The Good News: After a few days at home, Rye is back to himself.  Perky, animated, grounded.  His usual bouncy self.

The Bad News: The cause of his mental distress was and is his school situation.

This will have to be addressed.

This is the direct result of our state pushing for and insisting on mainstreaming all kids and doing away with special education services.

I was watching “19 Kids and Counting” tonight and Michelle Duggar said this about her kids and homeschooling, the world is a classroom.   I thought it was great.   Because it’s so true.  And I wonder, is “out-of-school schooling” better for some kids that “in-school schooling”?  Could be.  And I may have one of those kids.

Now, on a slightly unrelated note, I have a not-so-secret desire to be a Duggar.  So my opinion on all of this is biased.  I just love them.  Their kids are so calm and pleasant and mature and responsible and courteous, etc. etc. etc.  I find it just really amazing.  And wonderful to see.  Granted, their kids don’t seem to have any neurological struggles as mine does.  Nonetheless, they inspire me.  And I wonder if they would all still be that way if they had to go to public school for 8 hours a day.  But alas, we’ll never know.

Anyway, Rye is out of school this week.  He told me today he does not want to go back to regular school.  He wants to homeschool.  He says there is too much drama and chaos at the school and life is much calmer not going.  And he doesn’t mind doing schoolwork.  He just can’t take the atmosphere there.   I guess it was fun for a while and then it all got to be too much.  Way too much.  And with everything that has happened in the past few months that makes perfect sense.  So, now I wait until the IEP meeting on Monday and see what we can come up with.  I suggested to Rye maybe a happy medium would be a half day at school but he’s luke warm on that idea right now.  I guess we’ll just see.  I have to work part time so we’ll have to do something.  I am intrigued though to think about all of the things he could learn if he wasn’t in a classroom all day.  Especially since now he has no art, music or related art classes (foreign language, careers, computers)  at school.  The possibilities are endless.

Anyway, it is my experience that a lot of special needs kids homeschool so the parents can create the atmosphere the kids need to be happy and successful.  And focus on the child’s strengths vs their weaknesses.  We’ve actually done it before and it worked really well.  Rye was a much calmer, more mature, less frantic kid.  I  guess we’ll just see what the future brings.

Despite the fact that he is very social, outgoing and somewhat daring, Rye has a lot of fears.  Many of them are common for children his age and many of them are exacerbated by the fact that he naturally struggles with mood regulation and impulse control and has also been through some trauma events with his bio-dad and been hospitalized as a young child – all of which he remembers with great clarity and seem to weave their way into so many of the emotions he processes on a day-to-day basis right now.  His fears are also compounded by his learning disabilities and processing disabilities and the muddled way his brain translates the world around him.

So, why is this important?  Well, to me it’s important because the way he processes the world and the fears that result of his mind workings have a great impact on his ability to feel safe, secure and calm.  And it is his ability to feel safe, secure and calm that enables him to regulate his emotions and minimize emotional outbursts.  So it is important for me to try and understand how he processes the world.  And it is important for me to help him understand and legitimize his way of thinking or correct his way of thinking and thus minimize his fears.  And it is important for me to try and teach him how to deal with the fear, anxiety and confusion he experiences and what to do when it wants to overtake him and control his life.

Anyway, this all came to mind because of what happened here yesterday.  Yesterday we were reading this book that he had brought home from the library.  The book is below his grade level but remember he is quite dyslexic so it is an appropriate level for him.

The book is about a soldier who comes home from war and makes a deal with the devil.  The soldier must kill a bear, skin the bear and wear this bearskin for I think 7 years, I can’t exactly remember. Anyway, despite the fact that the book in an award winner, it has some real creepy imagery and illustrations involving the devil and this was all too much for Rye.  We made it about a third of the way through the book and he got too creeped out and had to quit.   Now this could happen to any kid, no doubt.  The issue with Rye, however, is that it turns out through his confusion of what he had been taught at school, he thought the book was a real story.  He thought it was non-fiction, thus making it all the more scary.  And in his mind it never occured to him that is made no sense for it to be non-fiction due to the content.  At school he had been told to look for a non-fiction book.  He looked this one up, checked it out and took it home as a non-fiction book.  It never occured to him once we started reading it or even from the title that maybe he had looked the book up incorrectly or that it had been labeled incorrectly and no one at the school had corrected the mistake so there was no reason to think otherwise.

