When Lily was 3 months old and Techno Boy was 3 ¾ he started kindy, this was when the problems began. We had never had any trouble with him before that, but at kindy they tried to jam our square peg into a round hole, and he just didn’t fit. Amber had really enjoyed kindy, she just slotted into the routines and patterns of school with ease. She walked into the room, saw how others behaved and followed the cues, she saw what the teacher wanted and gave it to her. Techno Boy saw none of this. He saw a room full of toys and wanted to play. He was meant to go 4 half days, which I felt was too much for a 3 year old, so I sent him three half days. Within a short while I realised that was too much for him and kept him home another day. He didn’t enjoy kindy, I couldn’t understand it, Amber had had so much fun. One day he came home and asked me “when will I be good” I nearly cried, he already was good, he was my wonderful boy, how could his teacher do this to him.
I took him to the visiting paediatrician (when you live in the bush, that is what you get if you are lucky). He asked me lots of questions. Watched the boy play, and heard him talk to me, asked a few questions of the boy about the toys and got quite sensible answers. His diagnosis was poor parenting, too much TV, not enough interaction. He also thought that we weren’t paying him enough attention because of Lily, but Lily was an easy baby, and I could do anything while feeding or holding her. So we went home and worked on all these things, didn’t help at all. I watched him with the TV, he didn’t really watch it, it was just background noise, something that Amber was watching.
He was a lot happier at pre primary, Lily loved it too, they both enjoyed doing art at the school on my parent helper days. Techno Boy still had problems, and the teacher was worried, still at the beginning we thought it was just the result of the hard year he had at kindy. Half way through we had him assessed by the school psych, IQ test, query ASD. Well he ceilinged the test, that means he got so many right that they ran out of questions. We had been considering holding him back because he clearly wasn’t coping, but after this we decided maybe he was just too bright for this, and would do better when he started real learning. So we progressed him to grade one.
I explained his difficulties to his new teacher and she just ignored me. After all she was the expert, I was just some ignorant mother, I didn’t realise she had ignored me until later. I checked in regularly, she reassured me, “Techno Boy is doing really well, No problems.” I relaxed, we had made the right decision, he just needed the extra stimulation of real learning. We sat back and enjoyed our year. Techno Boy wasn’t really happy at school, but he didn’t complain. I heard from older boys that he was doing a few odd things, so I sorted them myself. The teacher was still saying he was doing really well. It was during grade one that we began to think Lily was a social genius, she was more socially adept than her brother.
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