Hi everybody,
I finally find the time to answer. It does not mean that everything is back in order (indeed till my son was born, nothing is in order), but the situation is less critical right now (for how long ????). Anyway, thank you for your support and understanding…
My "wife" (we are not married) cried several times last week, feeling lost by my son's behavior. … She is so anxious about school also … So I am, but in a different way … let's say with less guts.
Concerning the drugs, it looks like that there are only three medications available in France from normal drugstores (not easily). They are all based on the same active molecule as Ritalin. And, up to my knowledge, they are the only ones our neurologist prescribes … And honestly, we do have hesitated giving those drugs to our child.
Before answering SIaSL in details, I will deal with the Asperger issue. Indeed, we are in the process of passing diagnostics by a specialized psychologist (in April). Many of its behavior lead to think about that (it is surprising that after just 2 posts describing my son, Asperger is quoted … many psychiologists in France would argue the mother with her too huge love for his son, claiming that high potential, ADHD are just fantasy, while taking the money and making the parents losing their time … we lived that for 18 very painful months). Nevertheless, my son has rather good social skills. He can talk with anyone easily .. OK, the way he communicates can seem rather weird. Besides, he is not afraid of changing routines. He also has a lot of humour (he very easily understands wordplays and formulates ones of his own). His present psychologist said us that there are different Asperger level… Honestly, I do not know what to think about this hypothesis and I am unsure that passing the diagnostic will convince me that he is or isn't Asperger. What do you mean SIaSL about being Asperger in France ?
Thank you aculady for your interesting comments. One of the big problems of transitions with our son is that we work as you propose for the homeworks (advance warnings, fun stuffs after the homework and other hard things). But that does not work …
As far as hiring someone for the homework, we tried that but several home-teachers simply quit after a few tries …
Now, the answers to SIaSL :
1) "can you outline a pattern for the current behavior, when did problems start appearing, what the evolution was and how/when you got the diagnosis (ADHD/dyslexia)? Who did you see, when (how old was he), and did you get all the labels at the same time? Do you have detailed scores for the WISC-IV (all domains and subscores)?"
My son had problem to sleep when he was a baby. I remember his first full-nights at the age of 18 months and our hope … Well, it lasted 3 days or so and he finally left us sleep normally at about 2.5. He started walking at 11 months, started to speak rather early but not very early, but he was described as having a pretty good vocabulary at the day-care center. Problems really started appearing at the "maternelle" school (guess it is kindergarten in the US). During these 3 years, all his teachers told that he was very kind, had friends but he did not work at all .. He was just here doing nothing else than being bored. It started seeing a psychologist during these years at 4.5 or so… This f**** (sorry can't find anything else to describe her) psychologist just told us that there was nothing to do except waiting he stopped being immature. Told that we were just too anxious, that the mother was too close to our child, that we did not do the good things … My wife was on therapy, I was and we were on a couple counseling. All these so-called professional were just in a deny of High Potential when we talked about that. Indeed, at the age of 5, his teacher told us that she understood nothing to our son and that she thought about a High Potential. Anyway, my wife accepted this denial and I had to struggle 6 months to make her recognize all that. After she had acknowledged we were running in a dead-end with this psychologist, a pediatrician sent us to a good psychologist who sent us to a speech therapist. Our son was them measured as being late in reading learning. A WISC IV was passed at the age of 6 and 2 months. The scores were :
VCI : 155
Vocabulary : 19
Similarities : 19
Comprehension : 19
PRI : 135
Block design : 14
Picture Concepts : 19
MAtrix : 14
WMI : 115
Digit span : 14
Arithmetic : 11
PSI : 83
Coding : 7
Symbol search : 7
Based on that, a neurologist diagnose ADHD ( last year at the age of 6) and gave him a long-delivery Ritalin equivalent. Things then improved at school, but not that much and definitely not at home: it was the beginning of rebellion, violence, tantrums …. But, the progresses at school were not as expected. He refused to write most of the time, had a lot of difficulty to read compared to his school friends. The big thing with the drugs was that he stopped making the clown and disturbed the class (an important point for the teacher who was so disappointed just after 3 weeks of school in September 2010). It also clearly helped him in having a readable writing. This school year (CE1 indeed as suggested by SIaSL … 2nd grade in the US I guess ?) was getting really bad .. No progress. We changed speech therapist for one of the best in our countryside. She told us that he is dyslexic and dyscalculic (at the age of 7). He presently sees her 3 times a week and it seems that he finally starts reading not as fluently as the other children, but he reads much better now …
"2) what's going on at school? What grade is he in? CE1/2nd grade? What month was he born in (is he young for that grade?)? Is he showing the same behavior issues there? How are the teachers handling his differences -- both the giftedness and the learning disabilities? If you are about to get an AVS (note to other participants: special assistant = 1:1 aide within a mainstream classroom) I am guessing the situation is not good there, but... more details?"
