Tag Archives: Preschool

A Tourette Syndrome mother’s long journey, part 1

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This is part 1 of a 4-part series from a California mom detailing her struggle to get the right care for her Tourette Syndrome son.

Hello, I  am the mother of a 14-year-old son, Spencer, who has Tourette Syndrome. Unfortunately, we had to take a bumpy road  before this diagnosis. I could write a book on our journey so far, and I still don‘t have it figured out.

It has never been easy, including the beginning that started with the worst case of Hyperemesis, Pitocin, 24 hours of labor and hemorrhaging to get him into the world. Nursing was a challenge, he didn’t sleep much, had some ear infections and was sensitive to loud sounds.

He was otherwise very healthy and always in the 95 percent on the height/weight charts.  He walked at 15 months and was running within the end of that month. He had an advanced vocabulary and figured out how to open up the most advanced cabinet locks by his first birthday.

He had an atypical febrile seizure at 14 months old that was severe enough to have him admitted, but thankfully all the tests came back positive. As a toddler, he was very impulsive when it came to playing with other children and it was not long until we were outcasts in play groups. It is then that I started to feel isolated. Continue reading →

Forging Our Own Path: The decision to homeschool

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This is the second of three blogs today from New Jersey mom SarahG. Her first was on worrying less, while her third – to post later this afternoon — will focus on diagnosing Tourette Syndrome.

When my son, O, was 3 years old, our pediatrician advised me to put him in preschool, because “95 percent of children attend preschool,” and if O missed out on the preschool experience, he would forever be at an academic disadvantage.  Naturally, I did not want my son to start school at a disadvantage, so I placed him in the best preschool I could find.

At the time, O’s first tics already were beginning to manifest themselves, although it would be several years until we realized exactly what was happening.  All we knew then, though, was that he was “a real handful.”  Even if he did not learn anything in preschool, there was something to be said for getting that little bit of a break from parenting the human tornado.

Two years and many headaches later, my husband and I removed both of our children from preschool.  As it turned out, O’s teachers had little patience for the challenges he presented and no visible interest in learning why he was the way he was. At first they attributed O’s differences to my lack of parenting skills.  Once my younger son, B, a model student, enrolled in the school, the teachers decided the problem simply was that O was a bad kid.  For O, that meant that his situation went from bad to worse.

When I picked O up each day, he either was in a rage or was sobbing uncontrollably.  He was sent out of the classroom when there were visitors so he would not reflect poorly on the school; when he misbehaved, he was put in the janitor’s closet in the office or confined to a chair and not allowed to move.

Disciplinary policies such as modeling good behavior were suspended for O.  Respect for privacy and confidentiality went out the window, as the teachers publicly mocked O and complained loudly about him to me in front of other parents.  One day, I stopped by the school at lunch to pick up my younger son.

From the other side of the school, I could hear an adult screaming and a child sobbing ; a parent volunteer was unloading her wrath on O for something he did not do.  The school staff defended her actions because O was “so difficult.”  That was our last day of school. Continue reading →