I am in desperate need of help.

Dear T.M.,
I really hope some of my thoughts are able to help you in some way. Your daughter has a disability that may not yet be completely supported in school yet and this may be adding to some of her problems. It might be helpful to ask in school for a meeting with who ev er co-ordinates her disability learning. At that meeting you could ask about her learning plan or Individual Education Plan the short name for this isI.E.P. Perhaps it would be a good idea to ask if motivation and completion of homework could be built in to the plan. Is there a homework club at school? Is there a possibilty of your daughter being introduced to alearning mentor? This is a person who can help to get to know your daughter and why completion of work is such a problem for her, they can also help with goal setting and motivational ideas. You both should be included in the formulation of the IEP. She could also be allowed councilling to try and understand her feelings regarding all that is happening to her at this time. The doctor or school or both may have ideas on this subject. It is often so hard in these meetings to stay focused and to the point as things often race ahead before one has had chance to think about them. I know this from cruel experience myself! I find it helps if I sit down quietly before the meeting and write a list of the questions I want to ask. At the meeting I declare that I have certain questions and hear what they have to say then I ask the questions that have not been answered. You could also ask for support from the dyslexic association for you country/state. Again the school or specialist teacher may have a number or you could type the term into a search engine and they along with lots of good research comes up, especially if you put ‘dyslexia adhd research’ in. Be prepared to read lots, consider it a journey in discovery information is liberating! It may not get what you need right away but as you read new ideas and contacts emerge and a another step in the right direction is taken! Remember to be kind to your self, this is really hard for us parents and its normal that you feel so bewildered. Also try to walk half a mile in your daughters shoes, it must be frightening and bewildering wth her disability issues. Her self esteem may be low, dont forget that she will already feel so different from all of her peers. Ask school what confidence building exercises they have built into her iep. and if they have any suggestions that you might employ at home. In my experience the punitive approach only adds to the misery, I had to learn to step outside of myself and try to get alongside of my son which wasn’t always easy. Two books I found really helpful were Stephen Biddulph Happy children, and Seven Habits of highly effective families. These books weren’t always eay to read sometimes they challenged me but over all they gave me a start and the courage I needed at the time. I hope they do this for you also. I was up checking this message board because I couldn’t sleep for worrying about the next meeting about my sons next meeting on the third of October! Its 5.48 am in the uk! and Ive been up since four! Alas time for another cup of tea! I hope these words encourage you, as my friend (who is French) would say” Courage mon Brave!” Just take one step at a time and remember to think about something beautiful every day. Remember that a grain of sand is tiny but hundreds of them together create a very powerful force! Best wishes and good luck Marie Calow.

Your goal at this point should be getting her a high school diploma and some meaningful skills. How bad is the dyslexia? What’s her reading, writing, and mathematical ability like? She might do better attending school for sports and arts only, and otherwise doing high school from home through something like Indiana University’s Distance Learning High School. That way she would be able to skip mandated tests which might deny her a diploma even if she showed up faithfully all through high school; you would be able to help her with her courses, and she’d get her education under her belt.

This girl sounds like me at her age. I will try to tell you what I think would have helped me then if anyone had taken the time to bother. First I’ll say that punishment is probably counter productive at this point. It doesn’t really give her any incentive to do things that are difficult for her. It may actually give her more of an excuse to give up trying entirely. Rewards for work well done would be an incentive but first you have to get to the point where the work is actually getting done. The fact that you seem surprized when it doesn’t get turned in makes me think that you are expecting too much independence of her. She may need people to “hold her hand” through out the process of doing her work and turning it in… at least until she has had some more successful experiences behind her. Find things that she is interested in to help motivate her. Forget required reading or what an essay topic is supposed to be. What is she interested in reading? What subject is interesting enough to her to get her to focus on puting it down on paper. Help her find more information on the subjects that interest her. Finally, accept that there are certain things that may always be a stuggle for her and encourage her to find things that she is good at… a hobby, a sport, art, volunteer work… whatever will help increase her interests, talents, confidence and give her more reasons to succeed in life. I quit school when I wasn’t much older than her. It was many years and many struggles later before I was able to go back to school successfully. If you can keep her interested in school and learning new things it will be worth the effort. Good luck.

I echo the “sounds like me” sentiment. I really think the negative reinforcements are working to opposite effect. The trick is to get her to want to do the work herself. Unless she WANTS to do it, it won’t get done. Find something, a goal, that she wants to work toward and help her see who school success is important in acheiving that goal. I would also get into her IEP reduced homework assignments. While some of homework is to help them understand the material that can’t be covered in class, there is also a lot of homework that is simply there so the teacher has grades to help average out besides tests. Let her prove that she can show her comprehension of the material in less than 42 problems. Homework clubs are excellent at this age, because they often help motivate the learner to get the work done, and understand what needs to be learned, without her necessarily having to complete the whole assignment herself. (I can hear the teachers screaming now!!!) Her LD is demotivating her, and the negative incentives are sending her further into the pool of apathy. Hope this helps.
WIR

Children especially teenagers need limits. This book is great at explaining the need to allow our kids to experience natural consequences.

Shhh, I even used these techniques on my husband, it worked.

If you can afford it, I would hire a tutor to come after school as many days of the week that you can. It has spared me hours of frustration to have my kids do some of their more challenging homework under the supervision of someone besides me. They actually work for the tutor and they waste time, make excuses, argue etc with me. My son is ADHD and we have a high school kid help out twice a week and an actual tutor one other night per week. My daughter who has dyslexia has a special education teacher come twice a week to actually help her with her reading skills but my daughter ends up getting her homework out during that time as well. This all adds up to a pretty penny but it saves my sanity and so far they like it.

Good luck. The ADHD child is by far the hardest to motivate to do homework.

I am so frustrated with my older daughter!! She is a little younger, 11 and in 6th grade, but the problems are similar to those described by TM Neill.

Only one person (my daughter’s 3rd grade teacher) has ever thought that my daughter has any LDs. I take that back — we had a private evaluation done about 2 1/2 years ago and the diagnosis was dyslexic speller and writing disability. The test also revealed that she had the reading patterns of a remediated dyslexic. The school only qualified her under ED, but there are spelling and writing goals in her IEP. I believe she is mildly ADD, but right now she takes an antidepressant.

I already told the teacher I’m almost certainly going to ask to have her retained in 6th grade — even if the school wants to pass her on to 7th grade. They told me that my daughter has to reach certain “benchmarks” in order to be promoted, so maybe I won’t have to ask to have her retained.

We see a counselor and she has also suggested having a teenager to help with the homework, but my hours at work have been cut so I don’t think I can afford it. I signed her up for the homework club at school and she says she refuses to go. I would like the school to see how difficult it is to get her to do her work and to have someone besides my husband and myself help her.

Anyway, I can’t help but worry about my daughter when I see her work. It looks like a 2nd or 3rd grader did it — at best. Very discouraging.

I can relate to the others who have these problems. By the way, we are working on trying to get more structure into our lives. Not as easy as it sounds.

Margo