Teen Troubles

Lately, it's been quite a roller coaster around my house. It isn't something that can be blamed on my babies, either.

Back around his birthday, my eldest starting having super adverse reactions to his ADHD medication.

It started with the misplacement of his Nintendo DS, or at least that is the event that really showed that something was amiss.

My child has every piece to every toy that he has ever had, literally. They may not be kept in the exact same location as one another, but a piece can matched with its mate fairly quickly.

He NEVER loses anything, 'til now. To add insult to injury, he doesn't really know if he lost his DS or if he took it to school and it got stolen.

He honest to God cannot remember. It was so bad, that one day he came into the dining room and confessed having broken the house rule of having taken the DS to school and that he has faced the consequence by losing it and was asking for his house punishment.

The next day, I found him rummaging through his bedroom and the garage frantically searching for the missing DS because in reality, he had no earthly idea what became of it.

When I sat him down and talked to him, I discovered that he had been falling asleep on the school bus every afternoon on the way home from school.

This behaviour had been going on for weeks, and he had assumed that it was normal and was living with it.

I felt awful. Over the next week, I noticed that not only was he sleeping on the way home from school, but that he just could not stay awake in the evenings at home, either.

Then, one weekend, it happened. I experienced "Zombie child" behaviour first hand. I had always heard about the adverse affects of ADHD medication, but I had never in my life expected something so awful.

My child came home from school, and just vegetated. He lay on my couch and stared at the wall for literally hours on end.

The television was on, but he couldn't watch it. His siblings tried to get his attention, sometimes even climbing up on top of him, but he didn't seem to notice.

After the babies went to sleep, I tried snapping him out of it, but NOTHING worked. I even tried to get him to run to Wal-mart with me at 9 p.m. at night (usually something he would have found funny and jumped at the opportunity of going) but he would not budge.

The entire weekend went that way. Monday, I put a call into his Doctor's office about him having adverse reactions to his medication.

The only call back that I received was to schedule a re-evaluation of his situation by the clinic where he sees that doctor, which was to be the following Friday.

I had thought that they might help us or that we might find out something from his doctor by then.

We went in for the evaluation, were told that our case was a priority because of the bad side-effects that he was experiencing, and that the doctor would be calling us shortly.

I finally had to make the decision to take him off of the medication myself so that he could function enough to stay awake at school.

The doctor NEVER did call me back. The only correspondence that we received from the office was a letter referring us back to our pediatrician saying that because my child was not aggressive, violent, or mentally unstable that they could not help us.

So, here we are, without any sort of medication, flying solo in a world of distraction. My child did poorly this past 9 weeks on his grades because the brunt of it was spent on that high dosage of medication that was having the opposite of the desired effect and scary side effects to boot.

Now, we are working together to try and find ways that he can teach himself to focus without the medication in some attempt to get his grades up.

When we had the re-evaluation with the clinical manager at that doctor's office, we were informed that our diagnosis may be off, but that he just could not tell us anything because he wasn't licensed to do so.

I do not have any idea where to start anymore. The teachers were the ones who decided that he had ADHD and all of the questionnaires sent to them by the doctor were filled out to that affect.

His symptoms off of the medication are mainly concentration and focusing. He isn't really hyper and never has been unless he was taking that last medication.

We had an incident over the weekend that I do not know whether to blame him for, or chalk it up to lack of concentration and being able to focus.

Last night, I found myself having to ride him about a project that should have been being worked on for the past WEEK.

He had to re-research everything because the original work printed only half of what was on the page (the left half) and it took most of the evening.

Getting him to write a copy that was spelled correctly and not scratched out on was also difficult.

It took us until 11p.m. to get it finished and even then it was not as good as it should have been.

So I am torn. I do not want him to be put on another round of medication that will make things worse, yet I do not know where to start in asking for help.

I only have focus and concentration problems to go off of, and the idea that a clinical manager thinks that he does not have ADHD.

What is a Mum to do?

Of Midol, Bomb Threats, and Doodles, Oh My!

This school year has been the most eye-opening of all since my little boy started school when he was four years old. I find myself a pretty tolerant mother, one who does her best to work with my child’s teachers toward educating my child.

I have overlooked the glaringly large lettered sign on the door of the four-year-old early childhood development class that stated, “This is a noisy learning environment” when my child was sent to the office for talking in class at the age of four. I supported that teacher and spoke with my little boy about talking in class even though the sign and the class teaching method was supposed to encourage talking as a means of communication at an early age.

I supported his first grade teacher who found that he had mastered the first grade materials in the effort to get him work that was more challenging for him so that he wouldn’t sit in the back of the room and make pencil people and amuse himself otherwise only to run up against that brick wall of a principal who found his behavior in class not good enough to warrant new materials above his grade level that he so needed.

But this year, this has been the absolute most difficult time to support those teachers and his principal. Granted, it’s not a matter of subject matter not being challenging, as he is in a magnet program. It is more a matter of finding out that one teacher habitually calls him a liar in front of the class during discussion periods where the children are asked to talk about themselves and their hobbies(he has worked as an actor since the age of seven for a renaissance festival and actually received a paycheck for his work-luckily that day he had his child actor card/work permit that is stamped “ACTOR” in bright red letters across his picture and one of his faire ID’s in his wallet and was able to whip it out when that teacher decided to call him on it.) I supported the same teacher when I was called about his planner not being signed repeatedly and his grade being a zero for it (turns out I had been signing it all along, but she was looking for it to be on a line that she had become used to him drawing across the bottom of the page for a signature line that he hadn’t used previously and my signature was there in the block designated for her class work to be entered into.)Did she change the score to match the facts? No, of course not.

