Disability vs. Disobedience

G, the ADHD mentally disabled 15 year old boy I homeschool two days a week, only has one more week for the summer. He'll be here on Monday and Thursday, then I won't see him again until around August 20th.

I am relieved for the first session to be over, yet at the same time I am completely dreading seeing him again in the fall.

Can I admit that? Our contract lasts until December, so I really have no choice.

It's not that I dislike him. It's just that homeschooling him is a tiring, frustrating task that leaves me mentally and physically exhausted by the time his parents come to pick him up at the end of each day.

I didn't think it would be like this.

When he first started coming to my house, he did a marginal job of listening to instructions. He followed 75% of them. Now, however, he just does what he wants despite what I, or Tyler, tell him. It is SO frustrating.

For example, I have asked him multiple times not to open drawers, cabinets, or boxes of things we have yet to unpack. What does he do every time I turn my back? He rummages through everything. There is not a spot in the house he hasn't been. Not one drawer he hasn't opened and totally disorganized. Not one box he hasn't gone through. Why? Why can't he remember that he is not supposed to do that?

He also fails to understand closed doors. I ask him to not come in the bedroom while I nurse Rosie to sleep because he will distract her or wake her just as she's drifting off. It never fails, as soon as she's almost asleep he comes bounding in the door for no reason at all.

G doesn't even get closed bathroom doors. If you don't lock the door and make sure it's latched good, he'll come right in and start making small talk while you're in the middle of pooping. Tyler finds this horrifying.

He also can't seem to remember when you tell him something. For example, on Thursday he asked if we could eat lunch at Burger King at least 400 times that morning. Tyler (who was off of work) and I both told him that we don't eat fast food and there was nothing at Burger King we wanted to eat, so no we weren't going to go there for lunch. Five minutes later, he would ask again. The answer would still be the same--no, we don't want to eat that for lunch. Five minutes later, he would interrupt a conversation and suddenly ask if we could have Burger King for lunch. No, no, and no. We don't eat that! Yuck! We would tell him what we were going to have for lunch instead...but he wasn't listening.

The same constant questioning goes with anything that he wants to do when we don't say yes, whether it be letting the dogs inside (they ravage the house and create chaos), going somewhere, or doing something we don't want him to do.

Another most infuriating thing G does: When we're doing school work, I will be reading aloud (this is what his parents tell me to do with him) and he'll start talking over me, telling me something ridiculous like "If you had a black and orange cat what would you name it?". I'll tell him we can talk about it after we're done working on the school work, and continue reading, but he'll still keep talking, talking loudly over me as if I'm listening to him or something. It's awkward and frustrating. I get so tired of reading and trying to force him to pay attention.

He does have ADHD--he can't sit still and he has a short attention span--but at times it seems like he purposefully is ignoring me.

Sometimes he gets up and turns on the TV and turns up the volume loudly while I'm trying to get him to work on school work. I ask him why he did that, and he says that he can still do the work with the TV on. I tell him he can watch it after we finish, and get up and turn it off. Two minutes later, he gets up and turns it on again. It is beyond frustrating. There aren't even words. We'll go back and forth like that for several hours.

It's not like I don't give him plenty of breaks to re-focus. Trust me, I'm as lax as I can possibly be to still allow us to get 5 hours of school work completed each day like his mom requires.

He wants to play outside, but he can't quit taking sticks and banging them against the trees--ripping off the leaves and destroying the bark. He'll do that forever to my poor trees. I ask him not to, explain that it's bad for the tree, and he listens and stops, but as soon as I turn around he does it again. Then he takes a stick and uses it to hit an object--another stick, a rock, whatever--like a baseball and bat, and the object flies in unpredictable directions. I've asked him many, many times not to do that. It's dangerous. He's going to break a window or hit someone. He's hit me in the head before, and it really hurts. I lost total patience one day when he almost pegged Rosie with a solid rubber dog toy after I'd asked him to stop hitting it with a stick a zillion times in a row.

Even when I ask him to stop, sometimes he'll just keep doing it until I wrestle the object out of his hands. Or he says "Well I was just doing this...I'm just doing this..." Like it's nothing major, it's ok for him to keep doing it. But it's not, it's really not.

The entire day goes in circles like this. I feel like I'm chasing my tail. At first I thought it was just me having these issues with him, but Tyler has been home for the past few weeks for at least partial days while G is here, and he has the same problems. Tyler, poor thing, can't handle it. His nerves are frayed at the end of the day.

I don't know what to do about all of these issues. I honestly don't. G's mom just drops him off and leaves, then picks him up and they rush out the door. It's not something I can really discuss in front of G either. It's not a casual conversation to have in passing like that. His mom hasn't ever offered to sit down and discuss anything with me, like how things are going or any tips and tricks to working with G, other than the time when she first came over and met me.

I'm not sure how I'm going to handle having G here three days a week this fall. It's going to be maddening. Sometimes it seems to me that his parents just haven't bothered to teach him certain things--like to respect other people's property, or that a closed door means privacy. Maybe they've let it go, saying that he's disabled so he can't possibly understand. I think he can understand though. I don't want to judge is parents without really knowing what goes on in their home...I can only see things from my perspective.

How do you separate disability from willful disobedience? I have a feeling it's a fine line, but this must be addressed some how.