<p>Dear Catrina, Sleepness nights and endless worry not only about the child, but also, about how involved you are as a parent add to the parent's personal struggle. Your instincts tell you don't let up (and I agree because many of these kids don't stay on track without help). They often don't seem to develop the skills 'naturally' and give teachers and parents such a mixed picture because of their strengths. When we look back a generation or even in this generation at what happens or what life is like for these kids, its a shame no one was there for them as you have been. Somewhere in elementary school they often fall between the cracks and never reach anywhere near their potential. Sadly, they question why do I understand things, but I can't produce.
For a parent who has ADD, they know better than anyone what life can be like and fortunately in your case are determined to get and provide help.
The guilt of passing the gene or whatever is tough to handle sometimes also.
I've seen that sadness, frustration and guilt on both sides of my extended family. In this generation progress has been made, but some grown ups are only being diagnosed now. From what I understand, the signs, are quite different for girls.
Also, my unprofessional opinion is that learning difficulties for lack of a better term are not well understood simply because the world of medicine is not there yet. ADD can be the true diagnosis, may also be in combination with another problem or another problem may be the culprit. I believe finding people knowledgable in this field is extremely difficult. I don't have a lot of confidence in a lot of the testing because of the struggles I've seen. As I said, I don't think 'Medicine' is there yet.
You have most likely heard maturity, maturity, maturity will solve the problem. That can be such a large piece, unfortunately you hear it from the early years through high school and wonder will it ever happen. My niece for instance is learning to work with her peers now that she's in college and to go for help before she's in over her head. If you think of five or six subjects, they are bound to be behind in at least one most of the time because of their difficulty in "remembering to remember" what they need to do to keep up.
I apologize if a lot of this does not apply to your son. It may be too general in some ways and too specific to my experiences in another.
Now that your son is older (although there's still much growth for their young brains and ours too!) he is hopefully at the point where he can start to put some of the organizational pieces together. Do your instincts tell you the strategies are in there and will come along on his own timeframe?
I think you said you were worried sick. When they leave home and go to college, Mother Nature takes over and unless we arrange to room with them or get a job as the R.A, we are forced to let go. At that point, we've done the major part of our work. In your case, he sounds like he will take all that you've given him and everything he has going for him and start putting it together, albeit (sp?) not perfectly and/or immediately.
So my unsolicited advice is to send him off expressing your complete faith that you know he will do well AND acknowledging that he will have his challenges. He's got the great strengths of having lots of friends, confidence in athletics, and knows he's smart, so he probably knows both these things already.<br>
P.S. He's young and resilient too.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info</p>
<p>Vested.
Thanks again for your helpful advice. I am trying so hard to be positive and encouraging to him but watching his senioritis is really difficult.
I just bought the book "Letting Go" and I'm finding it very comforting and informative. It's made me very aware of the mixed messages and unrealistic expectations that I am communicating. For example when parents focus on college grades rather than what they are learning they are discouraging kids from finding out who they are and what really interests them.I really do believe that a primary goal of college is to find yourself and your passion.I'm rambling now because I am so tired. Thanks again</p>
<p>emeraldkitty- can you please tell me a little bit about how your daughter liked cityyear? i am considering it, but have never heard of anyone who participated in it, so i dont know any personal comments about it. thank you =) a PM would be great</p>
<p>There's always something to learn from someone else's experiences, so thanks for sharing your thoughts. That book sounds like it would be good for many of us. Thanks</p>
<p>I have posted elsewhere- but probly in archives so here is a brief description
CItyYear was very structured and controlled- this could be good for someone with ADD but she bridled at several of their rules and restrictions. Americorps programs are much less restrictive.
Her year was at home in Seattle- she saved lots by living with us- but other corp members bunked together- since the living stipend isnt really enough to live on.
SHe did the bulk of her service at a local elementary school that is a magnet for homeless students- but also worked with innercity youth on job applications and resumes ( while teaching them computer skills)
Smaller side projects involved waterway clean up-CISCO computer training - working on after CityYear plans...
