Is refusal to do homework an Aspie thing?

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My teenage son has an AS diagnosis. He went through elementary and middle school disliking homework but doing it with prodding and nagging and some help from me. He started high school this fall and has refused for 5 weeks to do any homework except one page of Geometry. He says he is too tired at the end of the day to do it. He also reminds me that many low-performing students in his middle school graduated even though they did no homework, even while he was turning in his projects. The school is huge--3000 students. he also does very little work in class. He is on Zoloft for depression and OCD (just started about 2 weeks ago). He has no friends. So he gets on his WoW game when he gets home from school and refuses all requests to do homework. When I ask, he screams "leave me alone!! !" He basically goes into a meltdown if I push. He says his only friends are on WoW.

Has anyone else had this attitude about homework? Is this an Aspie thing? I always did mine, and I am AS too.

I never had trouble doing homework... I always came home from school 'mentally exhausted' from having to stay in a social hell-hole for 6 hours but it never stopped me from doing my homework.

I don't really see the attitude as an Aspie thing... just a teenager thing

I never did homework, ever.

Home time was interest time, and I wasn't going to bring school home. No one the world over would have got me to do it.

I almost never did work at home, and I rarely studied, but be careful not to generalize the problem too much. It's not so simple as that unfortunately.

Luckily success isn't necessarily related to good grades, but you should try to teach him the importance of at least passing high school and let him get help and encouragement from any of the school administration or school counselors if possible.

Hopefully he'll mature later and realize the importance of doing work, but you may need to eventually do something painful to encourage him.

I haven't experienced this... I'm just trying to imagine the situation, so I recommend you look for people who've experienced similar problems with their children and ask for advice (not that this is a bad place for that).

I don't think it's an Aspie thing either, but it won't hurt to understand him. Real dating might get him off the computer and get him motivated to work -- and his peers can likely encourage him to work. Whether they will is questionable.

I really hated homework. I never understood why school was supposed to take up all of your time.

Pretty sure everyone hates it though.

But you graduated without doing it--so there is hope after all

I used to do my homework until 2nd grade. I never did really any of my homework after that. I didn't like having to go to school for 6 hours to come home and take up more hours doing the work they forced upon me. Now that I'm homeschooled it's gotten better. I don't think it's an Aspie thing though.

Firstly, even many neurotypical teens do a sloppy homework or pretend to do a homework. That is really a human trait. The only thing which could be said to be somewhat aspie about this is that your son isn't lying.

How is he sleeping? Eating? Exercising? How many hours does he sit with the computer?

In my final 2 years of school, I ignored all homework unless it interested me. I got away with it because of being academically bright, and courteous and non-disruptive in class.

Your son is probably telling the truth about how tired his school days make him; school is exhausting. Is homework really worth adding to that exhaustion? If it is, is there anything that can be done to make your son's day at school less tiring?

Abandon all hope, as I'm a high school dropout. However, not due to the work itself (doing homework wouldn't have mattered), but I couldn't handle being around the students in the latter years.

I only did homework in college.

I saw no point doing it in elementary school, and jr high. I didn't learn anything from it. I didn't have any solutions to know if I was doing it right or wrong, and generally speaking, I had more important things to do.

If your son feels his only friends are on WoW, then it's very likely the case, that is only fiends ARE on WoW, and if you took that away, you'd essentially be depriving him of the human contact most humans needs, but people with AS have a hard time obtaining in person.

Is highschool homework worth is? *shrug*. It depends.

Homework serves a duel purpose.
It's practice for doing boring things you have to do to be a responsible adult.
And hopefully you'll learn something from the material itself.

So I guess I'd ask, is he proficient in the first purpose? If yes, I'd get off his case. If no, I'd stay on his case.

Does he want to go to college straight from highschool? If yes, I'd stay on his case. I wouldn't bothger him so much.

You might try to get him involved in more social activities or alternative learning programs where he can be out doing something he likes and learn something valuable at the same time.

According to Attwood yes, it's an 'Aspie thing' and he sets out some strategies for dealing with it in his book. Everyone hates homework but someone with AS is more tired at the end of the day, more inclined to want to engage in a special interest (it's only fair, they've been engaged with things that aren't especially interesting by comparison all day) and might actually take longer to do the homework than the other kids so it is genuinely more intrusive for them.

