I'm a young parent (mid 20s) raising my son (7 y/o boy) with my wife, and we are having a really hard time right now. I should mention a disclaimer being that my son was raised by people other than my wife and I for six years. I am his stepparent and the better part of raising him so far has been molding him to being a polite, respectful, and independent young man.For some reason lately, my son has just been a massive brat lately and nothing we've tried so far is working. It's all a temporary band-aid on a wound that will eventually burst a day or so later (of course this is me metaphorically speaking about his "issues" lately).The biggest issue we are having with him is, and I don't know where he learned it, lying. He will lie whenever he really gets the chance, but especially if it involves doing homework, schoolwork, or anything that is not playing. For example, we make him do Math every single day he gets home from school because his math performance in school is lacking and we try to strengthen his math by making him do at least five pages in a workbook before he gets to play.He will do the five pages, come to either myself or my wife, and we check it. For awhile, he was pretending the old pages he worked on a few days ago were the ones he just did. My wife and I losing track and being just busy in general, we never really picked up on it, so we just said "okay, good job" because the answers were right, and he went to play. Eventually we figured out the games he was playing, and now we sign off on the pages he does.After awhile, he figured out another method of lying, which is to skim to the back of the page with the answer key, and just copy the answers. Eventually we picked up on this, and now ever since we cracked down on it (tearing out the answers, lol), he refuses to do math. He has (and I am not joking) sat on the same page for two days. He got home from school, was sent to do five pages, and stayed on the entire first page until after he ate dinner, showered, and then went to bed.He would just sit there in his room, refusing to do it, saying he "cannot do it", when he's 100% capable. The reason I know he is capable is because if you sit down with him and show him how to do it, he does it without issues at all. But if you send him back in his room to work on it by himself, he gets stuck again and refuses to do it. After awhile I went in his room to check on him to see if he was still stuck, and he was playing with dinosaur figures and quickly tried to hide them when I entered his room.He's also getting in trouble in school now for lying, which is what is causing me the concern. His teacher told my wife today that when he doesn't want to do schoolwork, or a tasking that he was assigned, etc... he will tell the teacher his stomach hurts. This will get him sent to the nurse to lay down, and will obviously get him out of doing any work or tasking he was involved in.To top it all off, when he ultimately does not get his way, he bursts into tears and throws "tantrums" sometimes. He cries in school a lot according to the teacher when kids don't share toys, and when he doesn't get his way.I have no idea what to do. I've tried everything, even things I didn't really do before (i.e. spanking his butt), or taking things extremely important to him and not giving them back to teach him that my wife and I aren't joking, etc. I've tried rewards, giving into him and letting him skip math practice for the night and playing thinking it'd help him, sitting down with him and working through the entire schoolwork, talking to him one on one and trying to explain big boy rules and how what he's doing is bad, etc. Nothing is working, and if it does, 24 hrs later it won't matter and he's back to lying and being lazy. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2rmMX1X
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