To think son’s school should be making special allowances for his ADHD

[charl87x]

My son has ADHD and takes medication. He only has it on school days to help with his concentration. Some days he doesn’t want to take it so he doesn’t. On the days he doesn’t take it, it reflects on his school work, especially his hand writing. Twice he has had his pen license taken away, and this is on the days he hasn’t had his medication. I try to convince him to take his medication but he just refuses on some days. He’s still coming to terms with having ADHD, and although he knows the medication helps, still refuses some days. Am i wrong to be annoyed that he is having his pen license taken away? It just seems to me they are making no special allowances for his ADHD. He came home from
school on Friday really disheartened about it. What i find worse is his teacher is the school SENCO. I would have thought she had more understanding of his needs. Should i complain about this? I dont want him to think having ADHD allows him to get away with things but also think slight allowances should be made.

Pen licenses ought to be banned - my sons school won’t let him use a pen, yet complain they can’t read his writing as it’s to light. Yet when they go to senior school they all use pens anyway!!

you’re right not to force your child to have the meds if he doesn’t want to, my eldest child has adhd and chooses not to be medicated - Camhs said nobody can force them to have them.
as for those saying get a echp - clearly have no understanding of what it takes to get one.

You need to enforce the taking of his medication with him. As he grows into adulthood there's going to be rules and regulations to follow in life, and he needs to start realising this early, or things are going to get very difficult for him. Eg, whilst you're trying to get school to make allowances for him now, a future workplace will not be as accommodating.

If your son can take medication to help deal with his adhd and that when he does, his performs better at school. Specifically enough that he has earned the pen licence. It illustrates that he has earned it. He is capable

but he then chooses not to take the medication

he chooses not to

on those days his behaviour and his learning is different.

so he is choosing to lose his pen licence.

he should start to understand if you have a choice of behaviour, choose wisely and that there are consequences of his choice

now if your son had no control over his adhd, that is a different story. But he needs to learn about his adhd and how to control it.

if it is not as simple as the off licence today, what other behaviours or actions will it be in the future? Should he forever be excused because of his adhd and never need to be held accountable for managing his behaviour?

why can he not be told, this is the issue, this is how to deal with it and if not, these are the consequences?

He shouldn’t be forced to take them, no psych will be forcing it on a child and there will be plenty of other measures school could be using ,the same as they will be doing with the unmedicated 7 year olds.

OP - get this moved asap to the SEN board. Otherwise you are going to get all these (ignorant) posters telling you to force the medication down him and that you aren’t parenting correctly which is the last thing you need!

There’s such little understanding about ADHD so unless you have a child with this you shouldn’t be commenting.

As someone who once taught a primary-aged child with ADHD who didn’t always take his medication, I have to say my sympathies lie with the teacher.

On the days your DS doesn’t take his medication, it won’t just be his handwriting that suffers - I expect everyone else in the class suffers unnecessarily too, either from the effects of his behaviour or from the reduced time the teacher will be able to devote to anyone else. I could tell within five minutes of the child I taught arriving at school whether or not he had taken his medication because his behaviour and attention span were so much better when he had, and he didn’t need more than his fair share of my time (of course what’s "fair" for children with Special Needs might mean they get more adult time than others). His mother agreed in the end to give us a supply of his tablets to keep at school so we could ensure he took one if his mother told us he hadn’t had one at home. He didn’t argue with us, it just became part of his routine.

Your son is making a choice. Choices have consequences. If he cares enough about his pen licence he will take his medication. If he doesn’t care enough, but you do, it seems, it has to be up to you to persuade/cajole/insist that he takes it. Would you let him choose not to take any other medication that had been prescribed for him, especially if you could see that taking it helped him? For you to complain because he is seeing the effects of his choices would be ridiculous.

No child should be banned from using a pen and told they need a license to write.

You're right that it is his choice about whether or not to take his medication. You can't force him. But he needs to learn that there are consequences associated with choosing not to take the medication, and I don't personally think it does him any favours to try to insulate him from those consequences.

Of course, he wishes he didn't have adhd and he would prefer not to need the medication. That's completely understandable but eventually he will have to come to terms with the reality that he needs the medication in order to help him function at his best. And that doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with him as such...it just means that his brain functions in a slightly different way.

It sounds like he needs to reframe the way he is thinking about adhd so that he doesn't see it as an entirely negative thing. Perhaps you can help him with this? Are there aspects of his adhd brain that enable him to do things that other people might struggle with? Being honest, I still hate having adhd overall (not helped by the fact that I am currently unmedicated due to other health issues) but I recognise that it also gives me certain "superpowers" that most people simply don't have... the ability to hyperfocus, for example; the tendency to cram more into my life than most people would think possible; the high energy levels; the ability to excel under pressure etc. And while I usually think that I would get rid of the adhd in an instant if I could, I don't actually know whether I would really want to give up those aspects of how my brain works if the opportunity arose. They're part of who I am.

