Parenting 101
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
There are the rare days when being a parent is nothing but sunshine and roses. Then there are days when it's a struggle just to get them to wear clean underwear. After that comes the days when being a parent just breaks your heart. The days they come home with tales of being picked on or being hurt. The days they get in trouble and you have to face the music with the school or daycare, and the days that they disappear from your sight and your heart catches in your throat till you see them again.
Today was one of the tough days. I've been meeting with various school officials because they are afraid that maybe Kendell has a learning disability. He has ADD and it often masks learning disabilities. He has always struggled with writing. The mechanics of it, the construction of a paragraph and his penmenship. I'm all for testing and isolating a problem. I want my son to have all the help he can in order to prepare him for life. But, I don't want him typecast. If he has a learning disability, let's find it and work on it. The school wants to find it and then possibly put him on a different curriculum for that subject. I disagree. I feel that they should keep him on the same track as the other students and use their tools to help him catch up.
Second guessing yourself is a normal part of parenting. It's one of the things I'm pretty good at. I walked out of the meeting with the other parties clear on how I felt, only to waffle on it while I'm alone in the car driving to work. The world speeds by and my mind is still back in that little classroom sitting on child sized chairs, me against the world.
School officials still have the ability to make me question myself. Years of living under their thumbs makes it hard to buck the system sometimes.
The end result is we are doing an overall testing to evaluate where he is at in all subjects, then we will meet again to decide on further(if any) actions.
My heart hurts today. I don't want these roadblocks in life for my child. I want to make the right decisions for him and guide him in the best way, but I have only my experiences to go by. What if I choose wrong? Worse, what if I choose right and it causes him some pain down the road in some other way? My job as a parent is to make the best choices I know how. But it's the ones I make without knowing enough, just going on gut instinct, that scare me and keep me wide eyed in the dark of night. I knew when I decided to become a mom that this was no easy job, I just didn't know how many mid terms I would be subject too.
link | posted by Kara at 1/10/2006 10:26:00 AM
2 Comments:
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Purring had this to say:
Oh boy. I feel your pain. I love my step-son dearly. He's not even in school yet and he's having problems. I just want to shake these daycare employees who keep suggesting he get on ADD drugs. Damn...he's only 5. These schools SHOULD use the tools they've been given.
- 2:51 PM, January 11, 2006
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had this to say:
It's hard when officials diagnose a person. Terms seem scary but don't have to box anyone in.
LD is a description of behavior. It only means one is perceiving through different senses unevenly with a gap between skills. A person automatrically compensates by using strategies to get around the challenged areas. In many cases it doesn't mean brokenness but just natural variation in how we learn best.- 3:19 PM, January 27, 2006
