@Geville - Take two on the reply I wanted to send. I'm sorry, it turned into an essay.
By complete coincidence, my three closest friends each have children who are ND - four children in total (I’ll refer to them as A, B, C and D). And I have another friend who is currently not talking to me because I gently suggested her DD might be ND and she didn’t appreciate the intervention at all (I’ll call this child E). And DS has another ND child in his class (F). This coincidence has made me think ND is way more common than most appreciate.
Against this backdrop, I have my own childhood, where I grew up with a child who had severe learning disabilities, communication problems, health issues and physical disabilities. We didn’t know him very well because he was sent to a ‘special school’ at a very young age, but he’d be back during school holidays. But I have a vivid memory of a group of us being told off in no uncertain terms, by my father, when he caught us crowding around this child and mimicking him, mocking him, and he was cowering terrified away from us. We were probably about 6 years old, but I do remember feeling incredible shame. Today though, I wonder whether that sense of shame was because I understood WHY what I’d done was wrong, or because I knew I’d disappointed my father.
My son, now a little older than I was at that time, is best friends with A. They sit together in class, play together at school, and DS goes on play dates to his house. The first play date did not go well. DS accidentally hit A when they were both throwing things at each other, and A spectacularly lost it. It really really scared DS, and he cried and was shaking and just wanted to go home because “everyone hates me and thinks I’m bad”. So one of the toughest steps I had to face up to- personally - was allowing DS to go on unaccompanied playdates to A’s house in case this happened again (A won’t come to our house). I also had this massive dilemma over whether I needed to sit DS down and explain how A sometimes did things differently in advance, so I could protect him. But A didn’t have a diagnosis at that stage, and I was fearful of making DS anticipate events / behaviour and make it an issue when it might not be - essentially putting ideas into his head.
In the end I said nothing to him, kept it light and casual, but I did ask A’s mum to phone me if I needed to come fetch DS. There have been other issues, but A’s parents are very alive to it, and they manage it in a way that DS appreciates. E.g. A is allowed time in his room away from everyone and they step in and play with DS until A is ready to re-join. I’ve never had to fetch him, and he always looks forward to play dates.
Then A got his diagnosis. DS came home full of chat about it, explaining it all to me as A had explained it to him, using unfiltered inappropriate child language. A told DS that his type of ND is different to F’s (the child in his class). According to DS, A’s is mainly about school work while F sometimes goes ‘cuckoo la-la mental’ - and yes, we did talk about the language. It’s not true that A’s is only about school work - he just loathes homework! - but I marvelled at how these two small boys simply reached an understanding and then moved on.
About F. F generates mutterings among parents at the gate because he can be violent, will throw chairs, run into the traffic if not supervised, and frequently has to be physically taken out of the class for his own and other children’s protection. Despite the mutterings, DS has only ever once, in all the years he has shared a class with F, come home with an issue, and that was after F managed to really hurt him and several other children on a very bad day. DS was justified in his fear and upset, and I was livid with the school for dropping the ball and not managing it all better. Lessons were learned. But I can’t help feeling that if my child isn’t regularly bringing home problems and isn’t distressed, then there isn’t actually an issue that exists outside the parents imagination and horror at behaviour that looks really bad on paper.
Recently DS has been talking about F in the context of playing at school, and I casually asked him how F was getting on. DS said “oh he doesn’t hit as much anymore mummy because he’s learning to use his words”. Again, I found myself quietly marvelling at his easy acceptance and ability to reach a simple understanding. He could just be parroting a teacher, but ‘using your words’ is a common refrain at the school for all the children so he could also have connected it all himself.
If these children were in the country I came from, their experiences would be so different. A would be viewed as the product of a mother who molly-coddled him and she would be judged harshly; B (dyslexic) would get absolutely nowhere at school; C would probably still be non-verbal and in a ‘special school’; D would be seen as an eccentric child genius, tolerated because he’s a genius; and E would be viewed exactly as she currently is in the UK: a child who can’t make friends because she’s nasty and mean. And F would be being beaten with a cane for his behaviour.
All of this is a complete revelation to me. I actually don’t know how to put words to it, but the way my children have no judgement, don’t gossip about these children, just get on with it and figure it out for themselves, feels almost miraculous to me. My children would never ever behave the way I did to that child I mentioned earlier. Icant even imagine them doing it. My acquired insights (which you might disagree with) are that I should always step back, resist trying to over-explain in case I derail things, and trust the parents of the ND children and even the school to keep things ticking along. I feel proud of the remarkable little people that my children are, but I don’t think much of it has to do with me: I think it’s their environment and social context, and I think I could even screw things up.
This is all about ND, because it started as a response to your comment, but race is a big thing for me too. My children simply don’t see racial differences. I have never ever had a question about different skin colours, or languages etc. Given how much race has featured in my life, this blows my mind and it feels extraordinary to me. Like a miracle really. It’s something I fiercely defend, but again my involvement is minimal, and I think it has more to do with their social environment.
And I would extend this to poverty as well. So far my children have been shielded from this in the UK, apart from visits to Africa where I’ve tried to explain it very carefully, but nervous I’ll mess up. I do think they’ll learn more from assimilating real experiences via their social environment, as they have done so far. This is one of the things I’m juggling, and I’m weighing it against the stuff I mentioned in my OP.
I don’t want secondary school to change what is working for my children. So far I’ve felt like I’ve stumbled accidentally into a good thing that has worked for my children. I don’t want their progress de-railed or set on a different course.