ZERO attending skills & poor motivation hampers progress

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That is our situation, in a nutshell.

We have noticed that when he is motivated to learn something, he learns it remarkably fast (even if I do say so myself). But there are some skills that he simply isn't mastering, not because he can't, but seemingly because he is not motivated to ! For instance, he has whole body dyspraxia, so puzzles are hard for him, as are shape sorters. However, since he seems to like working with shape sorters, he has been mastering and advancing to more complex ones, whereas he is still stuck at the simple inset ones as far as puzzles go.

This is also the case with most fine motor tasks, which are all hard for him due to the dyspraxia. But he mastered some because he seemed to like the work / practice ! His ABA program manager uses his poor attending skills as an excuse to not work on important skills, such as cutting or dressing, claiming he won't be able to master them as he lacks the pre-requisite attending skills. This is a common parrot cry with this woman, and she won't even TRY to see if these are maybe things he would end up liking, and, therefore, mastering ! I have to get very assertive with her and / or go to her boss, to get her to get the team working on these skills, at least on a trial basis. What I am saying is that she seems to be using his lack of attention as an excuse to not really push him along, which really annoys me. Of course, this is not about me, and but I do worry about his poor attention and lack of motivation, especially as I am beginning to realize that he CAN learn, but simply isn't because of these other challenges.

Anyone here have any advise for me on how to motivate him and get him paying more attention (without resorting to medications) ? Help !

We have similar issues in that I have to customize almost everything we do to be related to special interests. We also have the limiting factors of our son not being able to persist through things with too much difficulty. Your ABA therapist should try to be more creative with accommodating this. This is really par for autistic kids.

On the other hand, you also have to try to be patient about lags that have to do with frustration toleration. So, it is a mix of taking advantage of windows of eagerness, and making as much progress as you can in those areas, while simultaneously working on less favored skills, so that the limiting factor can improve and you can push forward in those areas.

What I would do is look at the skills I wanted to prioritize and figure out how to break them down into very small pieces. (Well your ABA person should do this) and figure out how to bring in things that he likes.

For example, even if your son has no motor skills to do buttons (Mine still doesn't) you can have him play games with a button with a triangle painted on it and button hole with a triangle picture on it, and have him match triangles. (Or something like that--I am not an ABA therapist--and that is off the top of my head. ) That would teach him that buttons go with button holes, if he doesn't know it. He would learn about fasteners, even if he is not willing to try to use them. You could do the same sort of thing with snaps; shoelaces and shoelace holes. etc. just use different shapes.

Hi ASDMommy, I am approaching my son's deficits from a developmental POV, too. Since he is developmentally a toddler, I download a lot of infant / toddler activity ideas from Pinterest and various blogs and work on them with him. I am not always on top of these and slack off a lot from sheer exhaustion, but this approach has given us the most success as it meets him at his current level and reduces his frustration. Plus, it helps strengthen his foundation, which will pay off in the end, even if it appears that progress is slow right now.

But even this isn't always fail-proof, and there are days he actively fights us when we work, but we / I really persevere, even though I would like nothing more than to throw in the towel and run off into and hide in the woods forever.

The break down of tasks is also something I do by myself, as the PM is totally useless and opinionated. One of my goals for this year was that he would jigsaw puzzles, although this is a very difficult task for kids with dyspraxia. We started really small with 2-piece jigsaw puzzles, and Hubby spent 30 minutes before dinner every evening, working on the puzzles with him. He is now able to do 3-peice puzzles and can possibly do 4-piece puzzles, if he would only attend. We used images of his favourite singers / characters from TV shows to create our own simple jigsaws to motivate him, and that has helped a little bit but not a lot. Of course, that he is actually now doing 3 piece jigsaw puzzles is still cause for celebration for us, when last month, he didnt even know or care what a jigsaw was. So, I guess I am just going to have to suck it up and take it slowwwwwwwwwww but I am really worried that the lack of motivation will eventually cause us to plateau off, even if he did have the ability to progress beyond.

I am at my wits' end, and don't want to go down the medication route at all for the inattention (especially if it isn't neurochemistry but lack of motivation that is causing his trouble with paying attention). But I am not sure if I can avoid it forever. Just really overwhelmed and worried sick about him right now.

Last edited by HisMom on 09 Aug 2014, 10:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's not slacking. There is just too much to do, and not enough time. You won't do your kids any good if you are constantly going. I hope I did not imply that you should be.

Sometimes you have to take breaks or your brain won't be clear enough, anyway. Don't feel guilty about that.

