A Twelve Year Special Journey

May 12, 1996, Mother’s Day and coincidentally my mother’s birthday, was one of the most memorable days of my life. While preparing to attend the lunch party we were throwing my mom, I was jolted by a sudden spasm that told me an “unexpected” visitor was coming that day. My eldest son, not due to make his grand entrance until another two weeks down the road, had decided it was time for him to join our family.

Twelve years to this day, Ragu was born. Twelve years ago, I embarked on that journey called motherhood, and found out a little later that mine would be an even more “special” journey because two of my kids would turn out – well – special.

Few, I know, realize that Ragu is special. (In fact, by now, I’ve learned that special is a relative term, one that belongs to the eye of the beholder.) It took me a long time to realize that, and for years, I was lost in the jargon of development pediatricians, special education consultants and therapists. The development pediatrician said he was “normal”, but showed signs of hyperactivity and speech delays. The SPED consultant declared he was “normal” but had “autistic spots.” Everyone else refused to label him (which alternately elated and confused me) till one day, when he was 8, I saw his Individualized Educational Program (IEP) filled up by his homeroom teacher indicating his diagnosis as “autism.” I never knew homeroom teachers were supposed to make up their own diagnoses, but by then, I’ve learned to rise above labels, so I left it at that.

Ragu is a case who drives SPED consultants batty. Each time he would take a standardized test, the test administrator always ends up telling me that my son was the first to achieve that kind of score in the test. I have come to expect the same results and the amazement and awe of the specialists. His latest Psycho-Educational profile, taken when he was 10, pegged his cognitive and mathematical abilities at the level of a college student. He teaches his dad -- a numbers and computer freak who probably spent all of his teenage years playing video games – how to navigate RPG games. One day, he stunned his dad when he wrote a computer program which his dad claims they talked about as they brushed their teeth. As for me, I am this old woman whom he will sympathetically aid when handling anything with batteries on it.

Don’t ask about verbal abilities, though – his verbal abilities were equivalent to a six year old’s. In fact, I thought at that time that was too high. His six-year old brother, Jacob, was far more articulate than he was. I always knew that Ragu wasn’t much of a talker but that didn’t worry me, especially when at age 1, he knew the numbers 1 to 20. At 16 months, he knew the entire alphabet and his primary and secondary colors. That his only other words were “ma” and “da” worried me just a wee bit. I could communicate with him, and that was what mattered.

Of course, the nuns at DML Montessori -- who were initially impressed with this boy who knew the basics (by then he could count to 100) – did not think this way. They told me Ragu “was very mobile” and “restless”. Initially, they tried all known measures to control “the little supervisor” who refused to sit down, even delegating one nun to just follow him around. The nuns even stormed the heavens with prayers, just as I did, to get little Ragu to just sit down, but I guess God didn’t think it was time to slow down his little Energizer Bunny. After countless presentations and flag ceremonies wherein everybody cooperated except for the “supervisor” who explored like a goat out in the meadows, I just knew Ragu was different. Special, perhaps, but to a mom, a son is always special.

This realization would bring me to the world of special education and special needs in the Philippines. In the next few years, Ragu, his dad and I, would embark on a long journey full of joys and discoveries, frustrations and fears, all of which would only enlighten us and bring us closer together, and prepare us for something else – the arrival of his youngest brother, Isaac, who is severely autistic.

Last Saturday, we celebrated Ragu’s birthday with a simple dinner at TGI Friday’s. He happily devoured his burger and was pleasantly surprised when the boisterous birthday crew came with their tambourines to give him a birthday jig. We reminded him that next year, he would already be a teenager, and yes, he said, he was ready for that.

Happy birthday, Ragu!

The Start of our Journey

I was going through my old files and saw this, which I wrote when I was just beginning to understand what it meant to be a mother to a special, super child.
Published in BusinessWorld, December 7, 2002

I remember the day the somber-faced nun called me into her room. Ragu, my three-year-old, had been in school for a week, and everyday, when I would ask his teachers how he had been, they would always say "very mobile," "restless," or words to that effect. Once, a kindly sister approached me with what she apparently deemed to be a compliment: "Your son sat down today," as if she had just mapped out the secret of the human genome.

I guess I had expected to be called. After all, my son was somewhat immature, and the sisters probably wanted to find ways to make his adjustment to school easier.

But I wasn't prepared for what the directress had to say: "Your son seems to be disturbed." My boy had been throwing toys around, she said. Could it be that he had been physically abused or witnessed episodes of violence at home - between his mommy and daddy perhaps?

I assured her that my husband and I were peaceloving citizens and that corporal punishment just was not our cup of tea. We both agreed that it was premature to worry just a week into a new schoolyear, and left it at that.

