Doing a bit of proactive research. I would love to hear from parents of students on the autism spectrum and/or adhd about programs they are currently/previously utilizing for their students. DS attends a rigorous high school and has a couple of years to go but I am not feeling confident at this point that he will be prepared.
Organization and planning are still in the immature stages. That combined with being away from home, advocating for himself well, life skills and social life are very daunting to me. I know these programs tend to be very costly but have they borne fruit?
I don’t know what programs your referring too but all the support I have gotten hasn’t cost me a thing. Just contact the disabilities offices at they various schools and ask them. Your proactive approach is good, but take it a step further if you can by generating your own ideas and running them by the disabilities office. For instance last year I had issue with a statistics class as an undergrad, so i went to the DS office and told them i wanted a tutor like what the library provided, but they were filled up, i asked if it were possible for something to be arranged with one of the grad students who might be doing some TAing. Everyone including the director of that department liked the idea. A lot of disability support is just normal support a student might get, with tweaks.
However if your child is still in highschool i know being “held back” is a blow to the self esteem but simply having him wait and work for a couple years before doing college while he builds those “skills” isn’t a bad thing. Maturity is different when your on the spectrum but it does still happen.
Thank you, @Beldan4 for your comment. Sounds like you made a good choice for yourself. My only fear with the gap year idea is that he will lose his motivation. Many people who intend to go on to grad school but take a break first never do…hard to get back in the grind.
heh, perhaps. The other side is those you hear about where they find their motivation because they remember why they don’t want to do the sucky things they were doing before. It took me 8 years alone before I found therapy that worked and the motivation to start going to college. I don’t beat myself up for fact because I wasn’t functional enough to attend but I do sweat the lost time. School is important true, but if the WHY it’s important to him isn’t good enough to hold onto by himself when your not there to remind him he may just give up halfway through anyway.
I am now almost 40, i just graduated with my B.S in psychology last spring. I want to go onto Grad school, and as i run into people who finished Grad school 10 years ago I do feel a little frustrated, however the truth is, when I did try to take a college course waaaay back when i was 19, it was a total failure and waste of time. You need both the motivation and the skill set to do it. Whatever his/your choice is I just worry about people with LD’s that bite off more than they can chew. Disability services are there mostly to support the already motivated to succeed, but also motivated to take advantage of DS services.
If i can think of one step to focus on it would be this, can he get himself all on his own, no reminders, to get to his own therapy session (if he has them). Can he keep his own appointments the DS office? Can he MAKE his own appointments? If he’s motivated enough to do this on his own, then that is a good start, if not…then i feel you’d likely just be sending him off only to come back frustrated. He’s got to be able to take the steps to manage himself as well as his school work. which is why i suggest a year off, if he falls apart when left on his own it shows a lot of lack of motivation, because in college he’s going to have a lot of time to himself.
Good points @Beldan4 and thank you for your input. Please don’t beat yourself up for getting a later start. Most people have more than one career anyway so think of it as skipping the first burden. Kind of like getting married later in life and possibly skipping an earlier mess that can happen in youth.
In addition, your bring maturity to your profession that no one has much earlier. Good luck to you!
I’d suggest looking at programs like College Internship Program and College Learning Experience. These are programs which are apart from the universities in their cities (there are several of this locations around the country) but they provide life skills, executive functioning and academic support for kids who need them. Also, we plan on requiring our son to work at least one full year before he enters college. And, not a job in dad’s law office but something in retail or foodservice. I’ve noted that once kids have some real world experience (not some carefully curated “enrichment gap year”), their maturity leaps.
Thank you for those suggestions and I will research those programs. My only fear about the gap year is that once you get out of the habit of studying, it is hard to go back…why people who take time off before their Master’s sometimes do not end up getting it. What do you think about that?
@FlyAwayTime - You can always go to college or go back to college or start a masters degree if you want to. There aren’t any time limits on this stuff. Plenty of people who go straight to grad school drop out without finishing because they change their minds about what they want to do. Yes, life can get complicated by job/kids/spouse/aging parents/etc. in a “gap” period, but when you are truly ready for college or grad school, there still will be plenty of opportunities. Not to mention of course that there may well be different/additional/better opportunities because of what you’ve been up to in the interim.
If people are still reading this thread, I am trying to help my student decide between Uconn and RIT. Uconn was not my dream school for him but their Beyond Access has been unbelievably responsive to my inquiries and their program appears to be custom made for my son. They even allowed me to come in an dmeet with them and when I did there was no hard sell but they said all the right things w/o me even having to ask. RIT, while my son’s dream school, has a spectrum support program but they didn’t even want me to stop by. They said there was “nothing to see”. They didn’t seem to pick up on the fact that our family’s decision would be contingent on the ASD support the college would have in place. Could anyone here chime in a let me know what you know with regard to Uconn vs. RIT? Oh he wants to do Aerospace Engineering which is stronger at RIT than Uconn. I think. I mean, I don’t even understand that much about getting an engineering degree except that it sounds awfully hard and the student has no life. He woudl not consider any LACs though he applied to Union and Syracuse. Got into both those but Uconn and RIT are cheaper, and have the ASD support. Help!
I second the CIP/CLE recommendation. My son went in the summer between Junior and senior year for a three week program in Denver and his confidence went through the roof.
