I guess you know by now that I’m a mom whose child has struggled at school. I have a lot of anger around our journey. I feel as though, as soon as we started pre-school, we got into a rocket ship headed to a distant planet. An inhospitable planet containing human lifeforms who had ears that could hear but could not listen and eyes that could look but could not really see. I have felt as though we have landed in a God-forsaken educational desert even when we were at church affiliated schools where posters reading “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” were plastered all over the walls. I have been smiled upon with smiles that had no warmth and no feeling only disdain.

Disdain because I told these beings that my son is intelligent, charming, delightful, funny, warm, gifted and loving but shy, anxious and dyslexic. Their disdain comes from a type of superiority that they feel toward all parents. In their eyes, parents are too close to their children to see them clearly, too blinded by love to assess their own children and their abilities effectively. These so called educators feel superior in their objectivity and their understanding of the “research” around education and educational behavioral psychology.

I have something to say about this and I have something to say to parents. DO NOT BELIEVE THEM! You are your child’s most important advocate and you know your child the best. After years of searching and saying to these lifeforms “NO, you do not know my son” I am finally finding answers and solutions to help him achieve in school.  

First, I have found a pediatrician who is not afraid of telling the educational community in this town that they are not physicians and that they cannot diagnose children.  Parents, if an educator or someone affiliated with a school tries to tell you that your child has something that doesn’t sound right to you—RUN!  I have kept on saying No because my child is shy.  Did you know that kids are not allowed to be shy today?  They have to be able to join in and play with other children immediately, even if those children have play rougher and louder than your child is used to.  If a child does not find a suitable friend in a group of kids in a few days of being with said group the red flags are flying and something is wrong.  Can you imagine having to like and be friends with a group of people you just met on the bus? If it is a small group, you might not find someone that is compatible with you or that shares your interests.  You can smile and try to be friendly but you won’t enjoy the experience and they won’t really either and will gravitate toward those with similar interests.  That is normal.  Expecting a child to be an extrovert when they are not extroverted or to fit into every group of children they encounter is not normal.

Second, don’t believe that the experts at reading and writing at the school know everything or that the resource teachers are up to date.  THEY AREN’T.  In fact, even at the best schools, you can’t count on them to know about dyslexia and how to deal with it by using commonly known computer programs that facilitate the experience.  For example, there is a computer program called co writer that makes helps children trying to write by predicting the word for them.  With dyslexia, learning to type can really improve a child’s reading and then because issues with writing seem to go “hand-in-hand” so to speak with dyslexia this program can help increase the child’s writing fluency. 

Finally, anxiety may be causing the trouble that your child is having at school and not ADD or ADHD.  The reason that educators like these labels is that they can get parents to give their children these medications and get immediate results in the classroom for the 8 hours they see them.   But are these medications what the child really needs?  Some educators diagnosed ADD for our son because he was “acting out.”  We went looking for a cause.   We found that our child had a vision problem that needed physical therapy for the eyes to help him.  This has helped him to feel much less anxious because he actually wasn’t seeing with his peripheral vision–he didn’t have any.  We had him diagnosed by a pediatric optometrist not an opthamologist.  Our experience with the opthamologist was to be ignored when we said we saw his eye jerking slightly when he was tired.  The optometrist gave us exercises for our son.  Now he is able to track across a page as he reads.  And he doesn’t act out in the classroom and is apparently is not ADD.

Remember, that struggling student isn’t a student but your child and you are his/her only advocate.  Don’t let the lifeforms in the desert that school has become  steal their hearts and their lives by labeling them inappropriately.  I understand that there are some children who are receiving help and support from the schools and their teachers but I know so many many parents who are hurting for their children as I have and are as exhausted as I am.  This is my rallying cry to them to keep at it!