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Lecka

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Everything posted by Lecka

  1. I read one of the Roald Dahl books that talked about his time at boarding school, and it made an impression on me. It really is depressing and disappointing that things are so normalized sometimes.
  2. In my current state a tag agency could renew an expired ID and is much easier than a DMV.
  3. Yes, I had a high school student refuse to use a locker. He did know how to use a lock, his 6th grade class had lockers inside the classroom and they learned to use the locks during that year. It was at a K-6 elementary school and part of their preparation for middle school. I had a lot of issues and in picking my battles, this was nowhere near making it into the places I would put my energy. I think it sounds like you have a sweet daughter who is doing well in school, to think you would march in and make her use the locker. Here they actually put QR codes on the lockers and you get to choose your own locker if you want one…. A lot of kids don’t want one. It doesn’t make sense to me either, but that is the situation. They can at least pick a convenient location in the building. When we went on the tour the counselor was talking about it as “if” your child wants a locker.
  4. Oh, no!!!!!! My Dad did the same thing with a hurricane in Houston. He had spent his entire life in an area with severe drought and had no idea the damage water could do. I had a similar experience when I was an exchange student, I was really excited about rain and couldn’t believe how much it was raining. Another exchange student said she didn’t like rain like that because where she was from they would have severe mud slides. I could not believe it, but years later I saw video of massive flooding and mud slides in her country. My Dad is also kind-of a know-it-all you can’t tell things to, because he won’t listen. It is part of his personality, it’s very hard for him to take in new information that is not “sensible” to him. It just won’t make sense to him.
  5. (in a public school) I felt like that with getting a typing accommodation for AP testing…. It’s not that it was hard, but it just seemed like they barely thought it came up. The teachers told me very early in the year, they could let him type in class but he would have to have a 504 plan (is this the right number lol) and contact the counselor very early in the year. And we actually had testing saying dysgraphia, because we had taken him for private testing back in 4th grade, that was enough for the counselor (plus writing samples and teachers saying he had trouble in class if they didn’t let him type when they were supposed to be writing by hand). I was definitely feeling like — how many kids got missed on this?
  6. @maize I totally get you saying you are neurodivergent here. Are all your kids neurodivergent, too? Are all your kids definitely also oblivious to possibly similar situations? My sister is neurodivergent and her two children are not. She attended a church with some similarities but more subtle in their way, but things that I did notice when I attended her church. I talked to her about it a few times, and she truly did not notice, and she also did the whole thing where she said it didn’t matter to her and she didn’t notice it. She did agree with me on one point, that she had never thought of or noticed before. But otherwise she was very dismissive because she personally didn’t see it and she personally is not affected by peer pressure or pressures for conformity or just plain caring about fitting in. Well! Not so for her daughters. They were basically raised in a church with certain expectations for women including gendered expectations, that were not in accordance with my sister’s own views. My sister didn’t notice the lack of accordance. My nieces do care about fitting in. My nieces are more aware of their social surroundings and of unspoken expectations for how to act and what is valued. Basically I feel like because my sister is clueless on this issue, my niece’s got no guidance, and they are both currently not attending church, and it appears to me that with one of them, a reason is that she has chosen “being a strong, independent woman” and thinks that is incompatible with being “a Christian wife and mother” as it is practiced in this church. My sister IS a strong, independent woman, and in ways she is not valued in that church and I could pick up on it in visiting, but my sister couldn’t or couldn’t put her finger on it. It was also a church her husband liked because of having friends there, and with strong children and youth programs. She was out of step in ways without noticing it. She had friends, too, and her Sunday school teachers (a husband and wife team, because women could not lead an adult Sunday school class unless they were part of a married couple) were great. (I say “were” because they are up in the air since Covid but it looks like they may be going back to this church.) She is not someone who has raised her daughters to think they need to be part of a “husband and wife team” to do something that men are also allowed to do on their own without being part of a “husband and wife team,” and women cannot do on their own. But they went to this type of church, with no explanation or “here is why I value this church and why I value my job, too” or anything. My sister never noticed that she was the only working mom and other moms were all part of the church homeschool group, for her age of kids. It’s the kind of church I would visit and quickly identify as “well I’m not going to fit in here very well unless I do x, y, z.” And a lot of people are looking for x, y, z and have found it! So overall if you happen to have all neurodivergent kids who are influenced by your own “march to your own drummer” ethos, I think it’s great. But it’s worth looking at your kids and wondering if they are all neurodivergent too, or if some of them are picking up on all these social cues that you are not picking up on.
  7. Maybe she could get an affadavit from someone who remembers she graduated, or from herself. Sometimes places will except affadavits for things like that…. Either just writing a formal letter, or doing that plus getting it notarized. Maybe she could offer that as a solution and see if it can be accepted.
  8. On the issue of things being dismissed, I think “what is the goal” is really important. Originally I was more justice-minded and wanted what was fair. I would think about “what if this issue was not present” and make that my standard. Now it’s more like, are things working out. Actually working out — not at the expense of self-esteem. But I also think there’s an opportunity for kids to come up with their own solutions and work-arounds, or just the way they want to manage things, and I have got a lot more respect for that now. I have also found out “my hill to die on” may not be my child’s hill to die on. I have to advocate cooperatively with them or we will not be on the same page. To a great extent I have to get on their page.