But even if the violence had disappeared in a week, the nagging thought never left me. Each day, as I would take him to his classroom, I would watch him go around to everywhere but his seat. The rare days that he managed to sit a few minutes, his eyes would be everywhere but on the teacher.

It didn't help that everyday, the children had to go to this huge assembly hall for prayers and the National Anthem. At the end of each day, the haggard look on the nun, whose vow of sacrifice suddenly included having to hold on to the whirling dervish that was my kid, would tell me all.

Smart kid. Still, his teachers agreed he was one smart kid. An extremely quick learner, he knew his alphabet and his numbers at fifteen months, had the memory of an elephant, operated complicated gadgets his yaya couldn't figure out and showed analytical ability well beyond his years.

How many times had he screamed in exasperation at the stupidity of other kids, and yes, his mommy, with computer games? What, Ragu built that 3-D castle? In fact, the sisters would sometimes let him out of the classroom earlier than the rest of his class - "he already knows the lesson," they would explain to his yaya - although I would sometimes wonder if they were just buying themselves some peace and quiet.

Which is not to say that the sisters treated him poorly. In fact, they were extremely patient with and concerned about my little boy, giving in to his outbursts of energy and assorted whims in a manner that they deemed appropriate.

They also tried every discipline tactic in the book on this "innocent, loveable angel," but four months into the school-year, I knew they were still at a loss as to what to do.

Panic button. I do not exactly know when I started to press the panic button. Maybe it was when I got his report card and more than half of it - the portion that covered behavior and socialization - was left blank, never mind if the part covering academics was great.

Or maybe it was when they had this presentation, and he just pranced and ran around while the rest of the class performed. Some parents consoled me and said it was just childhood exuberance; others shook their heads, probably thinking what lousy parents this kid had.

Before the directress could suggest I do anything, I had already burned the lines to my development pediatrician, neurologist and psychiatrist friends in the United States. I had also read volumes on that animal called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

ADHD is the most common disorder among American schoolchildren, affecting about 5% of the population. It has three subtypes: hyperactive, inattentive (informally referred to as ADD) and combination. Interestingly, ADHD appears to be an American malady, diagnosed roughly ten times as often Stateside than in Europe or Asia. In the Philippines, there are no numbers although I would later find out that I am not the only parent besieged by ADHD.

The definition of ADHD is vague, to say the least. It mentions something about the child being fidgety, inattentive, forgetful, being seemingly driven by a motor, talking excessively, among others.

The very elastic definition of ADHD brought doubts to my mind. I mean, what child isn't distractible and restless? Isn't a high level of energy a part of childhood? And what about temperament? If you ask me, that high energy level also gave him incredible spunk, a kind of grit and sparkle I do not quite see in less active children.

Even my husband was aghast. He had exactly been like our son as a child, he claimed, and though he drove his teachers crazy and was eventually kicked out by the priests in the respected boy's school he attended, he has now turned out to be an upright citizen of the world.

Evaluation. Expectedly, I took Ragu for an evaluation. The development pediatrician was extremely calm, especially since my little boy was just three. I had expected her to give me the death sentence, but she was noncommittal, noting that my boy could simply be acting his age.

She noted, though, that he was "very visual." "Mabilis magbabasa eto," ("this boy will learn to read quickly,") she predicted. Of course, I knew that. Even then, he could already read words like "congratulations," "gopher" and "odd-balls." Waiters gawk in disbelief at this speeding wonder who can read the "open," "close," and "exit" signs on doors.

On her recommendation, I moved my boy to a much smaller school and enlisted the help of an occupational and speech therapist to help direct his energies, develop his abilities and teach him appropriate behavior. On my own, I asked a special education teacher to follow him in school twice a week.

Frustration and hope. And thus began my odyssey to the curious world of ADHD, a journey that opened me to as much frustration as hope.

Even without an ADHD tag, frustration came in torrents, usually by way of people who never quite understood ADHD, seeing it as a disability that would forever keep my boy from any form of achievement.

The greatest pain came from those who adjudged my son rotten.

I remember the day he declared: "I am a bad boy." I went on ends finding out who told him so.

But hope also came aplenty, and this week, it came by way of a meeting with Kevin and Maying Kwok, a committed couple who also had to deal with the hurts of having a child labelled ADHD and enduring the tremendous misinformation and ignorance of the syndrome among the responsible adults their six-year-old son interacts with.

With "lots of prayer," they were able to invite Jeffrey Freed, a US-based educational therapist and consultant who has worked with more than 1,500 gifted and ADHD children in the last 13 years, to come to Manila to teach them, and other parents, how to best teach their ADHD kids.

