There is also some reason to believe that women are still being discriminated against in higher education in Japan. For example . . .
My child survived elementary school because of thoughtful teachers like you who led with empathy instead of judgment.
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My daughter was like this in the early grades, to the point of driving teachers nuts. The office was also frequently calling me to warn about her various transgressions (such as trying to pick a locked classroom door with a paperclip during lunch time, trying to climb onto the building’s roof from a nearby tree, etc). She was very bold and physically active, and often disruptive.
In later elementary school, however, the kids in her class started to display exaggerated gender roles and social separation between genders. Girls in her class became very cliquey and critical of each others’ behavior and appearance, while the boys in her class were still acting out and egging each other on. During that time my daughter became much more hesitant to speak up or do anything that called attention to herself, and it seemed to me that this had a lot to do with trying to fit in with the girls. Since this time, the comments I get from teachers are that she is self conscious and “shy” in class. She hasn’t been evaluated for ADD but at this point she does have characteristics that seem like the inattentive-type (diagnosed) ADD adults in our family.
It makes me wonder if some of the observed gender differences in ADD diagnoses might have something to do with girls’ social conditioning rather than biologically based gender differences.
This thread is also making me wonder if I should pursue getting some kind of evaluation for her. Sigh…
Just an FYI: in many places, that is easier said than done. When older S was born, my city had 3 pediatricians in 1 practice. 1 was elderly and part time, in the process of retiring. It was next to impossible to get an appointment with him. Another was a goofball who hit on the moms with big boobs (not me!) and made several major misdiagnoses. And the last was a huge (blank) who berated you if you brought your sick kid into the office for a visit. He made me cry many times. If he was on call at night, he’d either not call you back or curse you out on the phone. He was awful.
So there are a lot of people who just don’t have many choices to just find another better doctor.
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I would agree with this. Some primary care doctors are experienced and comfortable testing and prescribing meds, and others are not. In terms of proposing mitigation strategies, most doctors really can’t help here. We can’t command schools to reduce classrooms size, include more recess time, provide all the expensive resources etc.
The other issue is that testing for ADHD is not as scientific as most people imagine it is. People suppose that doctors have access to some type of diagnostic test that can provide a sure diagnosis. But the best validated test is actually the Vanderbilt, which is just an opinion survey of about 50 questions filled out by 1 family member and 2 teachers. It just asks about symptoms: Does the kid fidget? Does the kid get up out of their chair? Blurt out answers? Have trouble paying attention? So really it doesn’t tend to be different than a teacher’s gestalt impression.
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They gatekeep- more aggressively, more competitively, and with fewer “on ramps” for the late bloomers. That means the academically oriented boys get a boost; the girls who are more artistically inclined (may not be ADHD but aren’t showing up for cram schools every weekend because they’re interested in music or dance which takes up a lot of time) pull themselves out of the competitive pool.
So you can achieve parity-- even with the same overall rates of ADHD by gender as you have in other parts of the world. Shove the low-performing boys off to learn how to drive a truck and not even let them try an academic track; make sure that the girls who are suited to university studies are ready but move the others off-- there you go.
I’ve written before about my cousin overseas-- genius level in math, severe language based LD’s in other things, and her parents were given options for her secondary school ranging from a cake decorating course to hair/makeup certificate. Since she’s got the same profile (with the same gifts and deficits) as many of the American cousins, her parents asked, “is there no program to take advantage of her math skills?”
She got a bookkeeping certificate. It’s now 15 years later and she’s a successful programmer/project manager for a large tech team. All self taught/private tutoring/online classes paid for by the family (at greater cost to them than a degree would have been). I think she’s the only member of her team (and she’s the leader) who does not have a Master’s degree- and she doesn’t even have a Bachelor’s. So yes, a happy ending. But what happens to the 2E kids without savvy parents in countries where your 8th grade self can determine your entire career?
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Just read that Some UPS drivers make $170k year. Driving a truck is not a bad option
Didn’t say it was a bad option. But taking kids off an academic track early on penalizes the late bloomers-- and the kids with learning differences who could be successful at a university. As the parent of a late-bloomer-- yikes. Cannot imagine what my kid’s options would have been if some test when he was 14 took him off the academic track.
(He’s a bad driver so that option is out.)
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Your point is well-taken. I grew up in such a place and am grateful to have better options now than then. My point is that these are important medical considerations, and may require a level of expertise beyond the opinion of teacher or even a parent who doesn’t want to hear that their child may have an issue that may need to be addressed. Parents do their best with what they have, and will hopefully seek out the best advice they can.
Girls tend to be diagnosed with ADD-I and diagnosed later. My son was diagnosed with ADD-I when he was younger, but it was part of another diagnosis. I don’t think it would have been caught if he wasn’t struggling with reading. My daughter wasn’t diagnosed until high school.
Tell your pyr that my pyr says hi.
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You are correct. We are expecting kids to perform skills that are developmentally inappropriate. Yes, some may be able to do them as there is always a range, but many do not have the brain development and pre-skills to do so. On top of this, we expect kids to perform executive functioning tasks that their brain is not ready for (and male brains do develop later in this area). My biggest gripe with most schools is that rather than teach kids executive functioning skills or provide the scaffolding needed to complete them, they punish kids for not having them. For example, in 4th grade, my 2E son was not allowed to work on his “passion project” (the one thing that he wasn’t bored by because he could work at his own level) because he didn’t turn in his homework. His homework was lost in his desk because there was no organizational system and his desk was even more cluttered due to some items needed for visual accommodations. What purpose did this serve? He missed a learning opportunity (one of the few where he was learning anything) AND never learned the skill he was being punished for not having.
Needless to say, after considering it for a couple of years, we pulled him out and put him in a Montessori school. Best move ever.
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And here it goes. The best move out of this trap is to take a kid out of public school. Period!
Now, how can we afford it? Most people can’t. So people get creative: homeschooling, religious schools, online schools, and later community college online classes… Tutors, special books, different software, learning ourselves how to teach our kids. Reading all possible and impossible education approaches… The creativity of parents is the lifeline for those kids. They simply do not belong to our rigid public education system…
I have ADD and am huge into organizing and labeling. While great at labeling, I’m not always so great with any follow up. My ADD D22 takes the most beautifully detailed notes. (We’ve both been like this since we were young) It’s an attempt to control chaos. And while organizing/note taking we are often hyperfocusing and letting everything else fall apart. My ADD S23 learned that having a sparse and perfectly organized room (although I’ll never understand his organizational approach) cuts down on distractions while studying.
I’m a sped teacher that works in many different classrooms. I can spot the kids with learning differences a mile away. These students aren’t “my” students as most are undiagnosed so I have no direct contact with their parents. I will usually conference with the teacher and go over my concerns, confirm by looking at their classroom work, etc. Teachers know that they can come to me for ideas for accommodations and interventions. These tend to be accommodations that can be used for any child, so I’m not exactly diagnosing, but I am providing data points for a conversation with parents. I would never recommend medication as it is outside of my perview, but more importantly, because I always want to stand up and scream, “It’s not your kid, it’s the environment.” Since that wouldn’t exactly go over well, I work on making the environment the best it can be.
Absolutely. There have been numerous studies on this. Many girls are diagnosed in high school when it becomes harder to mask and the information is coming in like a firehose rather than a faucet (almost a direct quote from D22s neuropsych eval). Often anxiety is a comorbidity due to trying to “white knuckle” holding the facade of perfection together.
See my comment above about “it’s not your kid”. While I will work my butt off to help these kids and make it the best experience it can be, and many of them will “succeed”, there is a difference between “succeeding” and reaching your full potential. It’s really hard knowing what I know (watching S23 be in settings that did let him reach his full potential) and watching kids struggle in public school. It’s not the teachers. They are great. It’s the schedule, the structure, the curriculum, lack of choice and a million other things. Most of the kids I see are so smart and bored to death, trying their hardest and yet constantly “failing” at something. It’s heartbreaking
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Well, this is going to depend on your kid, your school district, and schools available. My son has a different set of issues (long story) and private school was a disaster. No support for students who were different in any way, no resources to evaluate or accommodate his needs… incidentally, no help for other students’ behavioral issues either (my son’s teachers frequently paired him with the boys who were most disruptive in class, in the hope that his “good” behavior would calm those boys down somehow). He switched to public school in 6th grade and I was amazed at the level of support, flexibility, and accommodations available.
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So you son did not have ADHD but was paired with kids with bad behavior, am I correct?
In that case, I can imagine that being in a bigger public where he was not supposed to “play” the role of an adult was better for him than in private.
Most public (at least in our huge public district) provide support, flexibility and accommodations mostly on paper… Yes, there are special needs classes, but can you imagine range of the kids there? Most do not get any support there. In the eyes of the school, the support is to pull them separately, give them their assignments and wait until it would be completed. If it is not completed, well what else can be done? Oh, we can also teach them to make a binder more organized… Anything else? Most kids even refuse to go to that “help” class because it does not “help”.
School used to start at the age of 7 where I grew up (Europe). Now they start at 6 yrs old. This is when learning to read is expected to start and no prior reading skills are assumed.
Also, for the first 3 years school is only 4-5 hrs long, then children go home. They are not expected to stay still for extended periods of time. Of course, this is a huge problem for working mothers. I believe the system here (starting early and staying long hours in school) is geared toward facilitating working mothers, and not based on academic advantages
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I don’t want to detail all of my son’s issues, but (in retrospect) they included problems with vision and visual processing that affected his reading and other schoolwork, and difficulty seeing other people’s faces which affected his ability to learn and respond to social cues. There were zero resources available at the private school for any type of different kid. No special ed teachers or specialists of any kind. No help for my kid, or for the ADHD kids (including friends’ kids who also left this school).
His teachers told me that he was obviously a “smart” kid, so they didn’t understand why he was struggling with school work, and instead I should “make him read more” and “socialize more.” My kid was also shy and quiet, the consequence being that teachers labeled him as a “good” kid and routinely paired him with the most high energy / least compliant boys, telling these kids that they should behave better, like my kid did, and telling my kid that he should be more social, like those kids. This made everyone unhappy and my kid often felt bullied or overwhelmed. No attempt was made to understand why any of the kids were behaving the way that they did.
In retrospect, I feel terrible that I didn’t pull him out of that school earlier, because it should have been obvious what a disaster it was for him… but all the parents around me in the private school bubble kept repeating that private school was so much better and more supportive for individual differences, and that public school was scary.
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Sounds like pretty terrible experience… I am really sorry.
I actually can relate to the issue you describe too. I have a family member with the same visual processing issue who kind of learned to deal with it over years, but still has issues.
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This isn’t unusual. Private schools take the kids they can teach - although this can be hard when they are young and it’s not clear yet who these kids are. Most have no problem referring kids back to their public district if they can’t serve them well, making public schools the school of last resort.
Privates are under no obligation to provide special services, whether it’s for speech or LD. Public schools are obligated to meet your kid’s needs but in reality, the needs at most schools span a very wide spectrum and the solutions need to be very personalized, which simply translates into not enough resources inadequately tailored to a kid’s specific needs.
Families who find a private school that can meet their needs will likely be best served. But this also means the family needs to fully disclose the needs and make their match mindfully. I’ve known kids who have thrived in Montessori schools and others, with different issues, who have needed very supported, almost rigid structure. Some privates specialize in supporting kids with visual or auditory processing. It’s about fit. In some situations, the public district will pay for this, but because of the cost, it tends to be in the most extreme situations (like meeting the needs of a deaf or blind child).
On the prep school forum, it’s practically a mantra that kids need to find the right place for them. Some have lots of structure and supports, others provide lots of independence. Some have learning centers that do a great job with executive functioning issues while others are more focused on subject matter tutoring.
The challenge though when kids are young is that it’s not yet clear what they need, and it’s serendipity as to whether the environment is a good one. Unfortunately, not everyone in those environments, public or private, is great at identifying and addressing needs as they manifest themselves. Sometimes this includes parents!
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Our son started K at the local school, aged 4, and it was a disaster. We enrolled him in a private school for K-2. (He repeated K.)
It was much better for him to be at the private school, until it wasn’t. By the end of first grade, it was clear there was a learning issue. Reading and writing were too difficult for him.
In 2nd grade, we got him assessed. He was (is) dyslexic and dysgraphic. The private school didn’t have any idea how to work with him and no one was trained in Wilson method (that was the preferred method at that time), or had any special ed background.
He went back to our local school, which has excellent special ed services. For years he was given small group teaching and push-in services at the regular school. He had an IEP, then a 504 and overall had a very successful education.
I don’t blame the private school, btw. It was a wonderful school for him and we are happy he was in that small environment for those three years. But for many kids with learning disabilities, private schools may not have the resources of public schools.
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