A couple days ago I received an email that I thought I would address here.

My oldest just started kindergarten, and I realized that he may be one of the wiggly-est in his class. Right away I panicked: “Will my son be labeled with a disorder?” I can hardly even type the term because it makes me so nervous. Have you ever had any fears of your boys having an attention disorder??? Various people have told me that its just a boy thing, but I would like to hear your take.

This brings back a lot of memories for me of when Jason was in first grade. We had high hopes for the year but things went downhill quickly and I assumed it was a physical problem. Jason had facial ticks, started wetting himself in class and was repeatedly sent to the office for disruptive behavior. I’ve written about that on this blog but it’s hard to remember how difficult that time was for Jason. He felt like he was being forced to be someone different and he was right. He was bring forced to be a child that says little, raises his hand to speak at all and stays under the radar. It was hard to see Jason so miserable and unhappy and that’s why we looked into homeschooling.

Since we started homeschooling I have done a lot more reading on the educational experience for children, especially boys, and I am shocked that there aren’t more children being home schooled. Here are some interesting articles from Psychology Today that address the disconnect between conventional schools and educating our children.

Why Students Don’t Like School.
Seven Sins of Our System or Forced Education
Our Social Obligation Toward Children’s Education: Opportunities, Not Coercion

Now, to the question about behavioral disorders. I have a best friend whose son was diagnosed with ADD and I have a nephew diagnosed with ADD as well. I haven’t dealt with that in my own home although there were some accusations flung around while we were struggling with the school. I personally think that the threat of ADD is used too often to explain child behavior that is not being handled properly by teachers or parents. If a child is struggling to stay focused in the classroom I think we should be correct in questioning if it’s the environment. Why aren’t more parents asking themselves if the school is the best place for their child instead of labeling the child with a disorder, adding some medications into the equation and leaving a predetermined opinion in the file of the student to follow them all through school?

I watched my best friend struggle with the process of wrapping her brain around what was happening and through the testing and then the question of medication, so I am not assuming that all children labeled ADD and on medication are being subdued without cause. However, I think that we need to be very careful about labeling children with a behavioral disorder before considering whether the environment of the child’s education plays a role in not being able to concentrate. It certainly played a role in Jason’s experience at school.

I wish that I had blogged a conversation that I had with Jason a couple years ago when Chuck and I were struggling with Jason’s school. Jason said that he didn’t want to go back to school because the school was trying to turn him into a girl. I asked him why he thought that and he said it was because they didn’t let him do boy things and only wanted him to play girl things. I thought that from his point of view this was interesting and I needed to be paying more attention to the way he was socializing with the other kids but then he added this: he also thought the schools were wanting him to grow up to be a girl because men weren’t allowed to work at the schools, only women, except for the man that was allowed to clean the school.

This blew me away. I had never thought of it before but he was right, in a way. Jason went to a combined elementary and middle school and out of all of those teachers there were two men, and neither of them had Jason ever seen before in the year and a half that he was in the school. I found that fascinating, and after reading a lot about conventional schooling, home schooling and the problem with fatherless children and the documented behavioral issues that come up, I am convinced that we have created a serious problem in our culture. We have taken away the teacher’s right to discipline the children that they are raising, and they are raising our children because our children spend more time with those teachers then any other adult. Not only have we stripped the teacher’s ability to discipline, but we’ve allowed the emphasis to move from educating children to socializing them (if you can call it that) and testing them. I think that there is too much testing which starts too early in the child’s schooling experience. More than anything though I think that one of our greatest mistakes is paying teachers too little, and making it almost impossible to fire bad teachers.

If it were easier to fire a teacher and they were paid enough to really support a family than the caliber of teachers would improve and we would have more male teachers. In a time when we are seeing fewer and fewer involved fathers, the greatest blessing would be for a child to have a loving, supportive and well trained male teacher to be a role model for those young children who need a male role model. I think that it is an absolute shame that the occupation of a teacher is predominantly held by women. We need more involved men and we need better paid teachers. If we pay them more then we will see more people who truly want to teach flock into the teaching programs. If we couple that with being able to fire terrible teachers then we can weed out the teachers who are useless or harmful to the children who are trying to gain a love of learning.

If I were starting this school year with a child in conventional schooling I would try to remember one thing: trust the child. If things aren’t going well then I would ask questions, listen without preconceived opinions and let them tell me how they’re doing. I would also be in that classroom as much as possible.

Let me know what your ideas are, going into this school year.