Popping pills
A lawsuit alleges a Ritalin conspiracy.

by Terri Mauro

Risky business
Do our kids need protection from the Olympics?

by Terri Mauro

Have the folks who do the parent advisories for TV shows been watching the Olympics? Because I think they need to put a warning label on this stuff. Maybe: “The following program contains scenes of people doing things with their bodies that, if you tried to do them, would result in significant emergency-room and/or chiropractic bills. Kids, don’t try this at home.”

The disturbing thing is, most of these Olympic atheletes, the pinnacle of their sports, are doing things I’ve been trying for six years to stop my son from doing. Things like slamming his head against hard objects. In the early days home from the Russian orphanage, he used to whallop his head against the wall, slam it into the floor, bop it back on my nose if he was sitting on my lap. There was a hole in the plaster next to his crib from where he periodically hit. Since he felt no pain, we had to persuade him that really, there were more interesting things to do than inducing concussions. But now, let him get one look at those soccer players stopping flying missiles with a head butt, or those female gymnasts hitting the balance beam with a crack in mid-maneuver, or the male gymnasts practically bouncing on their heads against those unforgiving mats, and he’ll know that head-hitting is not a bad habit, it’s a sport!

Or let’s look at inappropriate vocalizations. Now, my guy has a habit of yelling out annoying words or phrases over and over. So does the man who’s calling the soccer games. I dread the moment when my son hears the word “Gooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllllll.” Because I will then be hearing the word “Gooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllllll” 20 times a day for a month. Do we need this? Then there’s the incessant chatter of the commentators, trying desperately to make things up to make the pre-taped events seem interesting and suspenseful, and they clearly don’t know when to shut up, so why should my kids? It’s supposed to be bad when people talk on and on and on with nothing really to say. Isn’t it?

Crazy risk-taking is a hallmark of many neurological troubles, and I've long had an eye on my boy to make sure he doesn't, say, run out into the street or use a banister as a balance beam. But watching some of these atheletes, it looks like crazy risk-taking and a disregard for consequences are necessary qualities for sports superiority. Could they all have FAS/E? There was a time, I suppose, when you’d watch the Olympics and hope that your child could someday be like one of those glorious atheletes, but these days... I look at what these atheletes are attempting, and I don’t want my kids to even think of doing that.

I suppose you have to keep striving to go farther, higher, stronger, but especially in fields like gymnastics (and ice skating in the winter) that are largely subjective, I think it’s possible to push the human body too far. The things they’re doing are just impossibly hard and complex and punishing, and you can see by the injuries and the screw-ups that perhaps human bodies were not meant to do this. Call me a philistine, more interested in good TV than the glory of sport, but I liked it better when the routines were easier and the performances were better. And you could let the kids watch.

A word in Spanish
It's enough to make a young child cry.

by Terri Mauro

I knew things were going too well this year. My special-ed daughter is in a mainstream class, without an aide, doing well with only a round-the-clock study effort at home that is exhausting her poor mama. She remembered enough to get a B on a reading test, an A on a spelling test, a 100% on a social studies test. She’s happy, the kids appear to be friendly toward her, the teacher has been sending notes home to tell us what to study, and not complaining that my girl is a drain on her resources.

Math, English, Science--she’s getting along quite well, all things considered. But then there’s Spanish.

The foreign-language program in our city is still in its early stages, gradually complying with the state’s mandate to teach languages to kids when their brains are young and sponge-like, not later when their heads are full of rap lyrics and plans to shoot the student body. Only a few schools are currently giving the language lessons. Our old school didn’t. Our new school does. My daughter, who only started speaking English at age 5, is now being presented with Spanish words which mean nothing to her. (Better than English words that mean nothing to her, of which there are plenty, but still.) The other third graders have been learning this stuff for a year or more. She hasn’t. She’s clueless. And when she’s clueless, she cries.

I heard about this not from the teacher, and not from her, but from our new child-study-team case-worker, who called all concerned to find out if we wanted an aide for our daughter because she cried. (To what, tote tissues?) I’ve been explaining to all these people since the beginning of the year that if you give her work she is unfamiliar with, and she doesn’t know what to do, she will cry. If you give me the work ahead of time so I can show it to her at home and she is not surprised in the classroom, she will not cry. It’s so simple. It’s much simpler than putting an aide in the classroom. The teacher has sent me a few notes and a full set of textbooks, but not the sort of detailed advance warning I’d hoped for. And apparently the Spanish teacher hasn’t been clued in at all. Would it be so hard to send home the Spanish worksheets so that the language-disabled girl who has never had Spanish before will not be broadsided by them?

I’ve been requesting meetings since the beginning of the year, too, and everybody’s been too busy. Now that there are tears on the table, though, we suddenly need to talk. And I’ll have to make a decision. Do we want her to have an aide? (No. She is enjoying being like everybody else.) Do we want to demand that, as a classified child, she be released from the Spanish requirement and sent to do something else during that time? (Maybe. She still has such grave deficits in English, I hate to give over any brain cells to another language. She’s pulled out for speech twice a week, and maybe the speech therapist could switch her sessions to coincide. Or maybe I could request the resource room teacher work with her during those segments.) Or do we really want her to be like everybody else, and stumble through her language lessons? (When she cried, one boy admitted that Spanish made him nervous last year, too.)

