Is refusal to do homework an Aspie thing?

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I despised homework and even school itself. Mainly because I too didn't really have any friends there. It caused me to have majority incomplete GCSE coursework and therefore much lower grades than had been estimated for me. I massively regret it and now wish that my mother would have pushed me to do it like my dad did when I lived with him earlier on, although I hated that at the time.

School was the biggest cause of meltdowns throughout my life. Homework was always instant anxiety and would usually take up entire evenings if I did do it. Its alot of pressure to deal with when your whole future supposedly hangs on a stupid and pointless grade

eventually i gave up and did the minimal that it would require for me to graduate. I still wish Id dropped out and gotten a GED but my parents weren't having that. I hated graduating and everybody acting like I should be proud of completing something I viewed as a complete waste of time and rather unethical

Do you know what your child wants out of life? Cause having a good job and money weren't ever motivators for me. and thats what schools all about. I just want to be able to do what I want to do. School got in the way of that and always seemed counterintuitive to my idea of success

I didn't do homework.

I ended up dropping out of high school.

I've been working as a programmer for the last 10 years.

I was a decent homework-doer up until highschool, at which point school sapped so much of my energy that I'd go to bed directly after school every day. Just thinking about how we were not only expected to do homework but also to do volunteer work, sports, and somehow manage to have a healthy social life all at the same time truly makes me feel crippled. There is no way that I could have done what everyone else was able to do without relying on drugs or going to a mental hospital every other week.

I've seen more than one person post that they had school six hours a day. I had seven! The people who run my region's school system must be f*cking nuts!

Is your son getting enough of an intellectual challenge from his school work? Some extremely bright kids do horribly in school simply because they're bored out of their skulls, depressed because of it, and act out by refusing to do the assignments, especially the pointless assignments that don't add anything to their useful base of knowledge (like memorizing the US presidents, or repeating mathematical concepts that they already understand over and over.) Sadly, a lot of school districts base their admittance to more challenging classes strictly on the kids' performance in lower classes, so it can be hard for a parent with a child who is bored with the lower classes to convince the school district to move them.

I never did my homework when I was in public school. It was too hard and I couldn't understand it plus by the time school was over I needed time to decompress from the stress of being bullied and being treated like a second class citizen. My mom tried to work with me making me earn chips to cash in exchange for toys but when I found out I had to wait until I got so many chips and couldn't get a toy right away, I had a meltdown and refused to do any more homework. My mom gave up and my teacher knew it was pointless to force the issue and in class I basicaly veggitated and read books about my special intrests and was agressive and had violent meltdowns when anyone tried to make me do something I didn't want to do.

Now that I am homeschooled and can understand the miteral and am not being abused, I usualy always finish my homework. Sure I goof off and do things like watch TV or play video games now and then but I ususaly always get my homework finished before the next day.

I pretty much hated homework from the moment it was first introduced, especially math homework.

Math is what really stands out in my memory, since to me it was just a randomly selected number of tasks in our book, and the only real point of it was to do the number of tasks the teacher felt like giving us that day, to not get her mad at you.

It didn't really help that they were pretty adamant about HOW you got your answer and how to write out how you got your answer... I figured the answer out in my own way, in my head, and it was right, but I didn't use the process the teachers WANTED me to use.... So they thought I was cheating, using a calculator.. Since I didn't write out *their* process of getting to the answer, and since I couldn't write out the process I used in my head.
I tried to explain this and was then accused of being a "creative liar", since I was able to come up with such a fabulously watertight lie...
I still hate math.

I also once, at the end of 4th grade, had to do half of our math book in the two weeks leading up to summer vacation, since I hadn't done my math homework almost all year....

On a more general note, I was also one to dive right into bed when I came home from school, all I wanted to do was sleep or just stay in my room.
My parents thankfully left me pretty much alone, I think they learned quickly that bugging me at that time would result in an instant meltdown.

After having been "out and about" practically since you woke up you do NOT have anything left to do MORE stuff you don't have any say about.

Home time is sacred. Don't bug your kid about it.

I can see why people are responding that this is a 'teenage thing', but I see it as two completely different situations. When an NT teen refuses to do homework it's usually because they don't want to take an interest; when an Aspie teen refuses to do homework it's because they can't take an interest.

I simply stopped doing homework for every subject except English and Music from middle school upwards, and no amount of persuasion or 'remedial action' changed things. Perhaps my situation was more difficult to deal with because I wasn't diagnosed until adulthood, but your son sounds very similar to me aged 12+.

If you can find a way to make the homework interesting for him - either of your own volition, or with assistance from school - then you may be able to get him to do some, if not all of the homework set by his teachers. I'd definitely suggest taking it up with his school, and approaching them as patiently as possible. Technically your son has been diagnosed with a learning difficulty, and they should be willing to come to some form of arrangement.

