Sanne, thank you for the information, and WOW at both your story and your son's. We've had many late night discussions here, involving tears on my part, very stressful, wondering if medication could possibly "take the edge off" our son's oppositional nature, his impulsivity, and help improve his focus. It has just been very difficult to go that route when he has never been in an educationally appropriate environment for us to see what shakes out, what problems remain when he is with true peers and challenged on a daily basis...when perhaps he is not made anxious from the effort to squash himself into an environment that does not work well with who he is and what he can do, an environment that values conformity when he is a non-conformist. We have really dug our heels in and not wanted to medicate just to make him more manageable for an educational system that was not doing squat to meet his needs. But we also need to be honest with ourselves and acknowledge that some of this will likely NOT be fixed with the gifted accelerated program that he will enter next year (he tested into that this year, 70 out of the 3200 3rd graders in our district were offered spots, and my son was one of them, thank goodness). And I do agree that if symptoms are troublesome, it might be unwise to dismiss as an OE.
Your son's story sounds similar to that of my older child, who has Inattentive Type ADHD. His gifted area is reading/ELA, but when it came to math, he could test anywhere from 60th to 95th percentile, depending on the day. He can make an A or he could fail a regular class test, depending on the day. We eventually figured out that he was having real difficulty regulating his attention (he could read for hours because that was easy and required so little effort for him, but could not focus on math because it required more effort) and started him on a non-stimulant medication to see if he improved. His math teacher said it was like putting glasses on someone who couldn't see; after an adjustment period, he was suddenly ON in math class. This past fall, he started middle school and was placed in the top math track, where only about 30 of the 375 6th graders are placed. In MATH, where he had struggled to do basic mental math the year before because he couldn't keep his thoughts straight long enough. He didn't go from IQ of 108 to DYS, not by any means, but on a smaller scale, in his world, this was a HUGE jump for him--all because we admitted he had a problem and got aggressive in helping him. I am constantly wondering if I'm depriving my younger one, the one this original post was all about, of such an experience by holding back on treating some of his symptoms. He does very very well overall academically, whereas my older one didn't, but his teachers do report problems with focus and attention in some environments. And his impulsivity is very likely not limited to physical things; it's likely mental as well. The psychologist noted it during testing, called him a hurricane because he was constantly reminding him to S-L-O-W D-O-W-N.
Thank you so much for all of this food for thought. That's why I posted here!
