My daughter is a wonderful person, don’t get me wrong. I love her with all my heart and anyone that comes in contact with her is completely drawn to her personality. It is one of her greatest assets. She is the sweetest, most helpful person in this household! She is willing, and has, helped anyone who needs it in anyway she can.
She does love to work with her hands and be active. In NY we have BOCES, which is technical education, but still certain courses must be passed to graduate and I’m afraid that her social skills will allow her to be taken advantage of monetarily and in every other way. She went to a play with school and they stopped on the way back to get dinner. She was so excited to be with friends and buy her own food at a rest area! We gave her a $20 bill. She had used $10 of it at the play for a souvenir and had $10 left. Another student had no money. They kept complaining they were hungry. With a big heart she bought them dinner, leaving no money for herself. She went ten hours without eating. I had went through every scenario with her on how to make sure she would have money to eat. I even said if the situation arose where she wanted to help someone, get a teacher to help her figure out the money situation. Instead she just gave it all away.
Be VERY THANKFUL this wonderful child has a heart like this, she is a very giving child a VERY SPECIAL HEART!!!! She IS VERY social which
WILL help her in business, she WILL be fine you are worrying way to much be VERY thankful you are blessed with such a thoughtful human
being she is VERY young and I bet she grows up to be a VERY creative
business person!!!!
My thoughts and prayers are with you. Your letter could have been written by my wife with a few changes. Tenth grade daughter, has within the year shown anxiety disorder and OCD. Wonderful girl, but it takes her a LONG time now to get her homework done, and perceived slights can set her mood back.
BUT - she is also very kind, friendly, etc. The story about the money sounds familiar from when she was much younger.
In our state (Washington) the schools need to make allowances for kids that have trouble with learning, even if they don’t get the worst grades. BUT - you need to push them on it. We have her in counseling and the pyschologist was able to push it. We also had a dear friend and one of her teachers really step up to the plate to advocate for her. “Advocate” is a good term - the child can’t do it, and the schools don’t want to (can’t afford) to do it. So the parents (and perhaps a professional) have to.
For us, her spending all of her time studying (hence the okay grades, not A’s like before, but B’s and C’s) short-changed her on a “normal” social life. lack of sleep was becoming an issue. There were some other aspects too that forced the school to adopt some changes for her. We finally have a plan in place that gives her a few more options (taking more time on some lessons, reduced load on some lessons, etc.) Before that we had talked with her teachers and some of them made changes on their own to accomodate her. (At some resistance by our daughter as she didn’t want any special treatment.)
And yes - the long hours of studying, with me and mom helping, is wearing on the entire family.
Find others in your situation. In the state of Washington they have an “obudsman” for disabilities. Find and use someone like that. I still have a hard time that my daughter has a “disability”. “Come on - just DO YOUR WORK!” still comes out once in awhile. But as our one friend said, she has a disability just the same as a child without a leg. And you wouldn’t yell at the legless child to run faster.
One of the things my wife and I just learned in counseling with our daughter (”DBT” class) was “acceptance”. Not giving up, or giving in, but acceptance of one’s circumstance at a particular moment. Hard to do.
May God continue to watch over ALL our children.