Hi! I have an 11 year old who was adopted out of El Salvador at almost three, and came home with frank protein-deficiency malnutrition. She was initially considered to be mildly mentally handicapped, but further investigation showed that she had CAPD, a secondary language disability, a visual processing disorder, reading and spelling difficulties, ADD, organizational problems, and fine and gross motor coordination lags. At this point, post (1) Fast Forword (2) Lindamood Bell V&V, (3) Writing Road to Reading, (4) Interactive Metronome, (5) two years of vision therapy, (6) a combination of gymnastics and karate, and huge amounts of parental one-on-one tutoring, she is of average intelligence, scores at the 50th percentile or better on ERB testing in all areas except vocabulary, is working about a year and a half ahead of grade in mathematics, is gifted at Spanish and music, and is getting A’s and B’s at the Canterbury School http://www.canterburyschool.org/ here in Fort Wayne Indiana, which is the leading local, college preparatory, school. She is happy there, and they are not aware that she ever had any learning problems (although she tests well below their population (median ERB score 90-97th percentile). (She never had an IEP during her time in public school, and had several moves from school to school which successfully lost the medical record.) The only holes right now are her organizational skills and to a lesser degree, vocabulary. I expect to have the latter at the 50th percentile by the end of this coming academic year. So far so good, however, I have the following concerns:
Possibly because I have spent so much time organizing, tutoring, and generally angsting over her, she does not have the self-confidence, organizational skills, and self-discipline to stick with moderately difficult academic work unless I am there to make her do it. She relies on me to keep her organized and on task. While I feel I should just sit on my hands at this point, and say “Well, it’s your work, dear, you deal with it”, practically speaking I am incapable of taking this course of action. (I know that had I done that earlier she would not now be where she is, and I am afraid that she would simply slide backwards if I tried it now.) I am concerned that if she doesn’t learn to take responsibility for herself, she will do fine through high school (because I will be around), and then screw up big time in college. I am therefore thinking of sending her to a military boarding preparatory school for high school, most likely Culver Girls Academy http://www.culver.org or Howe Military School http://www.howemilitary.com/ both of which are in Indiana. I figure that a military school would be better at teaching organization, self-discipline, and taking responsibility than her current preparatory school. She is a resilient, popular child who loves being around other kids, and is very much a slave to whatever is in. I figure she’d adapt well to either. However, I am concerned that she might develop a Mercedes mentality and think she didn’t need to earn a living if I sent her to Culver and she came into contact with a slew of kids who had trust funds, and I am concerned that she’d finangle her way into lowered expectations if she went to Howe, and would end up losing ground academically even if she gained in self-discipline. Does anyone have any thoughts about this?
Shirin
Re: military school?
First. 11 is still very young. You have a lot of time before college and a fair amount of time before high school.
Second, lack of organization is not the end of the world. I have a terrible organizational difficulty myself and while it isn’t always easy, I do find ways to manage.
Third, she obviously depends on you a lot. Considering where she started and the incredible efforts you have made, this is only reasonable. Cutting off this dependence in one fell swoop is not only difficult for both of you, but probably very inadvisable. Even kids who have never had any difficulties in their lives have trouble being sent away from school; your daughter would probably be unnecessarily traumatized.
Fourth, adolescence is a time to work hard to stay close to your child. She needs you most when she is most stressed and difficult.
I would suggest finding a good local high school and working on gently weaning her away from dependence. If you are sitting with her and reading her homework with her, back off just a little bit. Sit a few feet away and take out your knitting or crocheting or your own paperback book. Tell her you’re there to answer questions but you want her to do as much as possible on her own. After a semester or so, move to the next room — she can do homework in the dining room whjile you potter in the kitchen. The next year, she can do her homework in her own room but you are in the house and can be called, and you come up and see that it’s all done. After a year of that, you let her suffer her own consequences if she doesn’t do it. The point is not to suddenly throw her in the deep end, but to learn to paddle in the shalows a bit and have some practice before the sink or swim. This would fit perfectly well with her age, as she is just at the point of wanting to get away from mom anyway.
Intrinsic Motivation
One thing that I didn’t do with my son was allow him to fall flat on his irresponsible pre-teen face while the price tag was low (i.e. before high school). He had way too much outside motivation and depends on it still.