Mr. Freed is the author of the book "Right-Brained Children in a Left-Brained World: Unlocking the Potentials of your ADD Child," which has sold over 110,000 copies. He will be discussing his teaching strategies this week in a series of workshops and lectures at the AVA Community Center in Alabang.

Talking with Mr. Freed gave me the kind of hope I haven't felt in years. For the first time, here was someone who knew the ADHD child's strengths, delighting "in uncovering the many gifts these children and, as they become adults, possess and demonstrating them for the world to see - my way of getting even with all the teachers who failed to understand me." Yes, Mr. Freed, too, suffers from ADD.

Right-brained. But here's what got me. Mr. Freed asserts that ADD children share a "strikingly common attribute: they have a visual, right-brained learning style." Since the right side of the brain controls spatial and artistic ability, emotions and holistic thought, ADD children are often "intensely creative, can do difficult math problems in their heads, and are excellent speed readers.

"They have a powerful visual memory, easily retrieving information stored on their mental blackboard. They are more likely to be gifted. Many are born perfectionists and are extremely competitive. They are super intuitive and can read you like a book. They are good at building things, think in three dimensions, and notice patterns and connections.

"Right-brained ADD children are hypersensitive in almost every sense of the word, would likely have acute hearing, eagle eyes that can pick up on the most minute detail, a keen sense of smell, and tactile defensiveness."

I didn't know if I would laugh or cry when I first heard this. He had just described Ragu.

Back to earth. But his other assertions promptly brought me back to earth. "Children like these tend to do poorly in school, first, because their antennae are always up and are easily distracted by external stimuli; second, educators tend to be left-brained, detail-oriented auditory processors who view visual learners as flawed." Again, another visceral truth. How many times have I been told that my boy "just doesn't want to listen?"

Street smarts, "a balanced form of intelligence" is rewarding in life, but it is not so in the classroom.

Still, Mr. Freed tells us these children can be educated well, if only educators and teachers care to utilize these children's skills and remember that these children "learn things differently."

Linear, sequential methods, the step-by-step method of teaching, would definitely fail with these children. But doing it from their areas of strength would work wonders.

Reversing the traditional teaching method. So how does he teach the disinterested child? Mr. Freed says he simply "reverses" traditional teaching methods. Take spelling, for instance. For a child who struggles with phonics and sounding out words, he holds up a white paper with the word spelled out in colored letters, and asks them to remember the word by making a picture of it in their minds. Phonics is then sometimes used as a finishing tool.

Mr. Freed has had nice results with this. Students who couldn't spell anything longer than five-letter words can now tackle words such as existentialism, antidis-establishmentarianism and parapseudo-microbrainscanology. "Attack spelling using an area of strength, the student's sharp visual memory," he advises.

Math is taught in a similar fashion. ADHD kids would likely struggle doing math using pencil and paper. So Mr. Freed takes these away and asks them to do mental math, or a series of computations in their heads.

"The right-brained child can develop his ability to visualize and hold numbers to solve challenging problems without having to labor through a series of painful written steps. I have worked with several of these students who are practically human calculators!"

For reading, asking these kids to slow down isn't the way to go. Instead, they do better by speed-reading passages several times. The first time allows them to scan the material and get "the big picture" while subsequent readings enable them to fill in the details. He encourages parents to "read and read to their children - long stories, no pictures, then ask them to visualize."

A powerful tool. Visualization can be so powerful a tool for these children that it is also the way to discipline them. Since they do would not likely think of the consequences of their actions, telling them to visualize these before they undertake anything should help.

In a nutshell, Mr. Freed teaches these children a different way to learn.

"If I can harness their visual memory, I can instruct them to use their mental blackboards to place spelling lists, time tables, math formulas, maps and periodic tables. The right-brained child can retrieve the images from his mind as easily as the left-brained child looks up the answer in a book."

Computers, if used properly, can help as well - Reader Rabbit, Jump Start, and other educational types. He, however, draws the line at video games, "which make the child more right-brained," and TV, "which develops no brain at all." These, he believes, "makes them more visual and right-brained than they are genetically programmed to be."

Psychology. Of course, Mr. Freed uses a "great deal of psychology" as well. "If you believe in the abilities of children with ADD, they will go to the moon for you," he says. Thus, "these children need to have a parent or mentor who recognizes their abilities and believes in them. Because they are so intuitive, they know if you think they are a failure, and will live up to that expectation."

Which is probably the fear of every parent.

The American educational system, Mr. Freed says, has definitely failed many right-brained ADD children, something which Filipino parents can say with as much validity about the Philippine education system, where ADD children are routinely shamed, punished, or kicked out.