No, no, I didn't think you implied that at all. Was just saying that many days, I talk the talk, but don't always walk the walk. I just returned from Michael's with a bunch of stuff to work on with him - thanks to Pinterest - but we will see how much actually gets done.

I am sort of feeling low at the moment because my bestest friend who had previously decided to homeschool her kid (like me) called to say that they had their IEP yesterday and that her daughter is headed off to SDC Kinder, after all. That has set my hubby off, of course, and I see a real homeschool / public school battle erupting soon between us.

Do you have any friends or any acquaintances whose kids were medicated for ADHD / ADD ? My son won't last a day in public school and will do best with intensive one-on-one. Any ideas / opinions on ADHD interventions that aren't medical in nature ? Thanks !

Not that I know of, but given the modern approach to things I can't imagine there were not kids in my son's formal classes (when he was in PS) that were not on something. We are also trying to stay off the meds, which is one of the many reasons we are homeschooling. We are not very social so I don't have a pulse on what people are doing. There are people on the forum here who medicate, though. Some have had good results, but some have has side-effects and a good deal of futzing around to find the right meds and dosages.

We can get concentration (mostly) if we use his interests, so that is what my plan is. I haven't been concentrating so much on actively forcing non-preferred interests during the summer, so it has been special interest city all summer, everyday all day. We will see where we are during the school year when sometimes I am going to have to teach boring stuff.

I need to relocate my "Smart but Scattered" book so I can do my yearly assessment of how behind we are on executive functions and such. Then I will need to stretch him just a little at a time. I can't ask for too drastic a change because of the frustration tolerance issues. That is one of our main issues, and one of the things the school could/would not tolerate.

It is hard to give specific strategies b/c everything I do has to be so tailored to special interests. Generally I make a mental note of whatever my son has interest in even if just a little and figure out how I can plug and play it into what I need to teach. Then I see what is left and brainstorm. If I can't special-interest something, I rate how essential the thing is and either scuttle it or make him deal and see how it goes.

When my son was little he loved shapes and sorting, also. Honestly, he still loves shapes. It is actually a useful special interest because you can use it for associations and a lot of different things. I don't know if your son is doing that clothespin thing where you have a piece of foam and he has to clip clothespins to it to practice the pincer grip. If so, you can draw shapes on the foam, draw shapes on the clothespins and have him match the right clothespin to the right piece of foam, to get him to do it.

We do the clothespin activity, mainly as a finger stregthening exercise. In fact, strange that you should ask because I found mini clothespins at Michael's that I jumped on during my trip yesterday - as he is now able to do "regular sized" clothespins, that he pins around the edges of a cardboard box (ours is an old shoe box). I also bought coloured felt sheets that I will be sticking on both the clothespin and at different places in the box, to see if he can match colours, too. I suspect that he can, especially if he is motivated, but again, his attending may be too poor for him to actually complete tasks.

Do you have to submit yearly assessments to the State / local school district ? I want to stay under the radar with the local district to avoid him being forcibly enrolled in one of their programs. I will be quietly registering my homeschool with the State, and work on him myself, supplemented by as much ABA as we can get / pay for.

I also worry that him not being grade level (which may be an ongoing issue, especially if he fails to develop any language) might put on the path to attending PS. And he might not develop language if he isn't really paying attention and is TOTALLY uninterested in actually learning language !

Gah, it keeps boiling down to attention and motivation, attention and motivation, attention and motivation ad infinitum....

I don't think the school district can force you to send him to PS, even if he has a disability. You might go for a free consult with an educational advocate (a consultant, not a lawyer) to get specific details.

I looked into non-medical options and accommodations to address ADHD before we chose to try medication, and to be honest there isn't much. Things like the teacher tapping a card on his desk to remind him to focus were clearly not going to cut it. You're probably already doing all the OT sensory stuff. Diet changes help only a very small subgroup. Cogmed and biofeedback (which your son probably isn't a candidate for at this point) have only spotty positive research results.

Have you looked into DIR/Floortime? They're all about finding what motivates a kid and using it to expand his world.

I'm curious why you've picked puzzles and matching colors to be the priority tasks to work on? Are there communication related tasks that are also priorities? I noticed when I was touring a special day class that was designed for low-functioning kids that there was a lot of sorting and matching going on and wondered why that was the focus.

These are a focus because they encourage "thinking" and the learning of concepts. I specifically picked jigsaw puzzles because they teach the concept of parts to whole, and the concept of looking at / getting the "whole picture".

There are communication goals that work on his receptive language skills, which are obviously also a priority, along with goals that work on cognition.

My state is home school friendly, but I do keep good records b/c I am a tracking kind of person, and it helps me stay on task. My school district was happy to be rid of us so I am not concerned at the moment, though I was nervous before we pulled him out.

