Tikkabik

a) The meeting was really well-attended. About 14 parents showed up all told, including us. What interested me is that 5 of them weren't even from our town, but were from surrounding towns -- towns with worse reputations than ours when it comes to dealing with ADHD children.

b) All but three families, including us, are only dealing with boys with ADD/ADHD. Its frequency among girls is much lower, and the way it exhibits in girls is very different. Boys who have classic ADHD problems are the class clowns, the hyper ones that jump out of trees for no reason; girls with ADHD are the quiet "daydreamy" ones. Interestingly, Emme's presentation of symptoms is atypical: She's got impulse control issues, which gets her in trouble (though the daydreamy thing is common too. We say that Emme goes off into "Emmeland").

c) Many of us have had the same problems getting our kids the help they need in the classroom. I think that the school liaison was a bit surprised (and, as a relatively new employee, perhaps a bit disheartened) by just how much trouble some of us had alternately getting the administration and faculty to help us help our kids.

d) Almost all of us had different ideas for what we wanted to get out of the group, but one thing came through loud and clear: A lot of us were looking for emotional support as much as anything else. It's extremely isolating for parents to deal with a child who has any sort of problems that prevents them from acting like a "normal" kid.

e) All of us have different ways of dealing with our kids. Many of us have turned to medication, which in some cases has worked and in other cases hasn't. Some of us have tried dietary changes, like getting the dairy and gluten out of our kids' diets, with similar results. Others have gotten hyper-organized to remove as much distraction from their kids' lives as possible. Others are just now trying to figure out something that will work.

The basic problem here is that ADHD isn't one specific disease or disorder; instead, it's a general syndrome that can be caused by different things, requiring different treatments or different plans of action to deal with. So what's good for one kid may not be good for another. This can be a stumbling block especially when it's time to put together a plan of action for the school, because this may simply involve an understanding with the teacher. Other times this can require the school to put in place what's called a Section 504 plan, which outlines specific accommodations they need to make for your child. In other cases, this leads to an Individualized Education Plan, or IEP. Each process involves a geometrically greater amount of bureaucracy in the school system.

ADHD -- and dealing with it in your kids -- is really complex issue. Within the span of my life, kids with ADHD went from being the neighborhood "problem children" to having a recognized neurological disorder whose source isn't fully understood and for whom treatment can still be a shot in the dark. Even within the medical community, there's disagreement about what constitutes ADHD, what causes it, and how effective the treatments are.

As a result, a lot of people -- even a lot of people my age, but especially those older than us -- don't consider kids with ADHD to be "sick" in the conventional sense. Rather, they presume that kids who misbehave or act in odd ways are just ill-bred or left to "run wild" by parents who don't give a shit. In some cases, sadly enough, this is true -- there are some parents who just aren't fit to be parents. None of the parents that were there fit into this category, by definition -- they were all proactive enough to show up and desirous to talk with others about the issues they're dealing with.

Even now when I talk about it with certain friends and family, there's an almost casual dismissal of some of which we speak. "Well, that's just boys being boys," or "They'll grow out of it." There's also suspicion on the part of some parents about overmedication and the desire to medicate as a panacea to control kids in an institutional setting that some of them are simply not well-equipped to deal with.

This leaves a lot of parents of kids with ADHD feeling guilty that they've somehow done a bad job raising their own kids, or that they've failed them in some way. I know this one comes up a lot with Bonnie and me. This leads to feelings of isolation and anger. So having a group of other parents to bounce this off of is incredibly important.

But it's improving, and each year that passes sees a better awareness of these issues in medical professionals, psychological professionals, school teachers and administration. Having said that, it's still an uphill battle.

One parent at the group the other night pointed out that you have to be objective as possible and be prepared to educate people that you think should know better, like school faculty and administration, even when you just want to ball up your fists and scream, "*You're* the professional! Aren't you supposed to *know* this shit?"

I think the support group is a great idea, and I'm really happy to see the sped office put it together. I'm still unclear on how much it'll serve as an advocacy group to actually affect change within the school system, which is what I want to see happen -- particularly in the K-2 school in our town, which Bonnie and I feel has an adminstration that's openly hostile and really regressive with what they consider "behavior-related problems" (as opposed to "non-verbal learning disorders"), but it's a good first start.