  9. I am probably seeming cryptic — last year I had a 17yo receive a medical diagnosis 3 months before turning 18, in the Spring of his Senior year. A year later we are still figuring it out to some extent, and it took me about 6 months to feel like I knew the kind of information to look for and consider relevant, let alone my son. So it’s a different situation than having more time to hand it over, but things are going well. Edit: on the other hand he has had a high level of buy-in and ownership and speaking for himself, from day 1, because of his age. He has been treated as someone about to turn 18, or already 18, since day 1.
  10. I actually think it was a mistake (unrealistic) for me to try to push a child in the area of medical appointments and prescription refills, with an arbitrary “do it by age 18,” but it’s turned out he accepts my support. But I think it’s an important issue, because it either limits how independent someone can be, or puts them at huge risk of receiving inadequate medical care.
  11. I think the medical stuff is the most complicated when there’s a situation where everything points to someone going away to college, but they aren’t managing their medical stuff and need a lot of help…. I think then it’s not an option to say “just don’t go away yet.” That’s not even getting into, a parent thinks something is important and the young person doesn’t care. I have definitely heard that taking ownership during the earlier teen years and into high school is supposed to really help with that. Neither of those are particularly my situation, though, it turns into a metric where it’s just not being met in our situation, but turns out to be okay, but we are working on it. But I don’t think it’s a metric somebody can just not meet and — act like it’s no big deal and go on with other plans like there’s not this elephant in the room.
  12. I agree about needing to be able to handle complicated medical issues or taking an advocate. I have one who is still working on this, and in this case it’s part of a whole situation where it wouldn’t be great for him to move away from family support right now. But, he doesn’t want to move away from family support. It definitely doesn’t just happen, he’s so much better but “provide a succinct summary of any relevant information that I would need to know, since your last appointment” is an expectation and it’s not easy. Our state has got medical translation required by law…. In practice the university medical system and the hospital system have it. A lot of specialists don’t. The primary care I take the volunteer family to, does have it. But the reality here is that not every medical office has it even though it’s required…. They also seriously do not have in-person translation, it’s either by phone or it’s a video call on an iPad….. In person would be so much better.
  13. I agree all of the medical advocacy and adulting are so important!!!!!
  14. My eyes have really been opened… there is very little you have to hand write. I am volunteering with a refugee family…. The wife was signing medical forms with a plus sign before she learned to write her name. Earlier this week I was at an appointment with her and in the waiting room, a man said he forgot his eyeglasses and office staff read him the form and filled it out for him. I have been having her fill out what she can on medical forms even if it’s so slow…. 9/10 when she hasn’t filled out very much of the form, they don’t care if she finishes it or not. So do I want people to be able to fill out forms? Absolutely. But I’m a lot less worried now. I used to say “what if someone’s hand was in a cast, and they couldn’t write…” My son with poor handwriting is one who is good at typing, even though it took him longer to learn to type. Once he learned to type, it solved 95% of his problems.
  15. There is a lot out there for teaching self-monitoring of executive functioning skills…. Executive function skills (like focus) are a big theme for ADHD and for autism….. this is the kind of thing where things overlap and executive functioning is independent of ADHD and autism, yet there is tons of stuff on it wrt ADHD and autism…. And some by itself, too, but there just seems to be more of a market for ADHD and autism. I am out of date on current resources, but it’s so important to teach kids what it means to focus (what are the things that go with focusing) and how to do it on their own…. In autism they will tell you a verbal prompt (aka verbally saying to do something) is the worst way to teach kids to do something, it can even lead to waiting around to be given the prompt! It can promote dependence. This can be an issue in autism so there are tons of strategies to try to avoid learned helplessness caused by overhelping (aka helping in ways that turn out not to promote independence). Edit: other prompts can be visual, written, or something like making a hand motion or tapping on a table… it can also help avoid getting too wordy or being distracting in of itself. “How not to be overstimulating” is a big theme in autism but it’s really broad to a lot of kids, too.
  16. I think ADHD and autism materials both could have overlapping issues with what you are interested in, as well, they are both just huge with kids having overlapping issues. But I don’t think there’s a lot out there for learning disorders specifically — but then ADHD or autism materials can include learning disorders because they are so common. Either one might address the issue of “not trying on purpose” or “not behaving on purpose.”
  17. The most common 2e materials seem to be focused on ADHD or autism, and they are both very broad. They market more broadly because that’s where the numbers are, I think.
  18. I think you would get some of that from ADHD materials.
  19. Some special needs parenting memoirs are not marketed as 2e, but turn out to be 2e. Besides parenting memoirs, maybe books by adults who had similar struggles as a child. Off the top of my head, I know Andrew Solomon mentions it in Far From the Tree, which is a big book about special needs parenting. It’s also what he chose to write and it’s not representative. But I do like it. The author mentions in the introduction, that he had dyslexia and his mother tutored him, he felt different as a child, if I remember correctly. I think I have seen more of interviews with adults who had dyslexia and being asked about how it affected them in childhood, I don’t know where I’ve seen it, but I have seen it.
  20. Thank you @Ivey and @Ottakee, that is helpful information.
  21. I read a lot of parenting memoirs, a lot of autism parent memoirs.
  22. For values for me holistic/whole child and “what I want childhood to look like” were what I looked at first for childhood. I did have values around what I want childhood to look like that helped me with balance, my personality is to do too much I think, so I would want to make sure I was providing balance. A balance between adult-led and child-led was important too, special needs kids can miss out on enough child-led time, but need more adult-led time, too. High structure was basically a requirement for several years. Trying new things and looking at what really is working goes a long way, too.
  23. These are hard to come up with and take adjusting, but it makes decision making so much easier.
  24. I think writing out values and priorities really helps in making decisions. What are the top values? What are the most important goals/priorities?
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