Whatever your decision, examine how motivation is applied. The real goal in this process is a life-time love of learning. That takes each of us through any program of study we choose.
I also think you must consider the desires of your daughter to live away from home (if that is needed).
Finally, there may be a summer program—such as Landmark School offers—in study skills. Another good one might be SOAR in North Carolina. They do a great job of building self-confidence and team skills.
I think you do have a little time to consider different programs before deciding if military school is really right for your daughter.
Re: Intrinsic Motivation
One thing that I didn’t do with my son was allow him to fall flat on his irresponsible pre-teen face while the price tag was low (i.e. before high school).
That’s partly why I was thinking Howe for seventh. (It takes them at fifth grade. Unfortunately, there are some problems with Canterbury, (which she loves and does not want to leave.) Canterbury assigns immense amounts of homework. If you are a child who can read well, but does not actually love reading (which she is), then being diligent means that you will work steadily through the afternoon, knock off for dinner for an hour or so, study some after dinner, and then hit the sack at a civilized hour e.g. 9 or so, to rise at 6:30 and do it again. If you are irresponsible you play during the afternoon, cheer the various teams at their sports, and eat popcorn instead of studying; get home at 6:00, and have a crummy evening and a hasty dinner while your working mom reads you the riot act for the ten millionth time, work like a dog until 11 or 12, with your mom running back and forth for missing books, pasteboard, etc. and then collapse exhausted into bed only to rise at 6:30 to do it again. Karen prefers option 2. Since she managed to put on 20 pounds in the first semester, I now have her picked up promptly at 4:00 and taken to karate instead of hanging about in aftercare eating popcorn, which is better for her health, but still leaves us running back and forth for books and pasteboard etc. The excessive homework schedule does not induce a lifelong love of learning, but on the other hand, academically speaking she has gained tremendously in this setting, and she likes the school. If I let her fail, basically what would happen is that she’d do no work, fail, get tossed out, and return to the ps setting. I removed her from the public school setting because of the highly sexualized behavior of the inmates, and the drugs in the middle school. Academically speaking she had no trouble coping with the work. A dilemmna. I figure that a boarding school might have reasonable amounts of homework, since there would be no parents around to handle this crud.
I looked at Howe yesterday, and it is awfully bleak. Culver, on the other hand, I KNOW she’d love, and their ninth grade offers a year long course in study skills. I don’t think she’d have any trouble living away from home; she loves camp settings and has been bugging me to send her to six-week residential camp for some time. (She’s only gone to two-week camps thus far.) I’m thinking of sending her to Culver’s six-week camp next summer to see how she likes it.
Re: military school?
–After a semester or so, move to the next room — she can do homework in the dining room whjile you potter in the kitchen. The next year, she can do her homework in her own room but you are in the house and can be called, and you come up and see that it’s all done. After a year of that, you let her suffer her own consequences if she doesn’t do it.
At the moment she either works in her room or at the kitchen table. She tends to work more efficiently at the kitchen table, as she tends to get sidetracked in her room. I do NOT read her work to her, although obviously I answer questions, find resources, check math, and proof written compositions. I expect her to make a good faith effort to figure it out herself before asking me for help, and for the most part, she can handle that now. Thus, if she doesn’t understand the math, she is expected to look it up in the index, and reread the appropriate section, go through the worked examples, etc. If she has trouble with English, social studies or science, well she has a good dictionary, a thesaurius, and a book of english verb conjugations, and there are two encyclopedias in the house plus the Internet. (That last requires my supervision, as otherwise she tends to get sucked into nick.com.)
There is, unfortunately, an awful lot of homework, so you actually have to be quite diligent for a good three or four hours to get it all done. Alternatively you could not do it, and have a bit more time to play. Accept the consequences? If she doesn’t do the work, she fails the course. If she fails enough courses she goes back to the public school where she will find the work much easier, but then _I_ get to worry about the drugs and the sex. Failure for her has consequences which more severely affect her long term, not short term…
shirin
Re: military school?
–If you were able to get her to the point she is now why can’t you teach her organization??
Because I am so good at it, and because she would so much rather depend on me to organize her than bother with it herself. Also, she isn’t interested in maintaining a decent GPA; that is my interest, not hers.
–It sounds as if she is very comfortable and at ease where she is right now. My concern would not be that she would have trouble socially, that she would regress academically.
