<p>Sometimes I believe that so-called “executive function disorder” in HS students is the product of hand-holding, spoon-feeding parents - like me. The result is a population of HS seniors without a clue as to how they should organize their schedules and living spaces, meet deadlines, plan projects and complete work… because parents have always been there to pick up the slack. Unfortunately our children may suffer from our helicoptering after they leave our airspace.</p>
<p>Debski, I agree…trying to play catch up right now. Her senior year, I let her take on more than she was ready for on her own and I picked up her slack…now we’re in the growth process…both of us. She’s doing pretty good though. :)</p>
<p>Debski, there are legitimate learning disabilities that have</p>
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<p>as a symptom of the disability. I agree that some students who don’t do well in this area just slack because someone else has always helped them with executive functioning. But there are students with actual disabilities who have issues as well. An example would be students with a non-verbal leaning disability. Some experts believe this disability is a result of dysfunction in the right cerebral hemisphere. For those students it isn’t just an issue of pushing them off the deep end and they will figure it out. They probably won’t. It takes a lot of baby steps, working through a lot of different approaches to find the ones that those students can actually use effectively, and a lot more repetition that you or I might need. It is pretty easy to just assume that the student is lazy or ignoring these types of tasks when in fact they really can’t do it without a whole lot more scaffolding, support, and practice than the rest of us.</p>
<p>So please be careful how you use the phrase “so called” when you discuss this.</p>
<p>I’m surprised noone has mentioned ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder) or ADHD inattentive (formerly known as ADD). There is no actual test for this, but it is diagnosed by history, interview, questionnaire for student and parent etc.</p>
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<p>Logistical word of caution …in CA. once you start at a CC - even one class that you fail or withdraw from…you will NOT be able to go to a 4 year state school as an incoming freshman and you will need to complete 60 CC units before you can transfer. I have no idea if this is the case in any other states.</p>
<p>Katliamom’s post #16 states what I have seen play out with friends’ disorganized kids more often than not. A lot of lazy teenage disorganization that truly requires ongoing help from adults is a symptom of something. </p>
<p>The question is, in a pinch, if he had to, could he take care of his own business? If there was a family emergency, and you had to leave town for a week, would he be able to pull it together to get to school on time and do his work, or would you return home to find him wallowing in sweat pants, surrounded by Dorito crumbs, having reached level 385 of Candy Crush, but not having made any progress on his research paper?</p>
<p>^^Yes eastcoast. This is the difference between kids who allow their parents to spoonfeed them vs. the kids who are not college-ready. My three boys would “allow” me to completely run their lives…something I chose not to do. Who wouldn’t mind having a personal assistant take care of the details? I wish i had one :-)</p>
<p>My advice to the OP to figure out if there is enabling going on or not. Either way there is no harm in taking a year off before starting college. There’s no “rule” that says the trajectory must be high school then off to far-away college. All three of mine by virtue of their birth dates started college basically at age 19…but there are plenty of kids that haven’t even turned 18 in the fall of freshman year creating a natural one-year age gap anyway…not to mention the abundance of “older” kids at larger public unis and even some privates.</p>
<p>My daughter has executive function problems related to ADHD. We did have her do a gap year abroad. I think it was very helpful. The challenges were different from school-year challenges (e.g., she didn’t have to manage long-term research projects, papers, studying for tests, etc) but she did gain experience with getting herself up, out the door, and where she needed to be, managing her budget, communicating her needs, etc.</p>
<p>There were others on her program who were much less ready for college than she was (as well as others who were much more ready). She was able to observe a great deal of transformation and maturation in one of the program members who was quite directionless. He has apparently since gone onto college, which was not a certainty during the gap year.</p>
<p>One advantage of her program is that it was international, and her peers from UK, Spain, Germany, South Africa, NZ, and Australia were much more grown-up and self-reliant than the Americans. I think the American kids learned a lot from them.</p>
<p>I echo the advice to test for learning disabilities. If the son has a learning disability, sending him to college or a gap year abroad will do absolutely nothing to address this issue and it would be setting him up for failure without any support. He would need to learn (and practice) skills to compensate for the disability. Right now, it sounds like the parents are doing that for the boy.</p>
<p>If the son is merely overly coddled, then sending him off to college and letting him figure things out may work out for the better. But I’d hate to bet that my child falls in latter category when he is actually in the former.</p>
<p>JMO, but if the child is truly that messy and disorganized that says learning disability to me. One caveat, the child has to set up his own organizing system for homework and projects, not try to follow a teacher’s or parent’s “suggested” system.</p>
<p>debski I also had my doubts about the various tests and diagnosis. I believed teachers/h.s. couselors that son was a flake and immature. </p>
<p>Then, after his melt-down, came a professional, extensive evaluation. I saw my son’s results on paper, in black and white. His processing speed is in 11th%. In another test, his ability to separate different types of details, and focus on pertinent ones, is in 9th percentile. Yet his IQ places him in the 99.5th percentile, solidly in the profoundly gifted range. As the tester said, son had skills which hid the disabilities for years, and made an amateur diagnosis so difficult/misleading. </p>
<p>All of the sudden, his difficulty with reading fiction, for example, made sense. As did some of his skills in physics, in which son had moments of ‘brilliance’ according to his AP physics teacher. Yet this kid was so unable to deal with the AP physics test he actually threw up. Twice. (We found out about that two years later. As we did about his inability to complete the reading portion of the SAT) </p>
<p>Only after testing and counseling did these begin to be properly understood as effects of disability, not hand-holding.</p>
<p>Deskpotato, would you mind sharing what program your daughter did?</p>
<p>I’m a big fan of gap years, whether or not the kid is organized, but a gap year in and of itself is unlikely to magically give a child those skills unless all they need is another year of maturity. I was too lazy (and unorganized myself) to get my kids organized. They both had the world’s messiest backpacks, but they learned to meet deadlines on their own. If you think it’s at all possible this is an LD, please have your child tested now so that you can figure out how to help him.</p>