Follow on from last week

Hi Nicholeen, Thanks you for answering my question last week regarding our 14 year old teen diagnosed with ODD and Anxiety and experiencing school attendance issues. We would like further advice regarding your suggestion to consider home schooling. For many reasons at the moment I don’t see that this would be a good fit for our family due to factors such as both mine and my husband’s heavy timetable with work. It would not be impossible for me as I work for myself and work from home most of the time and therefore have some flexibility but I would really struggle fitting in home schooling. Our daughter is very social even though she is currently struggling with social anxiety but at the same time she really does want and seek friendships and time with friends. She would actually much prefer to spend time in person with friends than online as unfortunately most kids her age seem to prefer. We had to unfortunately leave the fellowship we were part of a while back and have struggled to find a community around us so this means we are more isolated than we would like and this affects her friendships and relationships. There are other factors as well that would make it a challenge to home school her but one of the main issues that we are already facing now and we fear would only be worse if we tried home schooling is the fact that as I mentioned in last weeks message, that she seems to have no motivation and energy for anything else apart from her appearance. We try to make clear to her that she will not have a good time staying in technology or sleeping until late if she chooses to stay home and not go to school. We don't want her to think she will have a good deal and get away with avoiding whatever she tries to avoid, like being given detentions at school for arriving late, or not doing home work, etc. So we say if you are not going to go to school, then unless you have clear symptoms of illness then you will not have any technology and will have to work at home. Then unless I am on her case all day and even have to physically get her out of bed she will stay sleeping for most of the day or at least all morning and either doesn't do most of the chores she is given or will take so long that she will end up not having time to do the chores anyway. We let the chores accumulate but then she feels overwhelmed as she let's things pile up and then she finds it even harder. We are already struggling with this now so how much more if she's home everyday? Thank you.