Help with my 4th grade son and school

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My 10 year old ASPIE son was doing great in school until recently. Basically they work in small groups and he has been making noises and talking to himself lately. The other kids in his group are contently tell him to be quite which he interprets as yelling. His school has been really good at working with him and us but its getting to the point were he cry's at home and says I don't want to go to school I hate it. He has always done really well academically but my wife and I are feeling hopeless. He goes to a Psychologist he goes to a social skills group and we give him all the support we can but from what I am reading this is only going to get harder. I use forums for my hobby and it has always helped me connect and I hope this forum will help my wife and I so we can help our son. Thanks in advance

I'm self diagnosed, but the only way I survived school (back in the 1960s-70s) was because I was labelled a "genius". Even then, I struggled.

I am not convinced that our normal development - that which is appropriate for our neurology - is or should be the same as everyone else's. And the environment of public education exerts a great deal of pressure to "fit in", which we can never do well. So, to some extent, he is going to have issues like this. I hate that, I agree you should do all you can to help him, but you need to also understand it won't just go away. If he feels too much pressure to "fix it", that will only make things worse.

The one real thing you can try to do is understand what's going on - from his perspective. The experts don't understand what goes on inside us. One thing that held back my self-diagnosis was the fact that the diagnostic criteria do not describe what is on the inside. Only when I made the conceptual leap to consider that, since it described what others thought they saw in me, it might apply did I begin to take the idea seriously. Then I joined WP and discovered many others - including many with formal diagnoses - agreed with the exact points which troubled me, that we are not like that, but are only seen that way from the outside. So you have to make your own conceptual leap, and forget what you see or his teachers see or anyone else sees, and figure out what is going on from his perspective. Only then can you figure out what might be possible to help him.

I'd try to help, but you just don't provide nearly enough details to give me confidence I understand what's going on. Although I could make one guess, from my own experience: if he's forced to work in a group, this is about the age where kids start to really exclude those who are different. That may be what's happening here, but I can't be sure.

My son really struggled with group work at that age. Many ASD individuals struggle with it their entire lives, but I have found my son is learning.

Point being, just being asked to work in a group is stressful for your son. And what does he do when he is stressed and trying to cope? Most likely, he expresses it physically, because those noises and movements calm him. Which means, I suspect you've got a vicious cycle going on here.

I think I would start by making sure the group work is well defined: most likely, your son needs to have a clear role, one that is his alone, specifically assigned to him, and that he has complete control over. At this age, he isn't going to be comfortable exchanging ideas and interacting with other kids to reach a solution. If that is what the teacher is hoping for, it will be nothing but stress for your son. I would expect him to be years away from being able to handle that developmentally.

Looking back on my son's experience with group work, and knowing how well he does now, I think it is important at this stage to mold your son's group experience to his current needs to the extent possible, and let him feel some success and comfort in the process. And that means not really working collaboratively with the group. Someday he will, if it is all handled carefully. But not in 4th grade.

Even then, with it well boxed off, he'll be stressed by having his destiny affected by the work on the other kids. But this is a lesson he'll probably have to learn, unless he is willing and able to be a group of 1 (which my son did opt for at times). We talked about it with our son as a life skill, noting that almost everything we do in life involves other people.