There can be so many reasons for this. We still get this now, with difficult child 3 working at home. When he was at school he was out of my sight and so I was unable to make my own observations. It is very easy for the school to emphasise this and play down that; it is natural for people to have their own ideas and for those ideas to influence what they tell you.
From my observations of difficult child 3 working at home, some days are a write-off and some days he's brilliant.
Reasons for a day being a write-off (both when he was in mainstream and now at home) -
1) A change in the environment, as in other people in the house (even if they're not doing anything or making any noise). Or someone who should be in the house but isn't.
2) A break in routine, even if that disturbance in routine is over and normal routine appears to have been restored. Example - teacher arriving late, student arriving late, arrival of hall monitor, a change in teacher, a change in aide. Teacher decides to swap two subjects around, does something different such as ignoring the class weather calendar or similar.
3) Bullying or teasing incidents would upset difficult child 3 for the entire day, but the teacher noticed he was always more disruptive and unsettled when coming in from a break (as in from lunch or recess). This eased when we had playground supervision. Teachers were often unaware of bullying incidents, or played them down as not being sufficiently significant to be a problem. One "darlnig" boy used to stick pins or anything else sharp into difficult child 3, maybe just a sahrpened pencil, maybe a set of compasses. He would do this in class with the teacher present. The teacher NEVER reported this to me, difficult child 3 reported feeling something sharp or "he's sticking pins in me" over several YEARS. Their Scripture teacher (a voluntary position for a once a week optional religious instruction and morals lesson in Australian government schools) was a friend of mine from our church who came to me and told me about this and said she was convinced the class teacher knew but was choosing to not do anything about it. From what I know of difficult child 3, a couple of incidents of this in the morning would blow out difficult child 3's entire school day and probably end with him being given detention for misbehaviour and attacking this other student.
4) difficult child 3 feeling slightly unwell, even if he was only beginning to come down with something. We noticed that three days before symptoms showed up, he would be difficult, disruptive or at the very least, unproductive. The day he actually developed a fever or signs of a cold, was paradoxically often a day when he worked well. We thougt that perhaps as he was coming down with something, his body was making too many changes and constantly distracting him. But when actually unwell, despite being not well things at least seemed more stable for him.
5) He's asked to do a subject that is disturbing him in some way. For example, difficult child 3 wouldgenerally work well in Maths or Science, but if te topic were a bit "waffly", he would take much longer to settle to work (task-changing problems) and by the time he began work the rest of the class would be finished and ready to moe on. difficult child 3 would then spend the entire day playing academic catch-up, and always be behind. After a while he would simply get obstinate and refuse to work.
The kid who was sticking pins in him - that was a long-term problem and that kid was a known problem, known to other parents and kids. But because difficult child 3 was "the weird kid" he was generally scapegoated. When this other student, some years later, attacked difficult child 3 in the street (which was observed independently to be an unprovoked attack on difficult child 3) I went round to talk to this kid and his mother, who told me that the teachers had told her that difficult child 3 was always the aggressor and she should go to the police and have charges laid against difficult child 3. She said she had chosen not to do that. I pointed out that whatever was in the past was in the past (although I was shocked, it did not match with what I had been told nor with what I knew to be difficult child 3's nature) and that we would from here on have a clean slate between the boys. I told her son to not hit difficult child 3 if he attacked him but to come and tell me and let me deal with it. I said I would be tellnig difficult child 3 the same thing - to not retaliate physically (something I have always insisted on anyway).
I was horrified to be told that his class teacher, who I would have thought would have seen the pins sticking incidents and who I know difficult child 3 had told about it, had instead chosen to advise another parent to lay charges on difficult child 3, when it was her son who was the constant aggressor.
But after we had our talk, I made a point of praising that other kid when I saw him do something good. He was good at sports and there was an after-school ball game that most of the kids were involved in. At one point this boy's team was playing against difficult child 3's team and I felt some of the boys were being a bit rough, but I did my best to calm difficult child 3 down and say that sometimes in the heat of the game, kids get a bit enthusiastic. But I saw this boy make a really good play in the game and afterwards I went up to him and told him I thought he was a good payer and a generous player, for the way he had played the game. I think he thought I was going to say something mean, but I carefully didn't. Next time I saw him with his parents, I said the same sort of thing - "I saw your son play the other day, he's really good, his team must be so proud of him."
It turned everything around. When difficult child 3 was getting attacked by a group of younger kids two years ago, it was this boy and another who had also been problems for difficult child 3 in the past, who broke up the fight and rescued difficult child 3. They've done this again since that time, when a fight was just beginning. difficult child 3 told me that it was those boys who rescued him and I made a point of thanking them.