Luckily we figured out the miscommunication once he startet telling me why he was so scared and I was able to correct the incorrect beliefs.  However, things like this happen every day around here and it helps make sense of why emotions are all the more difficult to regulate with Rye.

According to this document, The Five Emotional Difficulties of People with Learning Disabilities, people with these disabilities often have the following struggles:

Some people with learning disabilities have isolated difficulties in reading, writing or mathematics.  However, most people with learning disabilities have more than one area of difficulty. Dr. Larry Silver asserts that  “learning disabilities are life disabilities”.  He writes,  “The same disabilities that interfere with reading, writing, and arithmetic also will interfere with sports and other activities, family life, and getting along with friends.” (Silver, 1998)

Typically, students with LD have other major difficulties in one or more of the following areas:

Rye has all of the difficulties listed with the exception of  the social skills part with regard to making and keeping friends.

A good example of his struggles would be just the other day he was talking about a friend to me with the friend standing there with us and Rye kept saying “her” mom, “her” house, etc. in reference to the friend. The friend finally jumped in and said, “Um, do you think I could be referred to as a ‘him’?” (it was a guy).  Rye had not even noticed he was referring to the guy as a girl. It must to be frustrating to make these mistakes and be corrected all of the time.

The document also states the learning disabilities can be cause of emotional regulation issues.  It states:

Difficulties with regulating emotions are common for highly sensitive adults with learning disabilities. Dr. Kay Walker, describes the connection between learning disabilities and self-regulation problems in her paper “Self Regulation and Sensory Processing for Learning, Attention and Attachment”.  She asserts that self-regulation problems frequently occur in those with learning disabilities (Walker, 2000)  In its most extreme form, individual may easily shift from one emotion to the next. Others may experience difficulty regulating impulsive thoughts or actions.

Anyway, I’m not sure.  It’s hard to know.  Do the learning disabilities cause the emotional issues or do the learning disabilities and the emotional issues just go hand in hand as a form of brain impairment with some people (as obviously not all people with learning disabilities have the emotional issues part) or are the learning disabilities a part of the bipolar disorder (although that is interesting as well because not everyone with bipolar has learning disbilities)?

Who knows?

My guess is, like everything else, it varies from person to person.  And I wonder how you ever really know.

The new school is very different from the old school.  The old school enrolls primarily upper-middle class students who come from families where both parents went to college, have corporate or professional jobs and live in very large, shiny new houses in planned subdivisions.  The kids are very competitive and can be very cruel.  They are exclusive by nature and are intolerant of differences.  These are the kids I grew up with.

The old school population looks like this (No, not really. But this picture is so creepy I just had to use it):

The new school population, on the other hand, looks like this:

The new school enrolls primarily average, middle class, rural kids.  Kids who don’t all come from perfect families.  Kids who have seen their families struggle and have seen adversity of circumstance.  Kids who know what it is like to do without.  Kids whose families generally value land, animals, agriculture, God and wide open spaces (and yes, this is a romantic generalization but you get the picture).

The two schools are only miles apart, yet they are very different in nature.

And the new school is exactly where Rye wants to be.  This is where he feels comfortable.  This is where his long time friends are.  As he said to me this morning, “This is where I was raised.”  And as we walked in the school and got the tour we heard Rye’s name shouted throughout the hallways as his friends saw him walk through and were elated to see him there.  They were excited to have him home with them. It was great.

Now why, you might ask, was he not already at this school if this is where all of his friends are, where he feels comfortable etc.?  Well, because I am an idiot.  When I was growing up I went to very expensive, private college-prep schools – all the way through school (K-12).  So, naturally I thought when given the opportunity in middle school for Rye to go to a school that is new and fancy and shiny and with more upper-middle class kids, I thought it must be better.  I thought, he needs to go there!  And so he did.

What a mistake.

You see, Rye and I are very different.  He has grown up in a rural community.  I did not.  He has significant learning disabilites.   I did not.  He has processing disorders that greatly effect how he interpretes the world.  I did not.  He has issues with emotion regulation.  I did not. We have different needs.  And what worked for me does not work for him.   I know this now with certainty.

Anyway, as we waved goodbye to the old school today Rye looked at me and said,

There’s a party in my brain!  I can feel the good sensations pumping through my brain and it feels great!  I am so happy!

So, there it is.  A party in the brain.

It’s a good start.