afterschool

As a scoutleader and mother of two boys with LD, I have found it most helpful to be upfront with the scout leader about your son and his specific limitations. Many people do not understand exactly what LD and ADHD mean and tend to treat the child either as a trouble maker or handicapped. If you explain what is successful with your son and what is not, it would truly help the adults in charge and you would be surprised how well the other boys will act with him if things are explained to them. The whole dynamics work better when everyone understands. Sometimes too, the activities are not structured enough and things can get out of hand or rules and expectations are not made clear enough. We all know (those of us who have boys) what happens in a room full of boys, it can be chaos. Maybe sit in on a meeting to observe what is going wrong and later make suggestions or offer your assistance. Usually this approach is always welcome. Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts is a wonderful opportunity for these young men. Don’t give up, get involved.

Yes. Scouts was a mess for the same reason Sunday school and even…Soccer/Sports was a mess. Instructors/Leaders with no training in LD kid needs. No awareness of how to integrate LD kids in the group. I am running out of non school options to get her involved.

Please keep in mind that scouts, Sunday school and even sports teams are lead by parent volunteers. They usually have little or no experience with LD and/or ADHD children, they are definitely not formally trained. As the child’s parent I believe it is our responsibility to help them understand for the benefit of our child. If the volunteers have never been exposed to such difficulties how can we expect them to automatically understand? Being parents themselves, I can almost guarantee that they would be more than willing to learn. Please do not give up, give them a chance to know your daughter and embrace your daughter’s differences. As you know she has so much to contribute she just needs to be understood and the volunteers need to be informed. Please try to start there instead of pulling her out of everything and starting somewhere else. Maybe it just takes you being involved in the activity with her as well until everyone is comfortable with the situation. You have the perfect opportunity to open the door of understanding for those who follow her. Take advantage of this situation, it will be well worth the effort.

My older son who was struggling with school at the time (k-5th grade) was in scouts during 2nd -4th grade, he decided to quit sometime in the 4th grade because it was getting too academic for him, I tried to encourage and help him but ya know, school was hard enough at the time. I should have talked to the leader but I left the decision up to him since we were having to juggle baseball in with it. He is good at baseball and preferred to spend his time there. I did feel like scouts was worth it while he was in it. We had a pretty good male leader and the meetings were held at my house, I was able to intervene if needed.

If you want him in scouting and he wants to stay then take the opportunity to speak to the scoutmaster and explain LD to him or her. Since it is scouting how about a presentation to the scouts on what having a disability means to someone who who just wants to “fit in”. They might even earn a badge or something for participating. Just a thought. My daughter is having a rough time with basketball this summer. Kids can be mean. But as I told her this is the perfect opportunity for her to learn tolerance to ignorance. She has learned to stand up for herself and to ignore ignorance. She is also learning that a good dose of well placed “guilt” can make the biggest hotshot look 2 inches tall in the eyes of others.

Although we did have some trouble with the Den Leader not understanding our child’s dyslexia and dysgraphia, the main trouble we had was with the other boys not understanding. They weren’t overtly mean to him at scout meetings (because that wouldn’t have been tolerated) but the same boys made him miserable at school by harassing him and calling him stupid. It was almost like they went out of their way to show their non-scouting friends that even though they had to hang out with this kid in scouting, that didn’t mean they like someone who can’t read, write, or spell. It is surprising how cruel children can be.

I think you need to find out from your son what his real feelings are about scouting and what aspects of it he does not like. Be careful not to take their first answer as fact—they will sometime dance around the real problem for awhile to save face. If it is simply a problem with the Den Leader not understanding, you might be able to address it with heart-to-heart with the leader (if they are open minded). If it is the kids that are giving him trouble, that’s much more difficult to address.

Perhaps you could get the a video tape (sorry I don’t know the specifics, but I often see posts about a tape called something like “how difficult can this really be” that people mention can be found somewhere on this site) and arrange with the Den Leader to show it. Some of the levels (Bear, I think) have a achievement that includes talking with a deaf or blind person about their disability, and I think this activity would make a valid substitution toward that requirement. Your child might object to this though because they often have elaborate mechanisms to hide their disability from their peers.

Ultimately, I would go with how your child feels. If he’s miserable, I’d say drop scouting. They intend for scouting to be a positive experience and if it’s not for your boy, I’d look for something else that he would enjoy. On the other hand, we “shepherded” our two boys through all five years of Cub Scouts despite some reluctance. Five minutes before the necessary departure time, I’d show up with the shirt hat and book, and sweep us both out the door leaving little or no time for whining. But if either boy had strenously objected to continuing in scouting, I would have dropped it.

If he’s fine at school and not fine at scouts, scouts feels like it’s expendable. Scouts are supposed to be for learning and for fun. If he’s not learning or having fun at scouts, why keep him there?

You could always give it another try in a year or so.