9
Nov
I have two kinds of kids at my house: The oppressed and the oppressor. These roles change based on what time it is, what mood people are in, what direction the wind is blowing in Alaska, and any other number of factors I have yet to figure out. Of course this is an oversimplification as some of the kids, I have seven kneebiters in case you are new here, don’t fit into those categories all the time and there are the occasional bouts of peace in the house but for the purposes of this discussion those two categories are what matters.
The problem is that these attitudes are self-perpetuating and breaking the cycle has to be done on levels at once and we have not figured that out yet to be perfectly honest. The first step was ADD testing and medication for DS2. If you are new here you probably don’t know I have a near-phobic reaction to medical personnel. This is due to various reasons rooted firmly in reality and some rooted closer to Never Never Land but it is what it is. I say that to say this: I did not start getting any of the horde tested for ADD without a lot of soul searching, research, and frankly sheer bloodymindedness on my part. I did not want to medicate my children and turn them into Ritalin zombies, stunt their growth, risk the other complications, and so on without a damn good reason. DD1 gave me my first good reason and the meds she is on boosted her ability to handle sitting still and completing school work so much I almost felt guilty for not getting her tested sooner. DS2 was different in that he is working three years above the standard for his age so school wasn’t an issue. What was an issue was his bullying everyone, including attempting to bully Momma and me, to get what he wanted and his out of control fits when the bullying failed. We tried everything from crunchy “I love you and I understand so let’s talk” parenting methods to swift corporal punishment for the bullying and all of them had the same effect: No change at all. So it was almost out of desperation that I decided to have him tested. He is all of seven years old and has a wonderful personality when he’s not being a little Pol Pot and I was deathly afraid of wiping that out along with the hyperactivity if he got diagnosed with ADD and went on meds for treatment. While I feel my fears were founded in reality they turned out to be wrong. On his meds he still acts up sometimes, he still pushes his brothers and sisters around sometimes when he gets mad, and he still throws a fit here and there. The difference is that these things appear to be habits rather than a lack of control. He is able, now, to pull himself back out of the acting out and change his direction and he is getting better and better at it as time goes on. His personality, the good parts, show more often than not these days and he can be a real help when he sets his mind to it.
One of the things I learned while researching discipline methods for kids with ADD is that he needs choices instead of orders. For instance one of their grandmothers was going to pick the older five kids up and take them to a movie. My better half agreed for this without remembering I had told them they were allowed to do nothing but sit down at the table for meals unless their rooms got cleaned. Every last kid was grounded from everything until their bedrooms were clean. For DS2 just telling him “Go clean your room” wouldn’t work. He may clean for a while then play, respond with “I don’t want to”, or simply go into his room without a word and start playing. To combat this we explain his choices to him. “You can go clean your room and work until it is done then go to the movies with grandma or you can not help clean your room and sit at home while everyone else goes to the movies and has fun. What do you want to do?” “I want to go to the movie!” “How do you get to do that?” “Clean my room” (In his best Charlie-Brown-why’s-everybody-always-pickin’-on-me voice complete with defeated body language) “So what do you want to do?” “Clean my room.” This doesn’t work all the time. For larger jobs he still gets distracted and plays but he understands that what happens is his choice and his alone. There is no “If you do or don’t do X I will do this” but rather “If you do or don’t do X you will cause Y to happen”. This makes things his responsibility and his alone. It may seem strange to put emphasis on responsibility with a child who has been diagnosed with a disorder that is marked by a lack of control but it works. It’s not a magic pill that fixes everything but it does help a lot. By presenting choices when it’s something we are telling him to do he has also learned that it’s his choice how he treats the other kids. Sometimes he makes a bad choice and sometimes he makes the right one but what seven year old can be expected to make the right choice every time? He is a great kid and he is learning, along with us, how to manage things better and I know we will work through helping him change.
Now DD3 is about to be three years old and I see much of the same attitude and behaviors that we dealt with in DS2. I would love to say that we just have to work with her until she’s old enough to go to the neurologist and be tested for ADD but I can’t. I have the same fears as I’ve had about every single one of the kids we’ve had tested so far. I don’t think it’s a bad things to have these concerns as I believe that we, as a society, rely on medication to fix way too many things and when we have school nurses, not even PAs, diagnosing kids with neurological disorders and GPs accepting that diagnoses without question and prescribing based on it then we have a problem. Of course we homeschool so that will never be an issue but I don’t want to be the equivalent of the school nurse in my own home. So I struggle with each child that I take to see the doctor for this or any other problem but I always take them in the end. I don’t want to cripple them by not having something treated that could have been. These are hard decisions for a parent to make, at least they should be, and if you are struggling with them then do your research, find a medical doctor (read: neurologist and not a shrink) you can trust, and see where things lead. Always be informed and always ask questions. If your kids are in public school and the nurse or administration is trying to say they have a disorder then always always always seek another opinion and preferably one that knows nothing of the school’s “diagnosis”.
We are trying to raise our Lost Boys as responsible men and our Princesses as respectable women. I will probably fail at a lot of the necessary pieces of these puzzles and my wife will fail at others but in the end I hope to give them all what my parents gave me: the tools to become responsible adults regardless of much their parents screwed it up. If I can do that then I have done better than most parents in my age group.
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