Saturday, July 12, 2008

Here's One

My son, who is now 21 years old, has never been a discipline problem. He never had any reason to rebel, so I've never experienced any late night calls from the police department or him stealing from me because he needed to buy smokes, drugs or get some idiot to pimp him beer from the liquor store across the street. He's your a-typical gamer/slacker anxious to find where life's going to take him as he gets through college and grows up.

At one point, he was the target of a well-meaning educator who thought he had ADHD. I took a few classes after work to help see if he was really this way or what was really going on in class when he would stare out the window while the teacher was trying to get his attention. Over time, I came to the conclusion that he was just smart and bored in a over-crowded class that spent more time reviewing and repeating for the benefit of the non-English speaking students than teaching the mind of my curious child.

So when the title of the article "Kicked out of Preschool" flashed upon my computer screen after I checked my email this morning, I had to read it to squelch my own curiosity about how and what was going on with a kid like this. I recognize that true ADHD kids can be hyper for a number of reasons and will to varying degrees exhaust their parents physically, emotionally, and mentally. At one point, I thought my nephew was ADHD until I separated him from his older brother and once he was given one-on-one attention not having to compete for it, his behavior was fine. It was almost night and day.

The behavior problems described in the article were aggressive behavior, including biting and hitting, and other hard-to-control behaviors, such as running away. Using my nephew as an example, imagine a kid with siblings who comes from a broken home, divorced mom working more than 40 hours a week to make ends meet and now the kid now acts out for any number of reasons in a preschool class because now mom is gone again and the child can't cope. He lives in an apartment with nowhere to run, gets little attention at home because of competing siblings and the demands on his mother of running a household and is babysat with the TV while mom tries to relax. While mom cooks a high fat, starch and caloric meal, cheap, quick food with little nutritional value, she also thinks about her own monthly cravings and decides everyone will get a scoop of ice cream before they get ready to go to bed.

This parenting sounds normal enough and everyday, right? It actually sets up the ADHD prone kid for failure.

Some of the women and I were talking out loud at work this week and it seems we have very strong views about how parenting should be for the first 5 years of life. Mom needs to be mom at home and not work because the most important job you can ever do in your life is "parent". If you approach it as a job and do everything in your power to perform it well, your and society's reward is a respectful, compassionate, functional adult.

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