I even was fairly complacent when there was a bomb threat incident at the school and a special meeting was called for the parents, leaving the PTSA to contact everyone, and although we are PTSA members and even on some of the committees, we were not among the select few notified of the meeting. In fact, there are about 400 children in his 6th grade class alone, and only about 200 parents were contacted. Hmm...

Then there was the time when my child watched his friends get beaten up by a group of people who were obviously singling out the “Different” kids and encircling them and verbally and physically bullying them. What did my child do? He went to the nearest adult in authority on the playground that day. Was it a teacher? No. It was a policeman whose presence was there because of the bomb threat incident. Did he help my child or the ones who were obviously getting hurt? No he did not. He told my child that was not what he was there to do and to go find a teacher for help. What kind of an example is that setting? My child learned that the police are pretty to look at, but not always able to protect him. That is just what he needed to find out at the age of twelve.

The bomb threat made headlines in the paper and was widely talked about locally. That was the sole purpose for the “Extra Security” presence of the police on campus in the first place. A seventh grader was made an example out of because of that note found in the bathroom and arrested and expelled from the school.

This event led to other schools following suit and turning other small children over to the police when similar incidences occurred at an elementary school locally.

We have spent the last year watching the school officials make examples of these children. Now, yet another example is being made. A high school aged girl has been made an example of because she shared her Midol with a friend. This child is being made out to be some sort of drug-pushing teen and is now facing having to finish the school year set apart from her peers. Not only that, but she will now spend the entire first nine weeks of next school year in an alternative school which is a place reserved for the truly undisciplined children who are a danger to others and themselves. To top it off, then the same child will be required to complete a six week drug seminar/rehabilitation type program since they have labeled her a “Pusher.” Further more, the administration responsible for her discipline has stated that they aren’t as concerned about the child having the Midol at school (a violation of a very archaic policy) but are concerned because she shared it with a friend.

This is the biggest farce. As children, we ALWAYS had a back-up purse-sized bottle of some sort of aspirin or Advil or Midol/Pamprin type medicine. Did we steal it from the drug-store or sneak it from the medicine cabinet? Nope, our mother’s gave it to us so that when we had headaches or really bad cramps we could take the meds (not the entire bottle-we weren’t stupid and could be trusted enough to have it from our parents) and then once we took the meds, we could STAY IN SCHOOL and DO OUR WORK and not have to be checked out by some relative and miss the rest of our school day. This issue isn’t anything new and its not going to change the way we as moms give our daughters pain relief that is needed upon occasion(once a month for you males out there) to get them through their days.


They are more upset over the liability issue of her having given it to a friend and the “What if” factor over the idea that the friend could have had an adverse reaction to it and the administration might have been sued over it. Now really, I do wonder what the precedent is on children or families of children getting sued for sharing their over-the-counter minor pain relievers with their friends and that friend having some sort of "reaction" to it. On the norm, by that age children KNOW what they have allergic reactions to and are pretty much not going to take something that they KNOW is going to make them seriously ill.

I wonder if they would treat a five-year old who is caught sniffing glue the same way... After all, we now know that the fumes from glue could cause euphoria and is considered a form of “Drug use.” What if any child had been caught sniffing their liquid paper or their markers in class for the same reason- should these kids be made to finish their year in an alternative school that SHOULD be full of the truly "Bad" kids who have REAL problems? And then should we put them through a speed-rehab seminar on drugs??

How would that look if that seminar was populated with a bunch of elementary school kids who all got caught sniffing their Elmer’s in art class? These people are seriously saying, "Let’s make an example of them" and that’s really pathetic on their part!!!

The whole incident makes that school administration & the board backing it appear assenine and incompetent. Why should this child have to finish her final few weeks of school at some alternative school for delinquent children who have REAL problems and mental/violent issues and why should we waste our time (and potentially create a serious issue with the child who shouldn’t be in the class to begin with) sending her to the anti-drug seminar for the budding druggies?

Today, this child’s appeal hearing was held. Was the decision overturned? Of course it wasn’t, how else could this administration continue to get press once school season rolls around next year?

There are many other real problem children in the area. A teen-aged boy just got arrested for raping and beating an elderly lady in her home that he was going to rob. Another group of kids are in jail over the shooting of a boy at a local McDonalds-there’s service with a smile for you… Initially that incident was billed as a “School Rivalry” by the press. Hmm do we see a trend here?? But alas, there is a teenaged girl in Haughton who will get to go to an alternative school and sit through six weeks of drug seminar just so that her school system will get their day in the sun by making an example over someone giving a friend some Midol. What a way to encourage and increase enrollment in the district.

It’s a WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY to make an example of little girls who are caught sharing aspirin or Midol with their friends like this! It is a farce and that school system is making themselves look like a bunch of idiots and they are fast losing any credibility they may have had. But, then again, this is Louisiana and it’s not often these folks get their time in the spotlight, now is it?

I now have to talk to my child about making certain that NOTHING he does is misconstrued as “Threatening” to anyone or anything. He must make sure to never write any “I hate teacher” notes or “I hate” doodles of any kind. I used a doodle he drew in the second grade as an example of things that can be taken out of context. He drew a very long serpent style dragon with the outline of a lady in its belly curled around a funeral pyre draped with ribbon with the caption, “I hate teacher” written on it. In today’s world, that doodle could have gotten him expelled or arrested. I know that it was just a harmless doodle... We have also talked about eliminating the popular phrase, "Da Bomb" from his vocabulary lest anyone misunderstand the expression and feel that he is referring not to something that is great or wonderful, but to something that might explode and kill someone. I know that to him some things may not be signifigant and may appear mundane, but to the rest of the city it may be the next front page headline touting our fine school system with him as an example. Seriously, what are these people doing to our children in the name of creating "Examples?"