I can't help you with insurance - we're in Australia and we can generally get a lot of help, if not all, covered under our nationally organised health insurance. We do have hoops to jump through, though, and finding the right people can be very frustrating.
Your description of your son and his problems is very similar to our experiences with difficult child 3 (and to a lesser extent, difficult child 1). by the way, difficult child 1 is now married (Nov 08) to a lovely girl who I suspect has an Aspie mother (and hence understands him instinctively, even if she doesn't know why).
It has been put to you bluntly at times, but I increasingly agree that the label of ODD never seems to really help, it only seems to cause more distress. And yes, I beleive that in general, there is usually found to be an underlynig disorder which has been the main problem. Deal with the main problem and a lot of the ODD issues go away. However, the longer the ODD habits continue, the longer they take to go.
A big part of the problem for me, is the term itself - Oppositional Defiant Disorder implies that the child KNOWS they are being oppositional but are CHOOSING to be defiant, out of sheer cussedness and orneryness. And the more we see our kids this way, the more resentful and angry we feel with them and they pick up on this and will behave worse as a result. This is a negative feedback loop, aka "self-fulfilling prophecy".
We do have a success story, but it has been a big struggle at times. School was the worst struggle, although we did have times when things worked well.
We do use "Explosive Child" methods, but if you're having trouble with 3rd edition, go have a look through the 2nd edition. I have found that 3rd edition is quite different, although I like it some of the ideas are very new. The way I interpreted 2nd edition worked well for us, and I haven't found the exact same things in 3rd edition (although I do like 3rd as well - it's just different). Have a look at the discussion on the book in the sticky in Early Childhood. Much of that seems to me to be based on 2nd edition.
Back to what worked.
1) Try and get a diagnosis, and with what you describe it really does sound like Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) in some form needs to be given serious consideration. To help you here, go to
www.childbrain.com and do their online Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) questionnaire. It's not officially diagnostic (not allowed to be) but you can print the results to take with you to a specialist. Do it anyway, print it anyway, even if he scores normal.
2) The school district will also offer to help with diagnosis, but frankly they can only give you an approximation. Like many of us, the initial diagnosis I got from the school district was Bad Parenting - according to the school counsellor, I was a pushy parent with a mentally retarded child (difficult child 1). It took six months of my hunting around for an urgent assessment, for him to get a diagnosis of severe ADHD. Another 8 years before he got a diagnosis of Asperger's.
Where the school can help though - is with getting support funding. This pays for an aide in class, for anything else the school may need to handle your child (such as conferences, training courses, special equipment etc). We had an aide for difficult child 3 for most of the day, four days a week.
3) Something I strongly recommend - documentation and communication. We began a "Communnication Book" which travelled in difficult child 3's school bag. On the cover I wrote, "parents, teachers, friends and anyone else - please feel free to write in this if you see or experience anything we all need to know about."
I wrote in it (on the computer; I would then print it out, cut it out and paste it in) and then put it in difficult child 3's bag. His teacher and/or aide were to take the book out, read anything relevant and add their own feedback. Doing this every day was important, to maintain good communication and to help us all stay on top of any emerging problems. At times the teacher tried to cut back on it, to "wean me off" as she put it, only to find problems getting out of hand. This Book replaces many of the after-school classroom-steps conferences. BUT - it should NEVER be the child's responsibility to make sure the book is in the bag, or to give the book to anyone. This may seem silly, but the book is too important to then be used as a training tool for a child who is badly organised.
4) Chances are your son is highly anxious, made worse by a stressful environment. Knowing he is struggling with his reading isn't helping. difficult child 3 would deliberately avoid any tasks hefoundchallenging. So would difficult child 1. An example with difficult child 1 - in Australian primary (elementary) schools, swimming lessons are compulsory. Every spring, entire grades (spanning three consecutive years at least) will spend two weeks (or more) having daily, half-day swimming lessons. I remember going through this when I was in primary school; they've been going on for decades. But difficult child 1 was so good at quietly slipping to the back of the queue, that he would come home from his daily half-day lessons with his swimsuit completely dry! That takes talent and high intelligence (belying the initial "mental retardation" label he got).
Never underestimate the lengths to which your son can go, in trying to avoid what is painful for him.
5) We all learn in different ways. I explained to difficult child 3, that autism is like computer operating systems. Some people have Mac brains and others have easy child brains. You can't tell, when the document comes off the printer, whether it was typed up on a Mac or a easy child, but the computer instructions to each kind of computer are very different, you can't expect a Mac to function with easy child programming and vice versa.
