Since remote school started, Lazer has had multiple people readily available to help him with his work. I’ve noticed that he often uses this to his advantage. When he has seesaw assignments, especially assignments like social studies that require him to read something and answer questions about it, he often will give up before starting saying he “doesn’t know what to write”. We are then compelled to help him think it through and usually end up almost telling him what to write. Lazer is a smart kid and I know he knows how to do work like answering questions based on simple readings, but without being in a classroom setting, and without having a teacher there, he has become very dependent on our help. This week we (my step mom and I) have been trying to push him to be more independent with his work. Lazer is very smart about manipulating us into helping him. We tell him to try to do his work by himself, he claims he doesn’t know how to do it, and it ends up taking twice the amount of time for him to complete his work, which is stressful for everyone.  It’s almost like a game of chicken. We’ve been successful in getting to complete his work independently a couple times in the past couple of days, but many times we’ve caved and ended up providing more help than he needed to come to the answer.