He might not appreciate the ramifications now, but finding a way to help him to do things that he doesn't want to do will be of huge benefit to him later in life. There may well be tantrums and arguments, but I'm sure he'll appreciate the effort you put in when he's mature enough to understand.

I used to get that alot! The only teacher who didn't mind too much was my teacher in my first 2, and last 2 years of high school and he seemed to recognise a mathamatical instinct in me - He was the head of maths at the school and had told my form teacher, a fellow maths teacher, in my first year that I was one of the best mathematicians in the whole school even at that point - so he understood when I told him that I worked it all out in my head.
They've even expected me to write down workings out for maths problems when I've done my NVQ which I found irritating and quite difficult as I don't calculate in an easily written way either.

I didn't mind maths in school, infact, it was my favourite subject as it was my strongest. This didn't stop me not doing the work though - I probably had less maths coursework than any other subject when it came to examination.

Wow--thanks everyone for the feedback. I definitely can tell that the school day is exhausting for my son; he has no friends at the school except one kid from middle school who never did any homework in middle school. Plus, my son's AS seemed to get worse once he hit puberty, sometime in 7th grade. From that point on, I had to pick up the slack with his homework, and it was extremely burdensome (and I have multiple college degrees!). There were always "projects" to hand in. We live in a university town where a lot is expected of kids. Many families hire private tutors. Half the students at the public school are minority kids who hardly ever do any class work, but get passed. A think this is beginning to get my son. I am probably going to put him in the "independent study" program at the school, which is a modified homeschool program, but I worry that it doesn't have enough structure.

Last edited by pekkla on 12 Oct 2010, 11:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

I have no idea if this would help your son, but when I was in high school, I discovered that I LOVED study hall. I ended up requesting study hall every year in place of an elective. It meant that I had an hour of quiet time in the middle of the horrible, exhausting school day, and it also gave me an opportunity to get all or at least a good portion of my homework done at school so that I could relax when I got home. Most people I have spoken to did not really make use of study hall, but I did, and for me it was a lifesaver.

I also found that I needed to use a planner to write down my assignments, because otherwise I forgot them most of the time. Knowing how to prioritize assignments and how much time to spend on each assignment (that's a tough one for me) is very important. If you put him in an independent study program, it would be all the more important for him to be able to do these things.

High school is really hard. I managed to get through a highly competitive high school with mostly good grades (A's and B's), but the toll on my psychological health was enormous and I ended up self-harming and being put on medication (which I was able to stop taking once I graduated!). It's important to know one's limits. An independent study program is worth trying, you just have to help him learn organization and time management skills.

Good luck!

Yeah, I remember study hall. Not bad. For some reason, my kid's schedule has no study hall period. Classes go from 8:30-3:30 every day, with 40 minutes in the middle of the day for lunch. And he uses a planner but I can't read the entries and he won't explain them to me. Its like he is hoping the homework will just go away.

I, too, am far too tired when I get home to do homework. I'm usually too tired to even focus on my obsessions.

What I do now I'm in college, though, is just get the work done in my free periods.

At the end of the day, *all* tests are *memory* tests when you're in school, and tests are the majority of your grades. If you happen to have been born with a sucky memory, you have no choice but to do all the homework and study like crazy to drill the stuff into your head so you'll remember it on test day.. If, however, you were born with a really good memory, you don't have to do any of that and you can still get decent grades because your test scores will be good.

I didn't worry much about how school was gonna turn out for me past 7th grade.. To that point, I was diligent about getting all the points I could and making good grades, blobbity blah blah.. As a result of being in the top-whatever percent of my school, I was invited by Duke University to take the ACT exam as part of their "talent identification program." (I'm *sure* there are many other former TIPsters on this forum. lol)

I scored a 19. At the time, that was actually good enough to get into the big public university here...soooo...what's the point of trying super hard if you know you're already "college material" at age 12? lol

Having said that, I rarely did homework past 7th grade because I didn't *have* to do homework to score well on tests. Granted, if it was a big paper to be written that counted for a lot of points or something like that, I did it, but the "10 points" rote-memory homework?...never. My grade point average at graduation was like a 2.5 or thereabout. I took the ACT once as a senior and scored a 29.

Our kid, now in grade 12, is quite similar. He's always incredibly worn out at the end of the the school day. We figure that it's because of all the emotional and physical effort he has to expend keeping it together while in school. We are finding that, for him, having a slightly reduced courseload is working really well. Instead of 4 courses, he's taking 3 (and has a spare), and seems to be handling everything much, much better.

We just got his AS diagnosis over the summer; before then his challenges were classed as anxiety. One of the recommendations that came out of his psychometric assessment is that in college he have a reduced courseload. We are really seeing the benefit of this, even in high school!

The low-energy thing is a real toughie. Hang in there!

I can tell you I procrastinate. I dont know if its related to AS, maybe my ADHD.