Attwood suggests communicating with the teacher about a particular piece of work that's set to be done and get the teacher to put a time on how long they expect it to take. Then the kid spends that long on the homework, stops and it can be considered done. I'm sure there was some other tips in there too, another option is to arrange for him to do his 'homework' at school somehow so it doesn't intrude into home life.

I used to despise homework.

I never really did homework in grade school.

I despise homework.

My position is that home is my time. School work should stay in school. I could see a teacher giving X amount of class work and saying whatever you don't have done by the end of class finish at home and turn in tomorrow, but deliberately giving work to take home is like expecting an employee to bring work home to do on their own time without pay.

It's a kid thing... specifically a boy thing. My NT brother didn't do his homework, neither does my aspie son (unless I really work hard at it.)

The best thing to do is set a routine for homework. Tell him that he has an hour after school to unwind, do his own thing. Then he has forty five minutes set aside for homework. Tell him homework time may change and increase, but for now that's the routine. If he finishes early, sit with him and get him to describe what he's done in lessons today. Read his text books, and talk about it.

Just this last two weeks my son has started to do his homework, but I had to brutally rigid about setting a routine.

I thought I'd be OK with homework until I realised that they weren't going to explain what they wanted clearly enough. At the secondary school they just assumed more "common sense" than I had.......then they didn't believe me when I said I couldn't understand what was going on. They could see I was intelligent, so as far as they were concerned, I had no excuse for not delivering.

My weekends were hell for years. I'd find myself completely unable to focus on the work, and would just sit there bewildered, trying to make sense of it....the clock would tick away and I'd get more and more anxious, then by Sunday night it would turn out that I hadn't achieved my targets, so I'd go in a bit early on Monday and try to get a bit of help from the other kids, to get them to explain to me what the hell it was supposed to be about. Sometimes they laughed at me, sometimes they helped me out a bit. Other times I'd just cheat, and fill in the answers as the teacher went over the work with us (most of them couldn't be bothered to mark our work personally so they let us sit there and mark our own while they just told us the answers - I was caught once and the teacher beat me up on the spot because he couldn't be bothered with the paperwork necessary for giving me a caning). Other times I'd get caned or threatened....the presumption was always that I was lazy (ironic or what? )

I wasn't diagnosed in those days (never even suspected autism), and I was the only kid in my area attending the posh school at the other side of town. My parents had no academic ability at all, and I had no local peers to help me either, because they'd never made it to that level....I envied them and the low expectations that they enjoyed.

It's easy now to see why I was floundering, but at the time there seemed to be no reason for it.....I wondered if I might have some kind of brain damage because all that futile mental effort was making my brain blank out. I'd always done really well at school before, because the earlier schools were so much more methodical and clear, spelling out all those little "common sense" issues that are later taken for granted. But now it was just a big herd of unruly boys, different rooms and teachers for every subject, and various levels of teacher incompetence - mumbling, talking too fast, failing to notice and help those who were struggling, a long day with no chance of going home for lunch to break the social anxiety sessions into manageble chunks.

I often wished that I could opt for hard manual labour as homework - that would have been nasty but at least I'd have known what to do. Luckily, in those days they didn't count coursework as part of the exam, so I was able to swot up directly from the textbooks when it was exam time, and I got lots of 'O' levels and 3 weak "A" levels mostly from just readling in private - really they'd have done better to let me off school completely and just tell me what books to read for the exams. But if I'd had decent support, with polite, clear teachers, I'd have probably had an homours degree out of it. As it was, the experience of the "A" levels was so traumatic (and the grades so mediocre) that I ducked out of university completely because I could see how I would go right out of my depth and have 3 years of agony and failure.

The other problem was that there was just too much work. 3 hours of homework every night in the week, and 4 hours at weekends (though I needed more time than that because I was so bewildered about what I was supposed to do), is too much for a decent work-life balance. That's one aspect of schools (and workplaces) that's got worse since I escaped. Great if you own a sweat-shop, not so great if you don't.