What I'm trying to say - your son may need to learn a different way. We certainly found with difficult child 3, that a lot of the stuff he learned in mainstream, was missed. He never took it on board, he never learned anything. Everything he learned, he learned it at home.
difficult child 3 was hyperlexic, so in this I can't compare what you're going through. However, he didn't have the understanding he needed, that went with his early reading. It was simply symbols to him with no mental connection to meaning. He needed to learn in a way that normally wouldn't work - he needed to learn holistically.
What works for other kids, to break the task up into little pieces and just deal with visuals, say, or just deal with sounds - disastrous for difficult child 3. He needed the whole lot, all at once, in an apparently senseless jumbpe. For example, difficult child 3 would watch DVDs with subtitles on and would pause, rewind, watch it again, then pause, rewind... over and over. Interestingly, another mildly autistic neighbour of ours did the same thing and his father said to me, "I worry about my son when he does this. It's mindless, there's nothing going on in his head, he just stares blankly."
I explained to the dad (from my own observations of difficult child 3 when he used to do that), "Don'tworry. There is A LOT going on in that head. But he is trying to learn EVERYTHING all at once, that is why it is taking a lot longer. He has no good frame of reference for what he is learning, thanks to the language delay. Nobody can help him learn, better than he can help himself. So he is being creative and finding his own way to learn, that works for him. You have to let him do this."
What they were doing, was reading the text, AS they listened to the sound of the text, AS they watched the action (context) and to make sure they "got it", they would rewind and watch it agian, in minute detail. Ofcourse this meant tey had it all memorised, but tey had it memorised with subtitles. I'm certain that with difficult child 3 and this friend of his, when they are spoken to they also 'see' the text in their minds, as subtitles.
You may find he uses slabs of text from songs or from movies or form TV shows. He probably repeats pet phrases of yours or his teachers. They often go through a phase of repeating what you say, then answering. For example, "Woud you like some juice? Yes please."
I do think the ODd label is badly getting in your way. You see your son obsessivley doing tings his way, andwhen you try to get cooperating he shouts at you to leave him alone.
This is normal for Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), or for any kid who can't transition well. If tat kid happens to be really concentrating hard on what he's doing, he won't feel you can interrupt hi without him losing a lot of hwat he just worked on. You need to give them time to transition.
What we found, was as difficult child 3 learned that we were going to help him transition, that we weren't going to stand there tapping our toes but instead we would wait until he saved his computer game or got to a point where he could pause it, then he became a lot more cooperaitve.
They need to be in conrtrol. And where it's no skin off my nose, I let difficult child 3 have control. He is then more willing to give me control where it is right for me to have it.
We need to change our parenting methods with these kids. The strict, over-controlling upbringing that most of us had, will trigger oppositional behaviour in Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) (or similar) kids. we have to get back to what our ultimate goals are - to have our children happy, productive, independent and functioning. If a kid is Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), chances are underneath it all he is intensely loyal, loving, law-abiding (as long as they are laws he understands) and above all, wants to please and wants to KNOW.
That give us leverage, as parents. And with what we have achieved with difficult child 3, I think I can safely say we have success.
He's far from perfect, he still needs careful handling. But it's second nature now in our house. We have problems when other family members come in and try to stick their oar in.
difficult child 3's current school placement is Distance Education, a form of state-based correspondence. The teachers are supportive, he has an IEP, he works form home at his own pace and I supervise and support where needed. He is confident enough to pick up the phone and ring his teachers. Due to te nature of this school they do have a lot of kids with a range of needs, from other kids with autism or Asperger's, or kids who are performers or sports-minded and being professionally trained, through to kids in hospital for long-term health problems. Or kids whose parents travel. Some correspondence kids are geographically isolated, such as "School of the Air" kids. It IS a mainstream program, academically. And difficult child 3 is doing amazingly well, which we are grateful for considering how badly he did to begin with.
With learning phonics, we bought a phonics desk from Leapfrog. It came with cards which slotted in, and the desk itself had magnetic letters which, if pressed, woud "say their name" but when placed in a card (for a particular word) and pressed, would "say their sound" in that word. Then when the letters were all placed, the whole word would be said. There were pictures on the card of the object also. Extra letters (such as spare vowels, and diphthongs (ch, or ph, or th), or "silent E" went inside the desk.
There is hope. Lots of it. When I look back to where we were, and look at where we are now - absolutely amazing.
Marg
