Just spoke with my wife about your situation. Depending on age, there are two options.
The first is to take your child to a doctor and get a letter from the doctor and apply for 休學. As long as you have a doctor’s recommendation this will be the easiest and quickest. Second option would be to discuss with the teacher at school, teacher will then speak with authorities and on and on. The second takes a lot of work and usually isn’t successful, depends on how much the teacher cares about the child and their improvement. But wife says usually way too much work and they won’t get involved.
Again PM me if you would like to speak in more details. She has helped quite a few of us big noses with issues such as this.
Bingo. He’s going to automatically develop strategies to manage his traumatic stress. try and ensure the strategies are positive and enriching, say reading quietly, and not destructive, like cutting or fighting.
It will show you what’s going on in him, how he’s coping, and what you can do to help.
Spoiler: love and hugs and building trust are keys.
And, try not to get caught up in getting him or others to recall or relive what’s happened to him. He was there. Let a professional psychologist handle that.
Also and if I may, you say the boy needs a year off. Kids are incredibly resilient. Don’t lock yourself into believing anything with a time frame.
If I may make a suggestion. I think something like team sports or activities will really help. Young boys tend to respond well to doing physical activity from my experiences. Might be worth while to find some kids leagues to make some new friends and run around as a young boy should.
My experience of local school is there’s no “relaxed option.” Even if you put your kid back a year, the teacher will want every piece of paper, every test, every revision, etc. It will be a highly disciplined environment where kids are in school 8 hours/day and most are in buxiban. I think the 休學 xiuxue (~medical leave?) option is probably the way to go. A lot also depends on economics. Bilingual school or a tutor or online school abroad might be options. For court and for future issues, it would be good to have him get some time with the medical folk. At my kids’ school there was also a “counseling center” that could provide some limited counseling on adjustment to school and might help run interference with the teacher. Hope it all works out!
First I’d like to point out Art. 20 and 21 here. Seven days per year for family care isn’t much, but it’s a start. Depending on the details of your contract and official work rules, you might get more than that. The point is the employer cannot refuse.
The short answer would be no, but talk to the experts, both in the legal field and in the childcare field. This is the sort of thing the Control Yuan is theoretically there for.
Depending on the age, you can look into nature focused programs for kids recovering from difficult situations.
If you’re in Taipei, there’s also a program that I think is called “Camp Taiwan”, which is more of a social-skills program for children who have a difficult time with emotions and interacting with others (like kicking, hitting, biting, screaming, breaking things). They go hiking and play basketball and learn to interact with others. That’s an after school kind of program. But I think it’s all in Chinese. It’s also “好幾萬” (many tens of thousands) per semester, so I don’t know where you sit financially. I’ve seen children who really have no concept of what is right or wrong really improve by going to the program; I don’t know what someone who’s suffered emotional abuse can get from it. It’s run by social workers who seem to know what they’re doing though.
If I had a school age kid here, I’d homeschool. I hear there are good flexible programs out there. Homeschooled kids spend a few hours per day and are usually ahead of their peers. There are other ways to get the socialization benefits.
If I were raising kids now, I’d homeschool them.
My best friend was a missionary in Africa so she homeschooled her son. He is an extraordinary adult now.
My cousin’s wife homeschooled their 15 kids. 4 were adopted siblings from a family.
One more possibility would be to move a bit out of the city where schools are smaller and there is far less academic pressure. For example, there’s a Beigang Elementary School in Xizhi. It is at the bottom of Xiwan Road where cyclists meet before heading up the mountain. It’s 10-15 minutes away from the major part of Xizhi (where Acer is, for example) but far enough out to where most Taiwanese would consider it remote, believe it or not. It’s a small school and I imagine sports are important there. Probably more aborigine kids at that school than at the schools in the main Xizhi area.
