Medication?

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I am against meds for my son at age five years old. I believe he is too young to let me know about the side effects. He is also already extremely thin and little so stimulant meds seem out of the picture for now.

His difficulties with paying attention are becoming worse. The teacher emailed me again today to let me know that they don't know how to keep him focused anymore. They have tried many things but he continues to get bored. I don't want to say, "Perhaps the way it is being taught could be a little boring." I know they are wonderful teachers but it's hard. I try to stay positive although it has been hard. Nate is an extremely young kindergartener who is being required to sit and read and do math for a lot longer than most kindergarten students are required because he is in full day (not normal full day - two 1/2 day). I want to switch his schedule but can't. He is at the private school and there is no one to take him to a daycare. He is stuck for two more months in this two 1/2 day kinder split.

Nate also pees his pants everyday. He hyperfocuses on his work so much that he really doesn't seem to know that he needs to go to the bathroom. Either that or he can't cognitive shift to the next task until he is done with the first one. He either hyperfocuses or doesn't focus at all. There doesn't seem to be an in between.

I have ADHD and anxiety. It has been a med hell nightmare for me. At first meds help but then they made the anxiety worse. I was an adult when I figured this out. As an adult, it was hard going through the med nightmare. My son is so small, I don't want him to go through that yet I also don't want him to not be able to function either. It's hard to know what to do.

I am not quick to put him on meds. There are too many variables to be sorted through in his current situation. I want him to be in a more stable "typical" situation before we even look at the med issue. Either have him be in full day 1st grade or kindergarten again. He will be bored in kindergarten but developmentally that is really where he is at. His best friends are all kids who are at that level (next year kinder). I just don't know. Perhaps attention will be worse in kindergarten again due to boredm. Perhaps 1st grade will interest him more.

I do know that we will be going down the whole "med" question road again. I just feel it is too soon for him

Any thoughts?

I think you're right, it's too soon. And I love my meds.

I wonder how much of the teacher's whinging isn't really about Nate being inattentive, but is some weird transferance thing from her resentment of having to deal with the toileting issue. I would be tempted to give her one of those six-alarm watches, pre-set to go off every couple of hours, to remind her to remind Nate to go pee. You're a nice lady and could probably pull that off without making the nasty remarks that come to my mind about having to help her be the grown-up in this situation, and her competance at dealing with children when she appearantly couldn't handle puppies. How many kids are in this class anyway?

I think back to my son's K year and other experiences and can say that he would have reacted very similarly to how your son is reacting. The educational and classroom expectations are developmentally inappropriate and are causing stress for your child. Sorry to be so blunt about it, but that is what I see. Fix the environment, and you fix the problem. And, yet ... you can't do that, because I know you have tried and are trying.

Which leads to this: I don't think medication can or should be used to replace an issue with the environment a child is in. They aren't designed for that. They are designed to fix chemical issues within the body. Nate's problem isn't a chemical issue within his body. Therefore, medication may be able to mimic a fix, but it will never to be able to actually provide one, which makes it inappropriate.

All these years we've managed to avoid medication with my son because we have consistently said that the environment needs to be worked on first. And with grit and determination we've always found a way to mitigate the issues enough for my son to get by. When he gets stressed, there is an outside cause. It's clear after all these years that it isn't internal. Yes, he can get panic attacks, but they aren't random - they have triggers, and he has learned to come down from those panic attacks in his own time and his own way.

All of which is so much better and so much more important to living life than masking things with a drug. Which is what I honestly believe you would be doing at this point if you chose that route with Nate. Stick with your instincts on this one: he's too young and it's not the answer.

schools often force kids to go on meds rather than work at changing the kid's behavior, mentoring, setting limits, teaching skills, etc. if i grew up in the USA i would have certainly been put on ADD or Depression meds. but thank god i learned to sit still in school and thus was able to slide through the cracks in the U.S. school system and not be abducted by med pushing administrators. i'm 22 and the only meds i have ever taken was an antibiotic for GI bug. that's it. yes i do have depression and apathy and problems with attention, but are meds appropriate in my situation - probably not.

p.s. most doctors do not really know how the meds they are prescribing work. they usually prescribe something to see if it will work. most psychiatric meds were not developed and were not tested on the pediatric population. plus the attending physicians overprescribe meds routinely and teach that by example to medical students. that is not to say that psych meds should never be prescribed, but the threshold should be high, not low.

Our son started on an anti-anxiety drug when he was 8 and I have to say that it has helped. It doesn't get rid of the anxiety 100% of the time, but it helps. Prior to that, we did start him on a low dose of Adderall XR because at the time, we were attributing a lot of his behavior to ADHD rather than being on the spectrum, and I truly mischaracterized his anxiety for being ADHD as well. I did not like those drugs at all - I always said it was as though it took his personality away. I'm glad he's off of them. The anti-anxiety meds don't work in the same manner at all - his personality is the same, it's just that he's not as anxious and not every last thing bothers him.

All of that said, I agree that 5 is pretty young for medicine. My son was small and thin, and the drugs didn't help that at all. When he stopped taking them - he gained 20 pounds and he looks great now. I think it's very difficult for teachers today because at least where I live, the class sizes are much larger, they are expected to get through far more curriculum in a year, and let's face it - I highly doubt these teachers are trained very well as to how to teach kids with special needs that are mainstreamed. Those are failings of the school system though, not our children - and I don't think it's right to expect every last pupil to be in whatever "box" the school district deems appropriate.

I'm not sure what more can be expected of his current learning environment - I'd love to say that the school has to figure that out, but the reality of it is that they won't and you'll probably continue to get phone calls unless you can sit down and figure out another plan of action. Do they have any kind of reward/behavior system in place for him?? Sticker charts worked well with my son - as long as he was being rewarded on a regular basis. (if he got 5 gold star stickers in a week - he'd get a new train car, or a pack of Pokemon cards...something like that.) I've found that often times I'm the one that has to come up with the idea for a simple behavior system, and the school is more than willing to put it into place.

medication has worked wonders for my son & daughter.........son started on meds in middle school....daughter started at age 9.
meds are not for everyone. meds don't fix all the problems.....what meds have done for my children is calm them down enough so that they can focus & function

I do query the necessity for medication.

Personally speaking, I'm of the generation that slipped through the diagnostic net, I'm 39, and was diagnosed a couple of years ago.

Yes, sometimes my behaviour at school was a bit disruptive and challenging, mostly I guess I wasn't sufficiently challenged, I was a bit bored with the level of school work.

I'm guessing that if I had been diagnosed as a child, the slightest hint of boredom or challenging behaviour and I would have been medicated.

I do wonder whether it's right to medicate young children when their behaviour can perhaps be addressed in other ways, patiently explaining appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, reward systems and so on. If you think about it, there are generations of Aspies who have lived their lives without medication as children, so I wonder whether it's really necessary.

i was dx'ed recently at 46. and, i was on antidepressants - ssri's - for 11 years.
once it was firmly established by an AS specialist that the issue was AS, i was vergy glad. I came off anti-depressants a few months ago because i realised on a very deep level for the first time in my life that i was not BROKEN. I was just DIFFERENT.

i stim more now - particularly in unfamiliar environments, and i am less social than when i wasn on the ssri's.

But the truth is - and this is a very, very important truth - i am more ME.
i am learning to be proud of who i am, in a world that may not cater to me that well. that is ok.

for years on ssri's i felt that i was more adapted to the world around me and yet less myself.

my choice to come of medication is a personal one. but it is wonderful.

good luck with your son.