Anachronistic Mom Blog

So Your Kid is Crashing and Burning in Kindergarten?

So.  Your kid has sensory stuff and they're crashing and burning in Kindergarten?

1. Deal with the school. If it won't traumatize your child, it might be OK. Work with them. Remember, that schools will pay for evaluations and treatment. If you have an autistic child, for example, you can get state-paid treatment starting at pre-school ages.  If the school won't help and if the situation is traumatizing your kid, do what you need to, including yanking your kid and homeschooling.  There are wonderful resources out there.  Use your judgment.

2. Learn your insurance. They will want to scr*w you over on this one. Work actively with your doctors and your insurance to find a diagnosis that they will use. If not sensory integration, then perhaps pragmatic language. I would strongly urge you to not use the term sensory integration anywhere near an insurance company. Find diagnoses that will work. I am currently on month 8 of trying to get any part of 20-something thousand dollars worth of treatment and evaluations that I spent on my son last year. Not a dime so far. The latest response I got from them is that none of the things that we were treating were "medical problems." And unfortunately a snorted response of "assholes" is considered inappropriate (and worse, is ineffective.)

3. Try to find a mother's group around you. I would suggest looking for special-needs kids in your school district. In our area, some of the school districts have special-needs kids PTA's. If nothing else, these moms can tell you which doctors are good. And believe me, those doctors are few and far between for the conditions that you're talking about. My friend Shannon, whose blog slogan is "We're here, we're quirky, get used to it" is an autism mom who helped found Septar, the Special Education PTA for Redwood City. Here's her blog, Squidalicious.

She also helped create the Can I Sit With You blog that talks about social issues in school:

And here's the special needs kid list that I belong to (among several) in my area. You can join it and ask for advice if you'd like.

4. Start looking for some doctors that you trust. It will take more than one doctor. Neurologists don't know about movement. Movement people don't do vision. Vision therapists don't do hearing, and so forth. You will have to build your own organizational structure and you should go in and try to find diagnoses of these things. This is a broad-system issue. It's rarely just one thing. Note that no doctor helped us until I visited Dr. Susan Johnson, with offices outside of Sacramento and up in Colma, by Grass Valley.

Dr. Johnson gave my son a movement exam and when he couldn't do things like stand on one foot at 7.5 (!) (but who looks for THAT?) told me that balance is located in the same place as hearing in the brain, and that it's a law of nature that if balance is compromised, hearing goes out the window. Therefore, until we got his balance under control, he wouldn’t be listening very well.  Interesting and really gave us insight into some of my son's behavior. She's very smart, very good, and nonstandard. Plus, she worked with her own child, who was PDD-NOS, and he is now happy and doing well in high school. 

Dr. Johnson gave us context.  She made observations about my son and related them to brain development, giving me a baseline and context for how the brain develops, and then she talked about a path that would help my son develop. She told me why.  Think about it.  How many of your doctors tell you why?  Pathetically few.

So you think that your kid has Sensory Integration Problems? Or ADHD?

My friend reports that her child is having trouble in Kindergarten and might have some sensory issues. She's kicking herself for not noticing.

I know the feeling.  When my child was in first grade, his writing was all on top of itself and at the middle of a sentence, would start heading up, toward the top of the page.  Up until then, we had just been working on some fairly quirky social patterns, using the vaunted "let them grow up" approach.  Now all of a sudden my child was feeling like a failure in school.

We finally said "OK, time isn't healing the quirky stuff" and took him in to a wonderful doctor, who gave him a movement exam (Note: this is par for the course if you live in Europe. Every child gets one before they start Kindergarten.  We hear that GOOD doctors give those also, but unfortunately, our child's pediatrician spent my son's first five years experiencing a middle-age crisis.  He went from being normal looking to getting more and more "hip" until he was greeting us dressed in drapey rayon shirts with loud prints.  And then he retired. )

We discovered that my son couldn't stand on one foot at 7.5  And what parent  measures THAT?  He couldn't remember letters if they were covered up.  He is left-eyed and right handed and the two sides of hig brain weren't talking with one another. His brain didn't know where his body was in space. To this day, if you make him close his eyes and touch a spot on his left arm, if he tries to touch that same spot on his right arm he will be a good two inches away.  We knew that he had a hard time socially, but were blown away to realize that he had real physical problems caused by stutters in brain development.

Nobody talks about this stuff.  This type of thing is not in the public brain.  Neurologists don't even measure and monitor movement when they give our children exams.  I took my child in for a neurological exam when he was four years old and was basically told to send him to Boy Scouts for social integration.  Had the doctor, in his four thousand-dollar examination, given my child some rudimentary movement exams, my son might be absolutely fine today.  

If you're going through this typeof thing with your child, don't bother wasting time by kicking yourself.  Because if you parented as though you were afraid of nascent developmental problems, you would raise a neurotic little weirdo, destined to hate you for life.  And of course, the brighter your kid is, the more he or she hides or compensates for weaknesses.  Right?

If there's something going on with your child and people are having trouble putting their fingers on it, settle in and start reading. Because what I have to say will help you.  And there's more on my website. Start with the Sensory page.  Or maybe the ADHD page.  I have not had time to put all of what I've learned onto the site, but it's a start.

A new direction for Anachronistic Blog

My blogging has been stalled.  That's because my interests are a rich stew of domestic issues, cognitive research, alternative teaching and parenting techniques, (and when I let it leak through, over twenty years of silicon valley professional) that it's enough to confuse anyone.  To choke a horse, as we say in the country.

If there's one thing that you're supposed to do in this age of "branding yourself," it's that you're supposed to make it easy on your readers.  Separate your stuff out.  I'm sure that those of you who like reading snarky silicon valley observations and stories of being an alien in upper-middle-class suburbia are not interested in my views on wikis.  And those of you who are interested in homeschooling and neural development might not care about the Maker Faire or assorted other geek fun things.

So I have been frozen for several months, trying to think of a new blog name.  Or a new login name.  And I just can't do it.  I'll keep this blog as a non-technical, non-business blog, but from now on, I'm opening the windows on the research and work that I've been doing with my child for the past five years.  I haven't really talked much about it before, but I've learned a terrific amount, and I'm starting to talk.

I don't have a huge amount of time for snark, although posing and too much grooming still can set me off on tangents, and it's nice to see you all again.