Tiana’s story: When I was in kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade—school was kinda fun. There were a few wild kids in my class, and we used to run around and act goofy all the time. The other kids loved to see us perform. Toward the end of the 2nd grade, some of the other kids sort of grew up…but not me. I continued to be the class clown, and I worked really hard at trying to get the kids to laugh with me. Instead, they started to “shush” me, telling me they didn’t want to get into trouble.
In 3rd grade, school got a lot harder, and the teacher was a lot stricter. Whenever I acted up, we’d have these talks about how I needed to get more serious about school. She said that in 3rd grade we were changing from a “learning to read” class to a “reading to learn” class. I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew that every time I picked up a book I felt really dumb. Just about everybody could read better than me—and when we had to read out loud, I was really scared that the other kids would laugh at me. And you know what? Sometimes they did. The teacher got mad at them, but they didn’t really stop—they just got sneakier.
That’s about the time I began to hate school. I cried every morning and begged my mom to let me stay home. I got stomachaches and headaches all the time and asked to go to the nurse’s office. I would do just about anything to get of class or miss school, because everything was so hard for me. The kids who used to think I was funny told me that I was “weird,” or that I bugged them, and they started to whisper about me whenever I came into the room or the cafeteria. I started to get extra help with my schoolwork, but it was so embarrassing for me to go to the “special class” that I refused or did stuff that got me sent to the principal’s office. It was better to be punished than embarrassed. I didn’t tell anyone, but I was lonely, sad, and kind of scared.
My take on this: If we recorded Tiana’s life with time-lapse photography, we’d see a funny, happy little girl morph into a depressed, anxious student over the span of three short years. Tiana’s classmates, not wanting to get led down the road to trouble, began to see her antics as silly and disruptive, and they distanced themselves from her socially. Academically, Tiana saw the extra help she was offered as an acknowledgement of weakness, and she rejected her teachers’ efforts to help her get on track educationally. She didn’t feel competent or confident, so she developed physical symptoms to get out of school. She must have felt she had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
My advice: If your child is in a similar situation, hit the "stop" button right now and try to rewind and restart. Teachers and parents need to take dramatic steps to help a student like this take control over her life as a student, or else she’ll continue to flail and seek escape.
Parents can:
Talk to teachers about how best to create a learning environment in which a student experiences success more often than frustration and failure. With specialized, intensive instruction delivered in an environment that is safe and supportive, this little girl might be put on a better learning, social, and emotional trajectory. If she doesn’t have an IEP, this might be time to initiate the evaluation process.
Talk to the student about the nature of her LD and AD/HD, and also about ways she can work through or around the challenges that come with these conditions.
Consider specialized summer programs, perhaps even for a couple of years, to help her catch up with things she’s missed and to “hit the ground running” the following school year.
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My child is struggling 
Now that my child has 
