"Mom, C's are great!"

sryrstress
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:38:51 +0000

I second the suggestion to try medication. This often requires trying one medicine or then another, and tweaking the dosage. Do not be discouraged if the first attempt doesn’t work exactly as you wish. I know it’s difficult to be patient.

My daughter is in 7th grade and has had an IEP since age 3 for various health issues and communication/language disorder. I considered it for years, but we finally had her independently tested last year. She was working soooo hard and making minimal progress, especially with reading issues. The educ.-psych diagnosed her with ADD-inattentive and reading LD. Her long term and short term memory tested < 5%. She really hadn’t been able to hold the info long enough to work with it and integrate it.

A year later, on Adderall, she is one of two students to earn all A’s the first 9 weeks. She has gained 3 years reading comprehension in 1 year. She has worked very hard the last year, but still…she worked very hard before and was barely treading water. Almost daily she thanks me for taking her to that dr. and says that “Adderall changed my life”.

I know independent evals are expensive and in our case, we had to travel 3.5 hours several times over 4 months, but a good one is priceless. Our report was 15 pages, written in easy to understand language, with many recommendations both for home and school. The school psych report (she’s had 3) were short and written entirely in PhD language and included no recommendations.

Sorry if this went off-topic. I just wanted to impress how truly life-changing medication has been for our whole family.