It was a huge time commitment- 40 hours spent doing CityYear work- (but this did not include being required to bus and in Seattle that is a commitment in itself), which included ending her shift probably 40 minutes away by car in an inner city neighborhood at night. By bus it always took her at least an hour to get home because of transfers etc.
She is glad she did it- but wouldn't do it again.
She would consider Peace Corps or Americorps something less restrictive.
As with many things there is a LJ for CItyYear
<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/community/cityyear/%5B/url%5D">http://www.livejournal.com/community/cityyear/</a></p>
<p>My opinion, only - so take it however you want.</p>
<p>On characteristic of the ADD personality (which both I and my son share), is that motivation and interest is the key to sustaining attention and focus on anything. We get easily bored with what doesn't interest us, yet can spend countless hours engrossed in a project that intrigues us --and we don't have much personal, deliberate control over when the energy to focus on a project will kick in. Deadlines & adrenalin are a good motivator, so procrastination "helps"..... we'll tend to get the motivation the day before the paper is due, but simple dawdle or doodle if we try to seriously work on the project much before that time. I mean, we can sit down to the computer with the best of intentions, and then find ourselves playing Minesweeper or Freecell for the next 6 hours.</p>
<p>If your son shares that characteristic - then basically you can work with it or against it. I highly, highly recommend the book "Learning Outside the Lines" by Jonathan Mooney and David Cole.... it certainly is a godsend to the habitual procrastinator, assuming you can get your son to read it. But its definitely the book he should have when he goes off to college, while you stay home with "Letting Go."</p>
<p>The way to work "with it" is to tailor job and education around the strengths, and not weaknesses. I used to be a terrific courtroom lawyer, because I did so well under stress -- I found I operated best as a defense lawyer, responding and parrying to what the other side was doing - plaintiffs work was not for me, because then I had to prepare a case step by step and initiate action, which was not for me. The deadlines got to me, which is a primary reason I quit -- it wasn't that I missed any, it was the constant stress of worrying that sooner or later I was going to, and being fully aware of the financial consequences of legal malpractice. But the worst thing for me were the steps needed to close out a file once the case had been concluded - there is a big emotional block for me about "finishing" a project, any project -- once the excitement is over, the last step never happens. So my solution was a second career - I've now got a job with an eclectic range of responsibilities (good for my multitasking inclinations), no one's life, finances or freedom depending on my ability to meet a deadline, and a whole lot of projects that are never exactly finished. I work from home and set my own hours, too. I was 40 years old before I figured out that I needed to make a career of the stuff I was dawdling with instead of the trying to make my living from the stuff I was avoiding. </p>
<p>This is a long post, so I'm going to break it up. A part 2 is coming.....</p>
<p>Part 2. Som Background about my son:</p>
<p>My son dropped out of college after 2 years. He did really well in the courses he was interested in, which tended to be the most difficult for him --- and got C's, a D & and incomplete in courses that didn't sustain his focus. He sometimes liked parts of a course and not others - so he would work on the part he was interested in. Now he has a job he loves where he moved up the ranks very quickly to become a director and he works very long hours -- it is one of those work hard/play hard type of careers, he'll work from 9 am to 10 at night, 6 days a week with half a day on the 7th.... but he can take off work any time needed and there are lots of retreats & other "fun" stuff through the employer. Up until the day he got this job, he was sleeping on the couch at home until 4pm ... but when he started work, it was clear he had found his niche, and hence his motivation. There was no way to predict this -- the particular job is easy for students to get, but a very high turnover -- newcomers are paid entirely on commission and let go after a week, two at most, if they aren't producing enough to make a living wage for themselves. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons my son was promoted so fast was that the employer needed to get him on salary because he was making too much on commission. But I had suggested for weeks before he got that job that he ought to try it, and up until he started work he insisted he was not interested in that sort of thing. I myself would not do well in the job, despite other aspects of our shared personality style, for a variety of reasons. </p>