What's going on at school ??? What a huge question …. He was born in july. As I said the drug helps him controlling himself and probably focusing, but most of the time the teacher writes in his place and tries to question him verbally. I guess she is doing great job and as much as she can, but he is not alone in the classroom. That is why we and she asked for a special assistant in the classroom, but we are still waiting for her coming. His giftedness is definitely not taken into account. But as SIaSL who seems to know how things work in France should know, it is quite dangerous in France to stress on giftedness care. Indeed, the reaction of many teachers can be kind of "if you are so intelligent, you should succeed. So leave me alone". So we prefer insisting on the difficulties to find some help. One of the big anxiety source of the mother is her questioning on his possible grade repeating … French schooling is much based on writing, so my son is facing a lot of problems. The reason for this thread is precisely on the giftedness care at home, just to overcome this lack at school.
"3) How does he do with other kids? Does he have siblings? Friends? At school? Outside of school?"
Everything did work pretty well with other kids till the end of kindergarten. He had a lot of friends, boys and girls, although he was different. He was kind of with them but not at the same place (on the moon or somewhere else). As an example, when neighbors played soccer (you know the strange game where you just can touch the ball with the feet), he could run in any directions or played bumping the other players or simply take a chalk-stone and draw things on the asphalt. Last year (when he was 6), he had less and less boy friend but still had a lot of girl friends. But with the girls getting older and gathering between girls, my son is more and more alone. He is definitely not interested by the same things as the others. Outside of school … no friends although we are living in a small village ( he used to have some)
He has a sister, 5 year-old. She is a magic girl, understand his brother difference, often hide things she can do to her brother ( I guess she is quite intelligent and that is much more easy to acknowledge than for his brother). She starts reading almost by herself, uses a very elaborated vocabulary. (she starts also being bored at school).She easily entered her brother imagination and can play for a long time with him until things get bad (but I guess it the case in every family). That gives surrealistic discussions between them during meals where the mother and I cannot say a word …
"4) You said you went through 3 dyslexia specialists. What didn't work with the previous ones, what works with this one?"
The first one was too young. She did too simple things with our son. The second one was better but did a lot of things by playing. She said our son is exceptional ...Such assertions were not what we were waiting for. We wanted our son to enter reading. We did not see any progress with both of them. Moreover, our son is very strong in obtaining what he wants: he simply turned these specialists as he wants. Now, the specialist is very experienced and succeeds in making him work on exercises he would have refused to do with the others.
"Re. reading, how did he react to the higher level texts you reqd to him? Did you try books on tape? Books that are appropriate for his probably low reading level might be excruciatingly boring to him."
During reading higher level texts, he is always very attentive, asks questions on the terms he does not understand. He anticipates a lot. For example, when I read him "around the world in 80 days" from Jules Vernes in its integral version, he quickly told me that the thief was phileas fogg before I even thought about that (well at the end of the book it is not phileas fogg …). I guess I should try books on tape, but the mother does not truly agree with that.
"And I would definitely talk with him about his exceptionalities -- if only to say that you understand how frustrating it can be to have so many ideas and such a hard time getting them out."
Well, we did not have done that .. We should think about that …
Well it is quite late. I go to sleep
Thank you again for your answers.
