High school - What type of school situation are your kids in?

[Lms1976]

My daughter is 15 and was recently diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She has been in and out of inpatient, partial hospital and extensive outpatient programs for the last year and a half.  She has been refusing school and when she does go she spends the majority of her time at guidance. What type of school situation are your kids in? I’m at a loss with what I should do and what she needs as far as school is concerned

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[FaithHopeLove]

Hello lms1976
It is good to meet you although I am sorry for the circumstances. It is good that your daughter has already been diagnosed so you have an idea how best to help her. It is also good that she is accepting treatment.  My son is 24 now but, when he was in High School he had not been diagnosed so there was no plan in place for him. Likewise in college. Other than one involuntary hospital admission for self harm and a few group therapy sessions afterwards, he has not received any treatment so I can't really give you any advice about that.  Not to worry though. There are other people here with high school age children and various school situations. I am sure they will soon be along to welcome you to the group. Meanwhile, settle in, post some more about your daughter, whatever you are comfortable sharing we will listen to with no judgment.  Is she your only child? You say she has been in and out of various treatment situations for the last year and a half. What was she like before that? Don't lose hope. Things can get better. You are not alone. We are all walking with you.

[Tazzer4000]

Hi and welcome.  My daughter, 16, usually liked going to school.  However, when she did decide to skip or refuse to go, I let the school handle it.  Natural consequences - you skip class you get a lunch detention, you refuse to go to school and miss more than 10 days, you end up on probation and are required to account for why you miss and risk ending up in detention or special school.  Trying to force or convince my daughter into going never worked.  We also had the rule that if you are too "sick" to go to school, there will be no after school activities or hanging out with friends.  This was a good incentive most of the time, especially on Fridays as missing then meant the whole weekend at home with no friend time.  Those were the things that worked for us.  Hope that helps a little.

[Yepanotherone]

Hi there lms , High school years were an absolute nightmare for us with our daughter and it eventually turned into a daily battle with me trying to force her into school . That , coupled with her poor attendance and prolonged /frequent absences due to multiple hospitalizations which led her to fall behind constantly and a drop in her grades ,  thus just increasing her stress . I truelly believed she would end up just dropping out . Our school district has an online school academy and my daughter wanted to try that. Against my better judgement I agreed ; I initially didn’t think it could be successful as she’s never been the most motivated with schoolwork ( and this worsened with her mental health ,), I believed she needed the structure and discipline of a traditional bricks and mortar school , I didn’t think she’d cope well with having so much control and flexibility with the curriculum  and I was worried that further social isolation from peers would be even more detrimental to her mental health.  I realized it was worth a shot however because the alternative was that she would drop out of high school all together, so we really didn’t have much to lose! ! I’m pleased to say my daughter graduates in a couple of weeks having managed to obtain all the credits necessary to obtain that high school diploma .albeit she’s 19 and has taken longer to get this done , however the main point is; she’s done it !  The online school ended up being a godsend for her . It enabled her to work at her own pace ( which in itself was problematic because she would procrastinate and wasn’t always very motivated ), but it also enabled her to focus on just one or two topics at a time and she could pick up where she left off when hospitalized . This online school wasn’t strictly online ; there’s a bricks and mortar building with a school principal , guidance counselor and a maths support teacher on site and the kids were required to show up and work on the school computers every day for at least an hour or two,  especially if they were lagging behind . The onsite teachers were very supportive and very empathetic : many of the kids registered there have “ issues” of some description , or they are young single school age mums who aren’t able to attend a traditional 8 to 4 school schedule in a regular bricks and mortar school .
You can perhaps ask your school district if they have an online school program ? It seems to have been a great success with our local school district , so much so , they have expanded it with moving into a larger building and they have more support teachers onsite now too with the recent addition of a science , English teacher and an interventionist ( for those kids who are not making the required minimal weekly progress with their online classes ) .

[stampingt1]

Welcome!

My DS18 did fairly well the 1st & 2nd trimesters of school this year. (He did a mix of regular & alternative high school classes, which is on the same campus. Might check to see if your daughter's school has a credit recovery program. My son missed last all of his junior year, too.)  However, his anxiety is now too bad for him to attend school. He has tried their online classes, but those only provide him w/ more frustration.  Think he is going to take the rest of the trimester off to focus on all his health issues. Hopefully he will go back in the fall & finish up the required credits that he needs. My husband is
meeting w/ school counselor tomorrow to get a 504 plan put into place. That's supposed to help w/ things in high school & college.

Also, DS18 has a neurology appointment tomorrow. Hopefully will get a 3 day EEG study scheduled, which will help us figure out what's exactly going on w/ him... temporal lobe seizures, BPD, mitochondrial disease or something else. 

Stampingt1

[mamabolivia]

I went through hell for 5 years trying to keep my DD in school. She never went, lied, etc. I gave up completely. She will be 21 in August and is very happy in culinary school where luckily they don't ask for a high school diploma. Damned if you you do (insist), damned if you don't (usually by other parents). I have learnt to take one day at a time. My daughter finds it extremely difficult to see the future, goals and ways to get there, so why hassle myself imposing my very ordered cause and effect way of seeing the world on her? I tried, I really did. It got me nowhere, and made her extremely unhappy. I no longer ask about her getting a job, I accept that she is doing the best she can, and we are doing very well!

[bumpyroad]

Hello lms1976,
Welcome.  My dd20 had a very bumpy high school experience - a disastrous freshman year in a large public high school for the arts, then an in-patient hospitalization, followed by 4 months of wilderness therapy.  When she returned, we decided to enroll her in a therapeutic high school in our community.  This was not ideal, but they were able to get her through the next few rocky years.  It was really helpful for us to have her somewhere where there were therapists available throughout the day, her teachers understood the issues she was dealing with, and the school was in regular communication with her therapist.  The down side was that the school enrolled kids with all kinds of issues, so the peer group was often pretty low-functioning.  I think, in retrospect, that dd was probably egged on in some of her bad behavior by the behavior of her classmates - though she was probably not a great influence herself...  We were able to get our local board of ed to pay nearly the whole expense of the private school, though we had to engage a lawyer to help us through the process. 

For us, the alternative path would have been a therapeutic boarding school or longterm rtc.  We wanted to have her home with us and after her experience in wilderness, were nervous about turning over too much of her care to institutional staff.  The good news is that she graduated high school on time (passing by a very slender margin!), applied and was accepted to a number of colleges, and is currently away at school and (knock on wood) doing fairly well. 

Time is on your side.  The teenage years are really, really rocky for kids with BPD, but our experience has been that, with steady treatment, our daughter is maturing - the process is really, really slow, but we are beginning to think that she will have an independent adult life some day!
Hang in there!