Wrightslaw is where a lot of people go to find out the laws in their state.

Did they indicate they were upset when you did not enroll your son?

They were VERY upset and harassed us by calling us ENDLESSLY. They even got hold of my husband's WORK NUMBER and called him once on it. Once was more than enough for us, though. They were threatening to take us to Due Process, when we moved, and that is when the harassment stopped. The new district has NO clue that I have a child with ASD. When I go to drop off or pick up my daughter, I leave my son with my neighbour across the street so that the SDC personnel or other school folks don't spot him. They have a severe program on the same campus, so I am very wary and very careful.

Given my HORRIFIC, nightmarish experience with his preschool program, I would be dead first before I send him to PS. I am extremely protective of him and don't want him traumatized. If he was talking and could tell me about his day, that is different. But not when he is totally helpless and completely non-verbal.

I will be registering his homeschool next year. If push comes to shove, I will simply flee back to my home country if the district tries to arm twist us into sending him to school. I am dead serious about keeping out of the PS system. They seriously let my boy down when we gave them a shot.

Yikes! That is awful. I have heard of some districts being aggressive in that way, but have never heard it directly from a parent. I don't know the laws in your state, but I would check out the WrightsLaw site, if you haven't.

This is the perpetual problem here too. They can do okay with 1 on 1, but in a classroom setting with no aide, yeah right. I think it's not ADHD (well for mine anyway)- it's kind of like they are on a slide that goes into their "own world" and when you interact they are at the top, but are constantly sliding down towards the own world, so you have to keep yanking them back up, and the moment you stop, they slide all the way down, and they're in their own world. What's in the own world is far more interesting, but if you can find something in "our world" that's interesting too, then they hold themselves up on the slide a little bit too, so you don't have to yank as much. I could be dead wrong about that, but that's how I picture it. If you're scratching your head thinking "what the heck are you talking about??" my apologies.

I don't understand what you said about the ABA and requiring "attending skills". If he can learn things, then he obviously does have some attending skills- but as you said, it's a matter of being interested. I would think you'd introduce as many different "topics" as possible, so he has a greater variety to become interested in. If I'm understanding this right, you may have a dud for an ABA coordinator...

I take the easy way out, and use rewards. We have a swing in the living room (don't regret that purchase!) and I use it to get them to do stuff. Put on your underpants...SWING. Put on your pants...SWING. The dressing isn't interesting but the swinging is, and it's contingent on the dressing. (Edit to add:) I help them with the skill if it's hard for them, as long as they put in an effort.

That is a great description. I used to feel like I was literally climbing into a bubble with my son to interact with him, and sometimes he would visit me, too. The slide thing you described, works as a good descriptor, for us now that the demarcation does not seem so drastic, if that makes sense..

I am still not sure how to differentiate between ADHD and ASD inattentive. Maybe ADHD inattentive is not so special-interest driven and more driven by random other things, but I do not know.

Dud is right. She (the program manager) is a REAL piece of work. I have complained about her many many many times, but she is STILL on his case. And she uses the "lack of attending skills" to not incorporate any of the programs that I propose for him, so I end up filing yet more complaints about her. The female dog used to be a special ed teacher and acts as if she is still a district personnel dealing with a difficult parent, even though we are now private pay. I am just biding my time and waiting for the right opportunity to kick her off his team. Now isn't right because his BCBA is going to be on maternity leave from September. Just my damned luck.

I like your slide analogy - it describes my son PERFECTLY. He needs the intensive 1:1 interaction to stay in our world. The minute he is left to his own devices, he is back to visual and vocal stimming. This is why PS would never work for him. Without a one-on-one aide to occupy him and work with him, he would never learn. So, group settings are ruled out.

Thing is that homeschooling is exhausting, too. However, there is no getting around it. If I knew he would work independently, that's one thing. But since that isn't happening (and if it was, I wouldn't be whining here), I am royally responsible for him all day long, every day.

Forgot to add - due to his severe dyspraxia, a lot of tasks are hard for him. So I think the inattentiveness is essentially a coping mechanism. He can't function otherwise, and by going into his own world, he can escape tasks / demands. So, I don't know if medication will really help him. Methinks it may actually be disastrous because then he would have to confront his challenges head-on (which may devastate his self-esteem, as I feel that he already gets that he is somehow different from other kids). Poor kid.

I saw an announcement for a free webinar on brain based treatments in our local autism newsletter and thought of your post. I can't endorse it because I don't know the details and don't have personal experience with the provider, but it was highly recommended by two of the leading activists in our area: