are no heroes. I would've asked him why he believed this as so and I would've asked him to define what a hero was.

Yeah he probably doesn't like the assignment because it makes him anxious. I never was good writing essays when I was younger, especially about something I am not at all interested in, but now I would probably be good at them. He may need help with it or maybe the teacher can give him an option in what to write about.

He maybe also resorting to lying because he is overloaded and on a merge of a meltdown.

Last edited by Vomelche on 18 Jan 2013, 10:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

I agree that lying is totally not a direct trait of aspergers of course. But in attempting to solve the problem with him I think the fact that he has aspergers his a huge thing to consider in the way of how we handle it all from talking about it with him to having him accept punishments.

We did clearly define the word hero also by looking it up in the dictionary. He does struggle with writting yes. But he has tools to do well, and people more than eager to help him out. all he has to do is be honest and say he is having trouble, and im on it.

How about if you look at it this way: would you expect a seven or eight year old to have difficulty understanding the assignment? When my son goes off the rails, I find that thinking about him as a child about 30% younger trapped in the expectations we have for his biological age is often the problem. (Meaning, it's usually me, not him, who has the problem.) I know this sounds like "letting him off the hook" and I have struggled hugely with that perception, but I can tell you this: when I meet my son where he is and build from there, things improve, and when I don't = meltdown.

Being mindful that our often incredibly intelligent kids who might well be ahead of other kids in some ways may respond to things like a much younger child is difficult, but try to re-frame your current situation. Problems with abstract concepts and struggling/being ashamed to ask for help are both things you would expect from a 2nd grader. (Especially since, if your son is anything like mine, he expects himself to be on the same level or higher as all the kids in his grade. My son knows on some level that he's smart - he doesn't understand the delay part and thus can be really hard on himself and very ashamed.)

If you had a 2nd grader who was suddenly stuck in 4th or 5th grade, how might you react? I am guessing your son's confusion goes well beyond the definition of the word. Many kids on the spectrum suffer from "theory of mind" issues - that is, they have trouble looking at the world through anyone else's perspective. This assignment requires a LOT of perspective-taking, and it is understandably difficult.

I am also guessing that the derailment of the rest of your son's may be that he globalized his frustration with not understanding when and how to ask for help.

Momsparky is absolutely right about the developmental issues involved, and that could affect the situation in a variety of ways. In addition to the issues listed in her post, you could consider that there are stages all children go through that involve lying as a form of fantasy, and it may be that he hasn't past it yet. Hopefully we have some of my posts on that in the parenting index (see stickies).

But I'll share my first instinct reading your post: you put your son between a rock and a hard place, by forcing him to pick what you considered (and expected the teacher to consider) a suitable hero. My son cannot write about things he does not believe in because, be aware of this, to him it is lying. It violates an internal code he has. So, if your son is like mine, you just forced your son to write a paper that in his eyes is, in its entirety a lie, all while getting upset at him for lies of a different type. Upon feeling forced to write up a lie, your son seems to have reacted by avoiding the issue with a different lie; in his internal logic, there isn't much difference. This conflict of how society views truth and how my son, internally, views truth, has been a real struggle for him. ASD children cannot naturally distinguish between shaded truths that are social constructs (holding their tongue about how they see someone's physical appearance), following instructions that they feel are inappropriate for the sake of learning to follow instructions, and actions that you and I consider lying: to their literal eyes it is all the same, a lie. I've seen adults post on these forums that by around your son's age they were so convinced that they couldn't win for losing on this concept that they gave up entirely, and simply started to say whatever felt convenient. Fortunately, my son would rather just battle it out in the world, and has learned to negotiate with the teachers for the right to alter an assignment into something he feels he can honestly produce, but that is a pretty high level skill for a child with ASD, and your son is going to need to learn it if you want him to choose honesty.

I cannot emphasize enough how stressful these situations are for my son, and he is an extremely honest person. We had to work hard with him on finding a solution he could live with, a way to get through these situations. You'll hear it said that most ASD kids are naturally honest, but obviously there are other ASD kids who take the signals from society and reach a different conclusion.

I truly believe in attacking this as an issue of confused signals. ASD kids are usually extremely literal while also unable to move from their viewpoint, to see that of others. It can take a lot of talk, a lot of different approaches, to help them find a way through confusing situations. As another poster said, the best reaction to your son's comment about there not being any heros probably would have been to ask him why he felt that way. Depending upon the answer, you could have suggested he write that up as his paper, while making sure he understood that you couldn't be sure how the teacher would view the change, and suggesting that next time he talk to the teacher right away when he recieves an assignment he doesn't feel he can write. Or, instead of imposing your view of what the teacher wanted, you could have considered explaining why you didn't feel your son's choice of himself met the teacher's parameters and how you thought the choice might affect the grading, while allowing him to make the ultimate choice on if he would write that way or not. Is it so bad to let him be a hero in his own eyes? Is it so bad to get a lower grade for being a little off-topic?

He has to learn to communicate his thinking in ways that mesh "well enough" (but not necessarily perfectly) with the world around him, and not just do what he is told. He has to find his own way as to how the pieces fit together, so that he'll be able to negotiate things when he is on his own. He doesn't have to conform if he doesn't want to and is willing to accept the consequences, as long as he understands the consequences.

And you've got to start into the long, hard work of getting him to understand all these nuances in the concept of truth, and why some kinds of truth are extremely important, while restoring his trust in the world, that he probably currently assumes is so full of lies that it is hypocritical in telling him not to lie.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 18 Jan 2013, 2:49 pm, edited 3 times in total.

