For my next trick.....

I could waffle on for ages about the biology of ADHD. It doesn't mean a thing. What really matters is how it affects the child, and the family of the child. Today George was given lunchtime detention for trying to bite a Teaching Assistant. His frustration got the better of him and he reverted to the behaviour of a two year old going through the "terrible twos". Thank goodness, his school teachers understand that he is not doing this out of malice. He is really a very caring and sensitive boy. He sometimes pretends he isn't but adults who know him realise who he really is, under all the nonsense he displays. His face, when I arrived to collect him from his year tutor, was enough to reduce me to tears. He looked so sad, so frightened, so sorry...... He has apologised to the poor woman, and rightly so. He doesn't know why he did it. He knows it was wrong. I spoke to his ADHD nurse this evening and she was very supportive and understanding. She knows he can't help it. It doesn't help in the long term though.... I don't know how I manage to function from day to day. I am deliberately with-holding his Ritalin on the basis that the long term effects are not fully known. I don't want to be responsible for giving him a class A drug that "may" fry part of his brain. Without it, he is not coping. What to do? We have booked an assessment at a Dore clinic, because it's currently the only non-medication option that we have. It's two weeks away, but I need it now! There's a chance that we're throwing away £2500 on this for nothing, but I can't sit here and do nothing. I can't give him the drugs unless I have exhausted every other opportunity to help him and I feel as though we're caught between a rock and a hard place. Unfortunately the space between the rock and the hard place is quick sand.

George is in the garage with his Dad, right now. They're welding. George is very good at it. He needs to end the day on a positive note.