by Ciji Parks

Created on: March 24, 2009   Last Updated: June 07, 2009

"Your child has a problem. I'm sure he has Attention Deficit Disorder."

No parent wants to hear that and no teacher should ever say that. I know from experience. That is what a teacher told us when our son was in Kindergarten. She said he often acted as if he was 'in another world'. He often didn't do or follow what the other students were doing in class. That was upsetting to us. With much heartache and urging from teachers, we opted to have him tested by an audiologist, for ADHD/ADD. That test showed he was border-line ADD/ADHD, but later we were told that he was too young for that test. Experts say the ability to focus is not fully developed until age 8. He was 6. The fact they insisted on testing him prior to age 8, was strange to me, but it is done a lot. Based off of the results of that test and some observations by the special education staff, our little boy, who had no interest in reading, was recommended for special education. Because of his lack of focus, he did not even attempt to complete his standardized assessment tests that year and it seemed as if that gave all of the teachers more ammunition, while we had quite a suspicion that our little guy was just very immature.

The next year, instead of special education or medication, we opted to have him put into a transitional program between Kindergarten and First grade. During the year of transition, I asked him what he was doing when he appeared to be 'in another world' at school. He told me that he was playing his favorite video game, Halo, in his head. I told him that during school, when he realized he was playing the game in his mind, he needed to visualize himself turning the game off with the controller. That really helped! Several times, he told me he had done that at school. I reminded him to do that every so often. We also cut way back on the amount of time he spent playing video games because we felt that his mind was in his video game world much of the time. My older son helped me teach him to read because we were doing a lot of travelling by car. He painstakingly sat with him in the back seat and made him sound out every word. That was a chore. It was like pulling teeth! The younger one hated every minute of it. That year though, he scored in the 99th percentile in reading and the 96th in math on his assessment tests. What an improvement! He is now in Second grade and is one of the top readers and students. All that this child needed was for his family to invest more time into helping him and some extra time to mature.

Due to our experience, I feel that general education teachers should not be allowed to diagnose a problem such as ADD/ADHD and parents should do lots of research when faced with a situation like ours. The experience we had was traumatic, and we discovered that a little extra time and involvement paid off.

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