The problem might not be that he doesn't know what a hero is, but just that there's nobody in particular he thinks of as one. He might have trouble with the idea of arbitrarily picking someone to write about who (to him) doesn't fulfill the requirements of the assignment. Maybe if you (and the teacher) changed the assignment a bit... maybe to write about someone some people call a hero, rather than someone who actually is one -- or to write about someone as if they were a hero, whether they are or not. That way it's clear that it's okay to choose someone even if he doesn't know or believe that they're distinctly heroic. Emphasize that it doesn't really matter much who he writes about, or whether everyone agrees on how heroic they are.

I had almost exactly the same assignment when I was a kid, and pretty much the same thing happened (except that I had different ways of avoiding the work). For me, I felt like I couldn't choose someone I didn't actually, legitimately believe to be a hero. Picking someone arbitrarily wasn't good enough, because it wouldn't strictly fulfill the requirements for the assignment. On top of that, I felt I had to choose someone the teacher would agree was a hero, and was concerned about what assumptions they would make based on who I chose. Asking for help may be not be as easy for him as you would expect, either, especially if he hasn't figured out exactly why he doesn't know what to do or if he's worried about your reaction. He might just find it easier to be stubborn or lie and accept the consequences of that than to just do the work (that was the case for me all the way through school, but I was avoidant and stubborn rather than lying).

My DD has twisted the truth about school work sometimes too. Usually because she's just plain doesn't want to do it.
I would approach this with making sure he does have an understanding of what ever homework it it is first whether about a super hero or anything else.
Have you got on the computer and goggled super heros with the 2 of you together, it's visual and more interesting. Can he put the project together on the computer as a power point?
I think he's just not interested so l would try to find a way that does get him interested.
Someone also suggested a reward for his hard work and in some situations if our DD is struggling we reward her for her efforts too.
Hope that helps

You know, I could definitely see my son trying to write a hero essay about HIMSELF if he were assigned one. I am running the concept in my head and from an AS perspective this is really hard. I am not AS enough to where I had troubles like that. I faked assignments like this when I needed to. My son though...I could give him the dictionary definition and there is no way he could apply this, correctly. Add into that essays and their open-endedness and the mental and motor skill issues of writing and this is just a hellish assignment especially if you have a homework avoider.

If he likes fantasy or superheroes or anything like that give him examples of "epic" type heroes, and see if he can apply it to real people and pick someone with an "epic" mythology surrounding them. If he does not believe that real people are epic in that way, that is not so bad, because really, they aren't. Real people have failings. Even epic heroes often do. I think, if that is the case for your son, I would attack this as telling him to write about someone (other than himself) that he admires, and have the intro say something about everyday people being "heroic" in their own way or something.

Yes, DW_a_Mom, I am an ASD adult and I see it as your son sees it. I have lied but I don't like it and I'm not good at it. For me, I feel like I'm in a country that does Orwellian Double-think and Orwellian newspeak. For me as well, I see those who are the paragons of truth and responsibility are liars themselves.



Well, they are all lies. It seems like for someone's physical appearance by lying you show them love and consideration. Why do these contradictions and inconsistencies of American standards exist?




I would do the Socratic method. It is said that if I tell the truth about a person's appearance, smell or whatever I may be harming them. This is where I have to challenge what society thinks. What if someone has a smell to them and they don't know it? What if this smell means that they may have to go to the hospital. It could save their lives.

I am going to tell you a story that happened to me when I was a teen. My 2nd cousin used these fraudulent magnetic devices which is based upon woo-woo nonsense. She is being ripped off. She has arthritis and wears these fraudulent magnetic devices and she says it helps with her pain. She is experiencing the placebo effect and being ripped off. By even writing this I am become angry. Let's say she uses it for other pains as well. What if the pain she is experiencing is telling her she needs to go to the hospital. This is the main reason that I don't like white lies. They're not so white and they are very harmful in the end. My father would not let me tell her and I don't agree with this.



My conclusion is to question and examine like Socrates.



I'm an adult and it confuses the heck out of me to. This is why I have major problems with obtaining a job. I can't be something they're not. The employers demand honesty but truthfully do not like it and some of them are not honest themselves. To me some of them are snakes. They break their word all of the time.



This is what I would ask as well. As an ASD, I don't agree with him. My family, Jesus Christ, and Socrates are heroes, IMHO. My family bent over backwards for me and has been through hell and highwater to get me the help I needed at the time. They helped me with understanding my school work. Jesus Christ was willing to give up his life and die on the cross in agony to save mankind from their sins. Socrates was willing to die for the pursuit of truth. He was willing to battle the fakeness and the phoniness that existed in ancient Athens which was celebrated.



I would do that as well even if you coach him through this.



Yes, sometimes it may be worth obtaining a lower grade so one doesn't have to compromise his principles. He will have to face the consequences of what he chooses to do no matter what they are. If this was me, I would write that I cannot write this assignment because there are certain things I don't believe and there are certain things I do believe. I would write about them. I would also discuss Socrates as well and how he was willing to take hemlock because he refused to give up what he loved and believed and that was the pursuit of truth and excellence. I would go further and state, I am willing to take metaphorically take hemlock as well which means I will take a lower grade if it means sacrificing his principles. I would state that even with my lower grade I would get a good night sleep because I stuck with my principles.

If I was him, I would write this as his paper. I would have the same issue myself as to writing what I feel is a lie. These are two possible things that may happen. 1. Paradoxically, he may get an excellent grade. By him refusing to meet the guidelines and using Socrates as my example I actually met the guidelines. 2. He may get a bad grade and may enrage the teacher. This is just me because Socrates is one of my true heroes. He and Jesus Christ are two of a few people in the world I aspire to be myself and are my heroes.




Correct. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/127594- ... for-supper



I see it similarly to your son.