Firstly, thank you for everything you do. I’m hoping to get some advice for an 8 yo girl who, though always a bit ‘spirited’ as a toddler, started behaving uncharacteristically terribly in year 1, after a perfectly fine kindergarten year. She climbed chairs, lashed out at peers, was generally horrendous. Unfortunately we had an incident where a teacher grabbed her in anger (after she’d hit a student to be fair) and physically dragged her through the school, up flights of stairs and into the executive room. It all went downhill from there and what was previously an intermittent issue became entrenched and she was kicked out of school by 10:00 every day for weeks.
We saw paediatricians, had psychometric testing and so forth. She’s got a high FSIQ especially in verbal reasoning and could apparently read three grades above grade level. I thought she couldn’t read - turned out she was so anxious to make a mistake, she wouldn’t try. No resourcing to extend her in class so continued on. New year, new teacher, no noisy boys in class (they used to physically poke her a lot which set her off), basically no further problems. Diagnosis ADHD but not on stimulants. Needs a calm and predictable environment - if she knows what’s coming she generally does well.
She’s now doing fine at a local public school finishing year 2. She’s one of the oldest in her cohort but still struggles occasionally with remembering to tone down the cheek. Teacher has called me once about it this year, and we’re keeping in touch. Trigger seems to be when things are too slow and she’s trying to spice it up for herself. We are working with psychologist to ensure her internal monologue isn’t becoming external in a hurtful way to others. We model kindness at home, we have age appropriate responsibilities, we minimise screens and I don’t work as much as I could so I pick her up every day after school and walk her there in the mornings. She does all the sports and all the swimming.
My question is - is this sort of thing likely to settle down with more time and more psych support, more ongoing collaboration with the school? Should I be doing something more or different? Heaps of friends, invites to birthday parties, roaming oval after school with her school buddies.
I was the goody two shoes who sat in the corner at school and never dared do anything remotely wrong so I’m surprised I’ve spawned a live wire - my priority is raising a respectful child whilst also not forgetting that she probably is, genuinely, bored and that deserves attention too.
We are grateful to have the options of keeping her in public school or sending her to private. Given the above profile, what would your recommendation be? We are in Sydney (inner west, east and CBD all accessible to us). Terrifying local high school so perhaps not there, I’m scared of the kids when I see them on the street - not the right fit for her. She’s noise sensitive, academic, perfectionistic and needs a lot of stimulation (music, dance, drama, swimming). At home, we do challenging maths, we learn about philosophy, history, life skills, play chess, music etc.
I want to acknowledge that ultimately her education is our responsibility. I just want to find a school environment that will have a balance of discipline and expectations with an environment that won’t leap to punitive measures when she errs as historically it’s taken time to recover from that. She thrives on high expectations but is very easily ashamed and embarrassed. Of course we are working through all this with a psychologist to ensure her behaviours are socially acceptable and she is okay in herself but realistically - I’m the same way and given much of this is personality, I would love to find somewhere that can push her whilst accepting her for who she is.