She might at Howe. She wouldn’t at Culver. Culver is as good academically as Canterbury. Culver is basically a top-notch college prep school with a military school orientation, but the emphasis on college prep.
–It sounds to me like she should stay where she is and you should research ways to help her??!!
I am open to suggestions.
Shirin
Re: Intrinsic Motivation
I have a friend at military school similar too culver, which just as good and tough, who doesn’t have any issues and he struggles. He’s a hardworker, but it was also what he wanted. He was also 14, when he made the decision and his family supported him. Maybe a small private school (maybe boarding) would be best atleast for now. Eleven is so young and a confusing age to make a decision like that.
I go to a small private school, that’s just as good as Brewster and schools like Canterbury, but were more help is available if needed. I have a tutor to help keep me on track, but still have 3-4 of homework a day.
Re: Intrinsic Motivation
I have a friend at military school similar too culver, which just as good and tough, who doesn’t have any issues and he struggles. He’s a hardworker, but it was also what he wanted. He was also 14, when he made the decision and his family supported him. Maybe a small private school (maybe boarding) would be best atleast for now. Eleven is so young and a confusing age to make a decision like that.
I go to a small private school, that’s just as good as Brewster and schools like Canterbury, but were more help is available if needed. I have a tutor to help keep me on track, but still have 3-4 of homework a day. I always have classes 6 days a week.
Re: Intrinsic Motivation
I permitted my daughter to fall on her face, dig a hole and then resign from school even though I know that it wasn’t mostly her fault. Most of you have read her story on line and she sure did learn from her experiences in school and is very organized when it comes to school work but not to her room etc. I have never been very organized, evidence on my desk, but I get things done. You have to let her accept the consequences even though it may hurt you more than her!
Re: military school?
Shirin,
I have a 11 year old daughter who is in a demanding parochial school. She is not LD but I really think a lot of what you are dealing with is 11 years old. My daughter is now entering 7th grade. Sixth grade was quite a shock. I saw most of her weaknesses being organizational. For example, she would not have the one out of six religion assignments that the teacher graded and she would get a zero. This happened several times in the first half of the year. I just let her fail.
One of her friends’ moms was having a fit about a lot of the same stuff. I kept telling her this is not Harvard, it is sixth grade. Frankly, I did not have the same demands on me in sixth grade. I think kids in demanding schools deal with more than we did at the same age.
Anyway, she really got her act together and she got straight A’s the second half of the year.
I know your fear is letting her fail and what will happen. I think you need to give her some space to discover the consequences of her own actions at a young enough age that the consequences won’t affect her the rest of her life. I basically let my daughter do her homework on her own and stayed out of everything unless she specifically asked for help. That level of staying out of it may not be reasonable for your daughter. I have a 9 year old LD son and can’t envision giving him as much space as my daughter when he is 11. But still you can allow her some space to learn from her own mistakes. But just the same I think a lot of what you are dealing with is developmental as well as the fact that she probably is more dependent on you than other 11 year olds because of your history together.
Also, some LD kids just need support much longer than the average child. An audiologist my son has worked with for some time has a child who is LD. She told me that she helped him all the way through high school. When he was college age, he went to the local junior college. He did two years work in three and she weaned him away from her help. He then went away to college and graduated with a B average.
Beth
Re: more thoughts about 11 year old's organization
Just one more thought. I do not proof my daughter’s work. But I know other parents in her class do—and they aren’t LD. I just am not sure that your daughter is that far off developmentally.
Also, if she doesn’t care about her grades, set some consequences that she does care about. My daughter has to get A’s or B’s on her report card. She can fail individual assignments (and has). If she gets a C or below, she is required to demonstrate that she now understands. If it is just organizational, I gave her some slack—in her case she still never got lower than a B on her report card, despite O’s or F’s at times, so I thought I’d just see if she would get it together on her own. She did. I would never ask this of my LD son because he has to work very hard for C’s. You know what your daughter is capable of. I would set a floor lower than what you think she is capable of but certainly higher than what will get her kicked out!!!
My LD son was shocked when he learned by reading “The Little Princess” why anyone would send their child to boarding school. He wanted to know why the father didn’t want to be with his daughter. I think you would need to be very careful that your daughter didn’t have this interpretation, especially since boarding school is not that common in this day and age.
Beth
Re: military school?
