One part of adopting a child with a history of abuse and neglect is that there are times when you need to discuss it. My oldest son Steve was taken from his biological mother when she was arrested while using him to shop lift; he was only 2 when he was put in foster care. There are a few things that you need to know about Steve the first, he has epilepsy. His epilepsy is controlled in the aspect that you do not see him falling on the floor in a seizure but when they run his annual EEG they see so many spikes (abnormal brain waves). Usually when he needs to have his medication updated or increased he tends to regress back to a younger day.
Steve loves to be able to help and quite often offers and is allowed to help clean his teachers. His teachers have a goodie box where if the kids help clean the room up they are allowed to get a goodie for helping. On Thursday my son was not asked to help but he stayed behind and helped and he got something out of the goodie box. Well his teacher said this was stealing. I asked her if she had noticed any behavioral changes in Steve because in reality the teachers see the kids more of the day than we do. She says well “now that you mention it he has had a drastic behavioral change.” She mentioned that he has become very stubborn and doing only what he wants and said that he was behaving like a 3 year old. Well ok first I have 2 things here, if the teacher saw a behavioral change in him why was nothing mentioned to us, the second thing is she admitted he is acting much younger than he really is.
At the beginning of the year we sat the teachers down and explained that he has seizures, what type of seizures he has, and parts of his history. We had not told them about his use in shoplifting because I did not think it was relevant. Party of his educational plan is to work with him on social skills and can the teacher guarantee that he took it knowing it was wrong? But if he cleaned the room like he usually does and gets a goodie out like he usually does why didn’t someone sit him down and explain it to him before issuing a punishment?