Pt 2 – Dyslexia, the battle my son fought and lost – My regrets
My DS was feeling dumb, and his engagement in learning was non-existent, he began to truant from school. He started smoking and experimenting with drugs. Sadly, he had found his coping strategy. After failing year 11, we decided to pull him out of school, and he started working with his father while looking for an apprenticeship. DS started a Boilermaker Welder apprenticeship, and things were looking up until he started the tafe component of the apprenticeship. It was just like school again, with for him unachievable amounts of work and more and more failure.
About this time my youngest child was also struggling at primary school, the story looked set to be the same. Even after teaching him to read my youngest struggled with spelling and writing. The difference for him was, he had a teacher who said we should look at dysgraphia.
This led to a chain of events that deserves its own blog post. The long story short was that we discovered the reasons for the boys struggling “Dyslexia” DS had by this time left his apprenticeship and had developed some serious mental health issues. As he felt the weight of yet more failure his self-esteem and mental health spiralled downwards. We found an ED Psychologist, and he was diagnosed with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, Dyscalculia and ADHD. DS was working as a labourer. But couldn’t hold a job for more than a few months.
The spiral down has been swift and painful both for me and for him. His low self-esteem and sense of failure meant even the successes he had were of no value. DS can build anything you ask for with no plans from scratch. Making and designing some truly wonderful and practical things, however, if you asked him to write these things down, you would wonder about his IQ. DS has superior spatial awareness and a canny ability to see potential problems before they arise. The diagnosis was too late for my beautiful, caring, empathic child he was disengaged not only from learning but from life. He had completed 2 years of his apprenticeship and was brilliant at the work aspect of it often being asked to jobs that only people who had completed their apprenticeship should be doing. Eventually, he was lucky if he could keep a job for 6 months now he has not been employed for 2 years. The anxiety and depression are increasing which is leading to greater drug use.
He is at times suicidal sinking into a blackness that leaves him crying in despair. The fear I have for his mental health and physical safety leave me drained. I had done everything I was told to do by the” professionals” and yet it was one little word told to me by my youngest child’s teacher that led us to find the reason for school being so hard. I trusted the education system to be able to educate DS. When I was asked to get a test done or do extra work with him, it was done because I believed that they had the knowledge to know how best to help him. He is not dumb; he is quite brilliant at making and designing things that have very practical applications.
The loss of his skills to the demons of failure is in the Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf’s words “a waste of human resources that we cannot afford”. The blind belief that the system would fix the problem led to him now at 23 feeling the weight of years of academic failure. I pulled my youngest child from the system that left his brother broken and feeling worthless, and he has not looked back since. But again, that is a post for another day.