The one-size-fits-all approach just won't work with these intuitive children. Author Ronald Davis said it so aptly: "The problem (ADD) has been around ever since teachers have attempted to teach students subjects that did not interest them. In most cases, it should not be described as a learning ability, but as a teaching disability."

Mr. Freed, for his part, makes no bones about it. "They can do it hard, they can do it easy, but they'll have to do it...until then, how many bodies will be stepped over?"

Not surprisingly, Mr. Freed believes in the value of home schooling. And yes, do enlist the help of that special education teacher if you think it will benefit your child. Even traditional tutoring might work, he says, "if the kid likes the tutor," especially since "if the kid is paying attention, it's solid attention."

Psychoactive drugs. And what of psychoactive drugs, downed by more than 3.5 million American schoolchildren daily? Mr. Freed does not dismiss their role, admitting that for some - the kid who cannot stop running aimlessly or the one who cannot stop doing cartwheels -ADHD can really be a disability, for which amphetamines (Ritalin, the traditional first-line drug for ADD, is not available in the Philippines) are needed. Still, he acknowledges that ADHD is being diagnosed even in those children who do not have these, and for these kids, the right teaching methods should help.

"ADD is one condition that is over-diagnosed in children and underdiagnosed in adults," he notes.

Mr. Freed could not overemphasize the need to understand the ADD or right-brained child, and its early identification.

He urges respect for this "daydreamer who studies cloud patterns from the window of his classroom" and may someday "become one of the great thinkers of the next century, solving problems in fresh and creative ways."

And as a parent of one - pseudo-ADD or not - I am my son's best advocate

Isaac is going back to school

This summer, Isaac is going back to a school setting after almost two years of home therapy. Back then, we opted for a home set-up since the school set-up was obviously not helping him but this time around, the reverse is true. He seems not to be benefiting from the setup anymore. The change is, of course, scary for me. After a long time, he will again be exposed to a lot of new people. How will he take his new surroundings and having unfamiliar people around him? How will he adjust to the schedule? Will he eat the food he will be given (no Piattos, I'm sure)? So many questions...
We've decided that he will go to New Era. Only New Era has the infrastructure and the will to have a real, working Special Education program and I'm just too glad that Dr. Dizon is there to personally oversee their Sped program. I do hope he doesn't get terrified by the sheer size of New Era. I still get lost there.
Change is always discomfitting, but we've made the decision. New Era, here comes Isaac!

The Big Move to New Era

This week, we made the big move. When I say "we", I refer not just to my family but to my friends -- all special mommies as well -- who also made a major decision that would profoundly impact the lives of our special children.
Leaving MI School, where Ragu has worked with the most wonderful teachers (Teacher Sharon and Teacher Jovi are precious not only to Ragu but also to me), was not an easy decision. Change is always hard to embrace. For someone like Ragu who can be quite rigid, this can be quite an earthshaking move, just as it is for me, too. MI was a comfort zone. But the fact that I cannot

change is that Ragu is quickly growing up (he is almost as tall as me now) and sometime, somehow, I would have to let him confront the real world. Real meaning the world that neurotypicals know, the world controlled by DepEd that the rest put up with. MI was a protective shell, which was good for his growing soul. But now his growing soul has to grow some more, and that will have to happen in a totally different place -- New Era. Moving to New Era is a great shift for me as well. I had to overcome all my religious biases, for one, and find peace in the knowledge that the Almighty, in His Wisdom, understands my every move.
This could have been a lonely decision, except that, to my great surprise, my friends from MI chose to make the same move for their children also at the same time. I am heartened to hear that Joaquin Angliongto, who Ragu was particularly protective of during their Primary B days, is joining him in New Era. Kiko Tan, Luther Ong, Jovi Joson, Hans, Lenlen Romantico and Benito Macapagal are moving too. (They will miss Miko Manzano and Joshua Aquino who are staying at MI. ) This gives me strength, for Ragu and I will make the big leap at the same time that kindred souls are making the same big leap, saying the same prayers to the same God and the same Blessed Mother who will, no doubt, send their angels to see our children through.
In the meantime, I am trying very hard to help Ragu through his adjustment period. He has been sad about leaving MI, and fusses that there is no aircon in New Era ( I tell him that he is supposed to enjoy the fresh air) and that no one speaks English (I tell him he has to learn Filipino because he is, after all, a Filipino). Jacob, who is going to Grade One at PAREF-Northfield, is similarly sad that there is no aircon in Northfield, and worries that he will won't learn Filipino as well as others. (Miguel, Jacob and Ragu all thought "saging" was an animal and argued that "kuneho" meant tiger) I let them fuss and worry together. What won't break them will only make them stronger.