<p>So again, its a meshing of interest + motivation + style that may be unique for everyone. My son chose a liberal arts college that would have been great for me and seemed great on paper for him -- but it lacked structure in some respects, and flexibility in others. I did well as an undergrad at a large university, in part because the structure was impersonal -- I could get away with missing class for days or weeks on end and just rallying in time for the final exams or to do a paper, I could switch majors half a dozen times, I could go off and find myself a volunteer job and then write my own major and a thesis around what I was learning from my work. My son had too much freedom in a small, close setting where there wasn't a way to hide or gloss over the work that was missed - so academically it didn't work out. If I had a do-over for him I would have nixed the LAC idea and sent him to UC Santa Cruz, more because its so much easier to recoup and make up missed courses in the UC system than anything else - he would probably have taken 6 years to graduate there, but he would have come out o.k. But he was accepted to Berkeley, so he would not even have considered Santa Cruz at the time, and I mistakenly thought that the LAC would give him the structure he need. </p>
<p>It wasn't a bad experience - he enjoyed college and got a lot from it -- but it just didn't work out in the long run. But it isn't really easy for us ADD-types to do the same thing for 4 years anyway -- so a piecemeal, in/out, switching-schools type of education might be par for the course. I like to have something new to do or learn all the time with my work, too -- I wouldn't last very long at a career that wasn't always growing and changing. </p>
<p>Part 3 to follow.....</p>
<p>Last part: what to do about it all (the hard part):</p>
<p>OK, here's the hard part. Again, my opinion only.</p>
<p>You cannot help the ADD-personality type by rescuing or protecting him. As long as you remember deadlines, nag, remind, "keep after".... he'll know that he can count on you to keep him afloat... and he will never develop the resources to do it on his own. So you need to back off and let the kid experience the consequences of his own mistakes. I can't say that my son's college experience is an illustration of my success in taking a more hands off approach.... but that followed a hands off approach in high school, where he sustained about a 4.3 weighted GPA and had his pick of colleges. Senioritis was so bad that he quit going to school altogether, until the vice principal threatened to expel him. He had a D in one class that should have been an easy A, and an unexplicable A in another class where he hadn't done any of the assigned work. </p>
<p>I'm not sure my son's quitting college is a "failure" though. He got what he could out of his school, then moved on to a job where he has done extremely well. The odd thing as that at his job, the first thing they did was put him in charge -- and that seemed to be where things really clicked for him. So this kid I always fretted about is now regularly in charge of managing 30-40 employees, plus all that hiring & firing & training in that high-turnover environment I mentioned. And he's loving it -- so its a little hard for me to see his leaving school as a loss. He made $25K his first year, and he has gotten a raise since then -- I'm not sure that he would have made much more graduating with a liberal arts degree. His job description calls for a college degree or "equivalent experience" -- so I know that he's making the same as many college grads who work for the same organization. I'm sure he'll eventually get tired of working and go back to college -- but obviously he will be a much more mature and focused young man when he does. The cool thing is really that he is entirely self-sufficient - he doesn't need me to keep after him, or even to support him financially. So in a sense I feel that time in college really was NOT helpful, because the only thing that "cured" him of his irresponsible ways was life in the real world. </p>
<p>I can see where your instincts lead you to want a gap year --that's definitely what my son needed -- I just don't think 1 year at age 18 would have been the right time or the right amount of time for him. My son probably needs about a 3 year stint of real work before he will be really ready to complete college, and I kind of think that if he had stayed in school, he would have ended up an unfocused young man with a degree that prepared him for absolutely nothing. As his mom, I would have been very happy & proud -- but other than education for its own sake, I don't think that was the path to success for my son. I think he just decided on his own that, at the time and under the circumstances, we were throwing good money after bad for him to stay in college. If you look at college tuition as an investment, this was one that didn't look like it was going to pay off.</p>
<p>Anyway, I know its hard to back off and let the kid make his own mistakes. And it doesn't always work out. But my ultimate feeling was that it was better to back off and also revise my definition of success for my son, letting him find his own best approach to living his own life.</p>