Tikkabik

This will come as news to a few of you but not to others, because I'm pretty open about it: My two older kids suffer from ADHD and Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD) and inattentive-type ADD and bipolar disorder, respectively.

Bonnie and I spend a lot of time and effort to understand our kids' issues and help them deal with them. What astounds us is that there are still people in the 21st century who think that these issues don't exist, or if we'd somehow parented them or fed them differently, the results would have been different.

What I can tell you is that this isn't the case. We've done a lot -- more than most parents, according to the educators, doctors and social workers we've spent time with -- to get a handle on our kids' issues and find workable solutions for them. The only things we've had any luck with is a combination of pharmacology and behavior modification.

Part of the problem here is that different things work for different people: One kid may respond well to having red food dyes or sucrose pulled from their diet; another may not. One kid may respond well to Ritalin (mine didn't), another may respond better to Concerta or Adderall XR. Brain chemistry is something that even neurologists don't understand very well. Psychopharmacology is an infant science. It irritates me that even when we're in group sessions with parents of other kids who have these problems, they immediately think that what they know or what they've tried will work for us. It's not true.

Another issue that, as far as I'm concerned, is positively medieval, is the title of this entry: The fundamental belief because you can't see something, it's somehow less real or less problematic than something you can see.

This perception is something that we've been fighting with our public schools over since Robert was about three years old. If our kids were physically deformed, or if their mental issues extended into physical form like they do with Down Syndrome, for example, there'd be no question of their need for special services.

But because my kids are otherwise bright, gorgeous children but suffer from behavioral problems, the perception is that it's somehow our fault as parents -- that we're not doing our jobs, or not doing our jobs right. It's unfair to us and it's unfair to our kids.

If that fatuous attitude was just limited to the schools, it would be one thing. But amazingly, my kids have even heard it from people who ought to know better.