Part One in a Series of Several:

I don’t talk about these kinds of things on my blog as a rule. Mainly because Contemblogging is my channel for humor and writing, but more importantly because it just never seemed appropriate in my mind to discuss another person at length in a way that might be construed as negative.

As of late, however, I find myself very stressed and in need of an outlet to collect, organize and come to terms with certain issues effecting my sleep and sanity. It is my Blog after all, and I make the rules…so I thought I’d throw some things out there to the giant collective that is the internet. I’ll see what it might unveil. Perhaps someone will know something, or have the missing information I’ve been looking for.

My son has Tourette’s, and although most people associate this syndrome with verbal outbursts of profanity, it’s actually much much more. In fact, only a small percentage of individuals with Tourette’s exhibit such verbally offensive symptoms. Rather they suffer from a spectrum of disorders such as attention deficit, Obsessive Compulsive thoughts, and anxiety/panic disorder, combined with tics either vocal or motor.

Meet Little Man. He’s a good boy. Polite, smart, intellectual and for most outward appearances... Normal. A little nerdy maybe, using an extensive vocabulary that far exceeds his peers, but nonetheless…normal.

From the time he was old enough to talk, we began noticing certain obsessive thought patterns and behaviors. Namely, worrying that something would happen to me, and I would die. If I left, he feared he would never see me again, and would have to hug me many times before I could leave the house. If he was upstairs, and I downstairs, he had to repeatedly check (literally every 3 minutes) to see if I was safe and still alive. Odd for a tiny fella, yes, but we wrote it off to separation anxiety. Just a phase. Something he would outgrow.

Getting him to school each morning was like capturing a feral cat, and attempting to put it into a box. It would take myself, the counselor and his teacher to coax him out of my van in the mornings, prying his gripped fingers from the door handles, as he would scream and cry out of pure fear.
He was scared to death and having a full fledged panic attack every day.

The panic attacks have to an extent, waned with age but will flare up in certain situations.

Obsessive thoughts are a constant source of distraction for him as well. Try the test below to see what it’s like to be Little Man, and then imagine how hard it is to keep your grades up under those circumstances.


As you read the excerpt below, tell yourself that you must count all the times the letter “E” occurs in the paragraph. But here’s the catch: You have to count and read simultaneously—you can’t just read and then go back and count the “E”s, nor can you keep track of them on a piece of paper. You have to do the counting in your head for this exercise. Then to make it a bit more realistic, assume that accuracy is very important to you—if you lose track of the count or aren’t 100% sure that you’ve counted correctly…you’ll have to go back to the beginning of the paragraph and start again. Since you have OCD, you probably will doubt that you counted correctly at least once during the exercise, and need to start over.
Ok? Begin:
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Children who have OCD often have hidden or silent compulsive rituals. These hidden rituals often confuse teachers who may look at a child and not realize what is going on internally that may make it almost impossible for the child to function normally at times. Young children often don’t realize that what they are doing is abnormal, and older children, teens, or adults are often embarrassed by the rituals and won’t tell you about them.
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Well?
How’d you do on that one? If you were a student with OCD, how would you feel trying to read in school or at home and how do you think it would effect your reading comprehension? What if you had to read it in 2 minutes, fully comprehend the point, yet timed tests make you nervous and cause the obsessive behavior to intensify? Isn’t this fun?

My case in point.

Staying on target with grades is a constant battle, and finding the right school or learning situation for optimal performance is difficult at best. Little Man is currently attending private school at exorbitant tuition prices, yet they offer no special assistance to children with the need for modified learning environments. Public School’s in Georgia are not worth their weight in peanuts, so that’s not an option. What’s left? Home schooling? Private tutoring? Valium for Mom?

This is what keeps me up at nights. Wondering what to do. How to help him succeed in an education system that prefers the teaching path of least resistance, not necessarily what works for each individual child.