Yes, I used to live in the D.C. area, and posted on this board quite a bit then. We moved to Indiana about three years ago.
–Also, what type of work schedule does she have? Believe it or not, alot of experts suggest that people like us take breaks every 20 to 30 minutes and do some type of physical activity.
She has a killer work schedule. I try to fit in some aerobic exercise for her during the day as it helps settle her down. I’ll look for “Organizing from the Inside Out
Re: more thoughts about 11 year old's organization
–Also, if she doesn’t care about her grades, set some consequences that she does care about. My daughter has to get A’s or B’s on her report card. She can fail individual assignments (and has). If she gets a C or below, she is required to demonstrate that she now understands.
Getting below a C on any test or paper means extra work in our family. I can’t set consequences which involve report cards because they are just too far off to impress my kid. Unfortunately, it is VERY easy to get bad grades on your report card in her school if you are not eager to redo work in order to hustle for good grades. Her English teacher will allow you to redo work until you get an A, but thinks nothing of giving a child an initial F for a beautifully written piece of work that was not exactly written to her demanding standards. For example, last semester she got an initial F on a book report on the book Shadow Spinner because during the presentation part of the report, she went three minutes OVER the allotted time. Everything else was absolutely perfect, and we are discussing something whose written portion was seven typred written pages long.
–My LD son was shocked when he learned by reading “The Little Princess” why anyone would send their child to boarding school. He wanted to know why the father didn’t want to be with his daughter. I think you would need to be very careful that your daughter didn’t have this interpretation, especially since boarding school is not that common in this day and age.
Mine was not particularly shocked by The Little Princess. But her idea of boarding school comes straight out of Hogwarts, so she regards it as fun, friends, and adventure.
shirin
Re: more thoughts about 11 year old's organization
“Her English
teacher will allow you to redo work until you get an A, but thinks nothing of giving a child an initial F for a
beautifully written piece of work that was not exactly written to her demanding standards. For example, last
semester she got an initial F on a book report on the book Shadow Spinner because during the presentation part of
the report, she went three minutes OVER the allotted time. Everything else was absolutely perfect, and we are
discussing something whose written portion was seven typred written pages long.”
Hey Shirin- nice to see you back. What was this supposed to teach the kids? That life isn’t fair? Wow. This school must be wonderful in other respects…
My inclination- and practice actually with my son- is to be as involved as necessary in supporting him organizationally. We did this with our daughter who is now a senior and she weaned herself so that I only occasionally offer proofing and whatnot. The boy(13 now) requires different sorts of support- more direct in terms of backpack cleaning stuff- but it is a teaching process as much as anything else he does. I think the modeling here is more valuable than the idea of “cutting loose” and that there is time enough for those skills to internalize. You however, know your child best and have worked with her longer and all that- and will make your choices well:)
Robin
Re: more thoughts about 11 year old's organization
Shirin,
I suspect that a big part of the problem is that your daughter simply doesn’t want to work so hard. Personally, I can’t blame her. It is a lot to expect of a kid her age, especially if she has had to work really hard to get to the point of being able to compete in this environment to start with. I understand why you find the public ms unacceptable. Is the boarding school less demanding than this? I have a hard time believing that this is a good environment for a kid who has had to overcome so much and the work doesn’t come as easily for as most other kids.
Beth
Re: more thoughts about 11 year old's organization
–I suspect that a big part of the problem is that your daughter simply doesn’t want to work so hard.
I agree. Her point was “Why should I work like a dog in order to get an F? I can get an F without doing any work at all.” I think the teacher is trying to teach kids that everything can always be improved. She is an extremely effective teacher, but she is also a NUTcase!.
–Is the boarding school less demanding than this?
Yes, although actual SAT scores and college acceptances are actually about the same. The boarding school has more AP classes, and far more sports.
Shirin
It doesn’t sound like military school is the best choose for teaching organizational skills.
It sounds as though you have both worked very hard and been very successful. If you were able to get her to the point she is now why can’t you teach her organization??
I think if you have done fastforward, lindamood bell, and more you could easily find programs or ways to help her become organized and to learn how to be that way on her own.
It sounds as if she is very comfortable and at ease where she is right now. My concern would not be that she would have trouble socially, that she would regress academically.
It sounds to me like she should stay where she is and you should research ways to help her??!!
K.