I’m inclined toward the latter, though I think my daughter would just as soon give the whole thing a skip. But it’s not going to go away. As long as she’s at this school, there will be Spanish, and pulling her out now will mean that we have to pull her out always. So perhaps it’s time to get a Sesame Street Spanish tape, and find a teach-your-child Spanish workbook, and get cracking. There is some hope: After going on and on about how she doesn’t know Spanish, my daughter did manage to sing a little song she’d learned in class. It took a little time and some salvaging of my rudimentary junior-high-school Spanish to figure out what the heck she was saying, but we finally got it: “Buenos dias! Good morning! Como estas? How are you? Buenos, gracias. Very well I thank you. Y tu? And you?” Or something like that. As I said, my Spanish is rudimentary. But she is learning, emotional outbursts or no.

So I’ll go into battle to get some Spanish early warning, and I’ll hope that keeps her from panicking. I’ve told her a million times that it’s really much better to say “I don’t understand. I need help.” than to burst into tears. But desperate times call for desperate measures. This time around, I’m just going to teach her to say “No habla Español.”

Smoke-free schools
More and more teens are kicking the habit...maybe.

by Terri Mauro

Back to school
Now it's the parents' turn.

by Terri Mauro

Last night was my kids’ back to school night, finally, and...um....well...the fact is, I have nothing to report.

This is in marked contrast to last year, where a group of unhappy parents attacked my son’s special-ed teacher and made her cry. They had a legitimate grievance (well partly; they were right to be upset that their sons were in the same class as the year before, but they were wrong to be upset that my small son was in there with them), but they hauled off an attacked the wrong person, a young and inexperienced teacher who had only found out she would be teaching the class a few days before it started. She certainly wasn’t responsible for class placements, and couldn’t really even be expected to have a complete plan for the class laid out. But the parents lit into her anyway, and we felt the repercussions from that evening for the rest of the year, as many students were transferred out and the remaining kids’ parents dictated a much more strict atmosphere than I would have liked for my guy.

I’d never seen anything like that before at a back-to-school night, and I didn’t see anything like it this year. We’re at a new school, and everything is just exceptionally...nice. The teachers are nice, the parents are nice, the staff is nice. Parents seem to be treated with somewhat less distrust than at our old school. My son’s teacher this year is experienced and in control, teaching a class she’s taught before, and the parents are happy the kids are there. My daughter’s teacher went to the school herself as a child, and nobody had any arguments about how she planned to run the class. I spoke to the gym teacher by the baked-goods table after the presentations, and she knew who both my kids were and said they were doing fine. She had a hard time getting my son to stand still, so she put a hula hoop on the floor around him and told him to stand in the hoop. And he does.

That’s the kind of thing parents of special needs kids have every right to expect, but seldom get. Last year, I had the feeling that my son was a problem to be gotten rid of. Here, he seems to be a challenge to solve. No one seems too shaken up by him, and that’s great. The child-study team has been working with me to come up with the right plan for my daughter, who’s in a mainstream class and is supposed to have an instructional aide. Since she’s the only classified kid in the class, this would have made it an individual aide, and I don’t want that for her--she doesn’t need that. So the teacher and case worker came up with the idea of having the Basic Skills teacher, who will be coming in to help other general-ed kids, help my daughter too. It’s a nice, non-typical solution, and the case worker set it all up herself. Last year, whenever I needed anything, I was told to call the special-ed director myself. So this is all a welcome change.

Everything’s going smoothly. It’s going too smoothly. There’s bound to be a collision sooner or later. But until then, I’m going to enjoy the ride.

Whatever happened to fall?
Wintery weather comes too soon.

by Terri Mauro

I don’t know what the weather’s like where you’re at, but here in the northeastern U.S., it’s cold. Not as cold as it’s going to get, to be sure, but colder than it should be in late September. This is a continuation of a trend that’s been going on at least since summer. I can’t say I missed the usual endless days of 90 and 100 degree temperatures, but there was something odd about the not-so-hot hot season. And now, we seem to have lost fall.

I grew up in the Los Angeles area, where people pretend there are seasons but it’s mostly a formality. Some parts of the year are hotter than others, some are colder, some rain more. But you don’t have the extremes of 100 degrees with 100 percent humidity in the summer vs. 20 degrees with a foot of snow in the winter. And so you don’t get those delicate gradations in between--the gradual warming of spring, the growing awareness of a crispness in the air in fall. Fall has been one of my favorite parts of living in this part of the country. The month or so of hanging between weather types--too cold for a t-shirt, not yet cold enough for a jacket--where you could run around in a long-sleeved shirt and enjoy the clear light and the crunchy leaves and the lack of sweat. It’s a cool time of year.

Especially cool this year, unfortunately. Downright blustery some mornings. Usually I stash a few transitional outfits in everybody’s closet and they’re good for about a month of procrastinating in bringing out the winter clothes. Usually I can wait until late October to haul out the heavy sweaters. Usually we don’t need the down jackets on Halloween. But here in late September, I’m already rummaging through storage bags in the morning looking for something warmer to wear.

Isn’t there supposed to be some global warming going on? Can we get some of that over here? Because I’m freezing, and I’m not ready to be freezing yet. Scientists will tell me that the warmer winter will be a sign of that warming, but it won’t be warm enough, and it needs to be warmer now. Temperature perception is definitely a matter of what you’re used to--I’ve worn essentially the same winter clothes for frigid 50-degree winter days in L.A., -20 winter days in Kansas City, and +20 winter days in New Jersey--and what I’m used to now is a little more temperate fall.

Come to think of it, I guess we already had it. In June.

copyright © 2000 by Terri Mauro