The thing is - a lot of stuff goes on at school and you won't be getting told about it. A lot of what can affect a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) child can be very subtle - difficult child 3 was very unsettled doing an important exam last week because of three things:
1) the ceiling fan was making the papers move on his desk.
2) way outside a dog was barking, then someone started up a leaf blower.
3) he was a little bit hungry and had not been permitted to finish his lunch.
That combination meant he was so off-task, he barely completed half the paper, in one of his best subjects.
The next day, with an exam in an even more difficult subject for him, he was focussed and on-task. The ceiling fan was still on but not on such a high level. The outside noises were still happening. But he had now adapted a little more to the exam environment and coped better. The following day, his best subject, the environment changed again. But he was in the swing of exams ow and took it all in his stride. he believes he did very well and finished the entire paper with 20 minutes to spare. The exam supervisors said he was on task and working well the whole time.
Human beings are complex creatures. Those with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) are much more unsettled very easily by things which the rest of us can tune out. They also get mood swings as part of their response to these problems. How would you feel if, in an exam, your papers were blowing around so much that you couldn't concentrate? Or the sounds outside drowned out all your thoughts? Or the sound of other pencils in the room were just too distracting? difficult child 3 handled it by picking at the skin on his arms for three hours. BUt how would you feel about how you had done in your exam, if this happened? And how would you feel about yourself? It would be very natural for a kid to feel depressed. But ten - a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kid can be very immediate, too. He might walk outside and see the wonderful lime-green leaves of the poplar trees and the purple of the flowering jararandahs raining their mauve trumpet flowers onto the cobblestones, and feel happy. He could lose himself in that purple cascade and just stand there and turn around in it, hands outstretched and eyes to the flicker of sunlight through the leaves. There is a joy in autism too, that can be hard for us to recognise. The despair can be just as intense.
But it's not necessarily BiPolar (BP).
It is possible to have both, I'm not saying it isn't. But remember - the doctors doing the diagnosing are thinking with "normal" brains. It is important to think deeply about the Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) component on its own and just how much it could be responsible for, before you begin to think - what else is there that even this part of the Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) can't explain?
With BiPolar (BP) and with any serious depressive illness, you can't really find a reason for the mood itself. It "feels" different, thna a mood for a reason. If your dog dies, you will be very sad. If your dog isn't dead after all but was a case of mistaken identity, you will be happy. But if you have those intense feelings and you can't find a reason, then you need to consider you may have a problem, especially if those feelings keep happening without an identifiable conneciton to an event.
In Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), those events are much more subtle and sometimes the reasons are hidden from us as parents. The child can't always explain because to them, they think it's all normal. They also often think that we can feel their thoughts too, that we are also inside their heads. This is why they get so frustrated with us - why can't we understand, surely we can see it too?
Again, some more old-fashioned specialsits see this belief as unbalanced. For these kids, it is not. It is how they cope. Medication won't help. Constant explanations and discussion has a much beter chance of them eventually getting the message.
Some specialsits, even the younger ones, have their own pre-conceived ideas and pet theories and spend their time making the world (and their patients) fit that model.
Example: we spent a lot of time and energy trying to get answers about our kids. I had dragged form from doctor to doctor, I had rung around talking to doctors before we even went to see tem, often travellnig across the city and further afield oonly to discover the bloke who had promised so much understanding didn't really have a clue and when it came to it, couldn't help us. Finally we saw the doctor we stayed with - the very first appointment was a very long one but we had a lot of reports by this stage which helped him make his diagnosis - difficult child 1 had Asperger's, difficult child 3 had autism and easy child 2/difficult child 2 was on the edge of Asperger's.
We were in shock as we leeft. But before we had even turned the corner of the street, my phone rang. It was one of my specialists, I was booked to go into hospital that day and needed to go straight there. I was to be there for several weeks. So at a time when as a family we were needing to get our heads around the shock of this diagnosis of our perfect children, husband & I were separated. I was separated from my kids and I was very upset. A psychiatrist who came to see me ran the tests (tick the box type of thing) the day after I was admitted. he then told me, "You have dysthymia. It means your mood is flattened, you are unable to really experience joy in the simple pleasures such as watching a beatufiul sunset, you probably would benefit from a course of antidepressants."
I told him that he perhaps hadn't considered the timing of his testing, that I had some very real reasons to be feeling sad right then. But he wouldn't consider it; his piece of paper had given me a score and that was that. Idiot.
I contemplated the man's idiocy while from my hospital room balcony I watched each sunset for three weeks, every single one beautiful. I loved those sunsets but was still sad about my kids being diagnosed as autistic. And despite his belief that I needed his help, that psychiatrist never came near me for the rest of the time I was there.
Marg