As a mum of a child with ASD and severe ADHD I would say it's your responsibility as the parent to ensure he takes his ADHD medication on a school day.

It's a life changing medication for him. It helps him focus and learn in school. He is really to young to understand the long term impact of not taking his ADHD medication on a school day and how that will affect his learning and outcome of things like exams.

A natural consequence is he gets his pen licence taken away on days he doesn't take it which hopefully encourages him to take it but the reality is he may not be learning anything on the days he hasn't taken it. He could end up with huge gaps in his learning long term by not taking his medication some days or constantly playing catch up.

Also please be super careful and check with his pediatrician if the medication he is on is safe to take on an ad-hoc basis. Not all are my including the one my son takes.

Never heard of "Pen licence". How utterly ridiculous and damaging to childrens' self esteem. I surely wouldn't have had it and my sons neither besides making an effort.

Twice he has had his pen license taken away, and this is on the days he hasn’t had his medication.

So other times he doesn't take his medication he hasn't had his pen licence taken away?

Do you tell the teacher each time he hasn't taken his medication? Or has she just seen on a couple of days that his handwriting has been particularly atrocious and tried to encourage him to put more effort in by making him write in pencil?

I think you need a meeting with the teacher to discuss the issues with him not taking his medication and how to recognise and work around that.

Hear hear. If it was for heart disease or diabetes you would have to insist, but it isn’t. He’ll work out his own relationship to the medication with your support and may soon decide to take it daily.

As someone with ADHD, I think it’s good for him to learn actions have consequences, I am not on ADHD specific meds, but meds for anxiety and to help with sleep, if I forget to take my medication it causes huge issues for me in day to day life and at work, it’s what motivates me to remember to take it.

Anxiety meds are very different to stimulant ADHD meds.

his choice to make the medication certainly - his choice to take it knowing the effects of this and any consequences.

Reasonable adjustments need to be made but not where these aren’t needed and they DH t need to be made as you ds has another option.

My DS has asd. He has RA. If he chose not to take the actions we’d put in place for him to avoid consequences then he didn’t avoid them.

personally I hate pen licenses but in those cases your ds could avoid the problem but he’s choosing not too.

Have you asked the school what he is doing and what caused the removal of the licence?

But there is a bigger reminder…that when he refuses his meds his behaviour/skills change ( including losing his pen license).

He is drawing more attention to his needs.

I agree with this, but part of the process of "working out" his own relationship with the medication will be to understand how it helps him and to see the consequences of choosing not to take it. If the OP and the school bend over backwards to make adjustments when he doesn't take the medication in order to prevent him from feeling those natural consequences, that will just prevent him from making those connections.

He’s free not to take them, but if his performance at school is much worse when he doesn’t take them, then having consequences is a good lesson for him.

He can accept the consequences or he can take the medication.

I don’t think making special allowances for him does him any favours. The world isn’t built for people with ADHD, people do not keep making allowances when you’re an adult and you’re working.

Yes, exactly. His peers will be more aware of his struggles if he doesn't take the medication.

Not that adhd is anything to be ashamed about.

I haven’t a child with ADHD.

I do have 36 years of experience in education, including working with children with additional needs.

I actually disagree. He might not need an EHCP, but the school should be making reasonable adjustments with or without an EHCP.

ADHD meds can make some people feel absolutely awful, one person described their experience to me as "a day long panic attack". If he doesn't want to take meds due to side effects, then there's no way he should be forced! Other interventions and reasonable adjustments can be tried. Imagine a workplace telling an employee to take powerful stimulants against their will or they wouldn't be allowed to have a pen.

This. People on here claim that to be diagnosed with Adhd the symptoms need to be severe enough to have a significant impact on day to day life. Why on earth would medication be optional in that situation?

People who have the right to make their own choices also have to accept the consequences of those choices. If you complain about the pen license you are interfering with the natural consequences of his choices. You don’t want him to grow up thinking that his ADHD is a "get-out" that means he doesn’t have to take responsibility for his actions because people will always make excuses for him. He is unlucky to have ADHD but he will have to learn how to incorporate it in his life, and accept medication if it helps him gain achievements he values.

Understanding actions and consequences and predicting them is really tricky when you have adhd, it’s one of those executive function skills which are often 2 or 3 years delayed.

I would forget about the pen license and start focusing on teaching that not taking medication has end consequences. If this was my child (who also has adhd) I would find/make a social story about children who don’t take their meds and what happens to them. And see if I could get him to understand that no meds causes more disruptive behaviours in class.