flowmom | shifting from devastated to rebuilding

[flowmom]

Completely off topic....
I was wondering why you felt that home schooling your son was better than sending him to school?

We are in the process of getting a formal diagnosis so we aren't yet eligible for services, and there's even a possibility that we we won't get them. Without the autism diagnosis from a formal assessment, my S will not be elegible for any services in spite of a lot of visual, motor, and sensory issues. Without services, my S would not be able to function in a public school environment and specialists that we have talked to have been supportive of homeschooling. Specifically my S gets "maxed out" in group situations, even ones like family gatherings, potlucks in our cohousing communities, playdates, crafting groups, etc. He goes to a class with other children and a teacher for 2 hours each week, but after that he needs quiet time at home to regroup, and we avoid social situations for the rest of the day. In his little class, it's a very high teacher to student ratio, and even in that situation he needs a lot of attention from the teacher to be successful. We are used to it, but he is dependent on us in areas where most 6-year-olds can self-regulate. Although he can beat me at chess and is very smart and ahead of his age in many areas, he needs a lot of prompting to eat his food, use the toilet, and generally use expected behaviours.

There's a reason that our homeschooling community has a very high proportion of special needs students. Even in our middle-class housing community, most of the children go to private school, not out of snobbery but because most of the parents feel that our local schools are not meeting the needs of the whole child. Although there are wonderful people in the school system, our schools are underfunded and simply don't have the appropriate class sizes to deal with the number of ESL (english as a second language) and special needs students (diagnosed and not).

Just curious b/c I recently asked my hubby (who works special ed and has worked with autism for many many years) if a person can home school a child with autism.

He responded that it takes years of education and student teaching to get to the level where you are really competent dealing with autism.

I totally agree and I have a lot of respect for special needs experts. Keep in mind though, that not every school district has a great special needs program. Yes, they are obligated to help special needs students, but the implementation of that varies a lot in my region.

One of the huge benefits of the educational system here, though, is that my S can be home educated, and our family can use his educational allotment to hire specialists who can do interventions (if the diagnosis sticks). Rather than the resources going to helping S to function in the school system, I would have the option of using the resources directly to work on occupational therapy, art therapy, and other interventions that we believe may help with the underlying causes. We would also work with special needs educational consultants to design learning plans for him. We would not be "doing it by ourselves", but rather we would be working within a team of people who can help us with strategy and interventions. We have an autistic neighbour in the public school system, and although he is high functioning, it's sad to see that he spends his whole day in school, then comes home and does more sitting work with a therapist after school. My child is super high energy and a lot of our day is taking him on nature walks, going to gyms, taking him swimming, etc. If he doesn't get enough exercise and nature time we are guaranteed to have more behaviour problems with him. We are also very lucky that the large homeschooling community creates a lot of social and activity options, so our child is getting probably just the right amount of socialization for him (he can't handle too much).

I just wonder if home schooling added to the stress of the marriage. If you and hubby were spent and had no time for each other... just wondering.

What added to the stress of the marriage was having a special needs child. The M problems started when S was one year old, and they got worse. H and I both grew up with undiagnosed brothers with serious problems and we know the damage that a "problem child" can do to a family. We decided together to invest a huge amount of energy into meeting our child's needs, in the best ways that we could. He did not react in "normal" ways to anything and no one gave us a guidebook as to how to meet his needs, so we've been doing the best that we could for the past 6 years.

With the benefit of hindsight I wish that I had done more caretaking of my M in spite of our children, but H didn't make that easy given his withdrawal. And frankly, what I did might have been the best that I could do. I went through years and years of being woken every hour all night long, of not being able to have a 5 minute conversation with my own husband while S was awake because of his disruptive behaviour, of not being able to have a chat with other mommies and get support because my S was wigging out. People always recommend getting support and taking care of oneself, but my only family member in this city, my wonderful supportive sister, has only taken care of my S about 5 times in 6 years because he is hard to handle.

Having a special needs child has been draining, exhausting, expensive (made it harder for me to earn money), isolating, discouraging, and confusing. If we had had an early diagnosis, we might have been able to put some of our struggles into context and figure out how other families deal with it. But our struggles have mostly been invisible to other people and we've had to deal with the usual assumptions that our parenting is at fault.

H is only in grade one, and he would have only been in half days last year (and I would still have had my little D at home). So I don't think that homeschooling itself is to blame for our problems.

Thanks for your interest in our sitch, June. Our parenting choices have definitely been a part of our M issues so you are on the right track with bringing that up.