I fully admit that I don't know much about behaviour disorders, but ADD has some spectrum of behaviours, so Robin's problems could partially fit. And I don't know what is recommended as therapy for that case. Or maybe Liz doesn't have the full picture - she's relaying what she knows and Mike & Dee may not want to give out all the details. That's my "out" if I need it :-)And while F was born post-Xmas, if anyone could benefit from early kindergarten, it would be her.
20 comments:
OH, dear. I wonder who Mike will blame Robin's problems on. It seems to me that he ain't a-gonna see his (wretched) behavior as the cause of things so it's likely he'll point the finger of blame at his sisters: April for being a 'rebel' and 'bad seed' and Liz for 'ingratitude'. He is probably the only person in this besides Elly who doesn't see Awfulny for what he is so her turning the louse down is incomprehensible to him.
Oooooohhhhh. I just thought of something: Mike touching off another episode by whining about the injustice done the Pasty One.
IMH: Aside from enjoying this story arc, I have to join the other commenters in adding that I love your new pen style. Very attractive.
Poor Robin. The sins of the fathers...
I agree! The new pen and pencil style looks very nice and has a lot of depth to it.
As for Robin...I think what he "suffers" from is not ADD but the fact that he had very little structure and rules in his life for his first few years, so he hasn't learned to cope with the structure that preschool tried to impose on him. This is mostly the result of parents who are mostly absent (Mike) and/or parents who are overwhelmed, or don't know how to be parents (Dee).
I see this sort of thing all the time with the kids I work with. Many of their parents are hands-off, and this shows in their bad manners, anger issues, and the fact that. they. cannot. pay. attention. Many of them are also lagging behind in their grade level.
For Robin, I could see this most in that mucking around in the dirt strip before the reFOOB began. There was no supervision, no set area like a sandbox where it was okay to unleash destructive tendencies. Robin was just aimlessly playing about in the dirt, all alone until Dee came to clean him up. It was kind of sad.
Now I know there is a fine line between Robin's behavior and a normal kid's behavior, because my brother and I did dig around in dirt patches unsupervised, but that was because our mother had trained us to not do anything stupid, and there was two of us in case something went wrong. Plus playing pretend is so much better with two kids! If Robin had been playing with another kid in an actual dirt patch or sand box, not a torn up lawn, it wouldn't have seemed so bad...especially if we had gotten to see his parents actually disciplining him and Merrie, and teaching them things and playing with them. We've seen a few playing strips, but in most of them, the kids are ignored or carried around like grocery bags.
Oh, here's an idea for you!..have Liz interact with Robin before she leaves and sees with her teacher's eye that what he really needs are attentive parents. I'll bet that Liz's revelation will not go well with Mike at all!
Re Liz advising Mike and Dee about Robin: It is a very touchy matter to advise parents about how they're dealing with their children, especially if one is childless. Because it's absolutely impossible for anyone-- even a teacher-- who's not actually raising a child to have something worthwhile to say about the matter. And if you do have children but they're past the stage you're advising about, everything you have to say is totally obsolete.
Jana C.H.
Seattle
Saith Floss Forbes: If you don't know the tune, sing tenor.
I think Liz has already seen some of the lack of structure problems Destroyer of Worlds notes for herself - recounting the early morning experience with Robin & Merrie to April before things All Went To Heck.
I have to agree with Jana that advice is *very* touchy. If I have Liz give them advice, I don't think I can have either of them take it well. We'll see.
Just a fan who would like to thank you so much for all of your updates over the last few weeks- they've saved me during this crappy winter/holiday season!
PS I hope you don't mind that I'm linking to Foob's Paradise on my website (www.isecretarycomic.com)
Oh that is true...I didn't think about that aspect, child-less person giving advice to her brother who has two kids...would equal a lot of whiplash! I guess Liz would just have to shake her head at the label and just be the best aunt she can be...okay, back to drawing! :)
I have ADHD. ADD is ADHD without hyperactive/impulsive. They're both treated basically the same way, and ditto for how accomodations and whatnot are handled by schools. Any decent therapist/psychologist/psychiatrist starts with behavioral modification to help with problems: forgetting homework, losing things, distraction, time management, etc. If that's not enough, then they'll start to consider medication. I don't know the laws in Canada governing who can/cannot prescribe, but in the States only psychiatrists can, if you're talking about mental health professionals. You could also go through your regular doctor to get the drugs.
For space reasons, I'll limit comments on medication to saying it can take a while to find the right medication and you might end up needing more than one b/c A handles x,y,z and you need B for c,d,e, and f.
A common misconception is that people with AD/HD aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, which is totally wrong. As a rule, people with AD/HD tend to be more intelligent than those who don't have it. Einstein and Mozart likely had it, and ditto for Walt Disney. There are others but I only remember those names at the moment.
I hate, with a passion, being told "Try harder". I cut slack to those who don't know I have ADHD, but when hearing it from someone who does royally brasses me off. Trying harder will NOT result in us being less forgetful, less distractable, less hyperactive/impulsive, less likely to lose things, etc. You can find ways to cope and assist in areas you're weak, such as leaving notes all over the house to make sure you don't forget your keys, but trying harder will only leave you frustrated and feeling like crap because you're still struggling with [problem].
What it's like in school with AD/HD is a whole other discussion. I'd be surprised if Liz didn't get anything in school on kids with special needs, so she should have at least a basic understanding of how to accomodate kids with ADHD and all that.
If there's anything else you want to know, drop a line to hoppytoad79@juno.com.
Re: DreadedCandiru2's remark about who Mike will blame. Last I read, genetic factors in AD/HD are overwhelmingly inherited from the father. In my family, one of his cousins has ADD.
Destroyer of Worlds,
One of by Big Red Buttons are parents who want to pin their kid's problems on ADD, OCD, autism, Asperger's, or whatever the condition of the moment is when what the kid suffers from is crappy parenting. Enough of that goes on that the public gets the idea that legitimate disorders/conditions are just excuses parents use and all the kids need is to know who's boss. Doctors enable those parents and prescribe meds the kid doesn't need, leading to all sorts of problems that the doc may prescribe more meds to bring under control. There is so much misinformation and outright lies peddled as truth...
hoppytoad, thanks for the info. I'll see if it comes up.
I, too, would be surprised if Liz didn't get something about kids with special needs during her Ed degree. She may have cajoled Mike and Dee into checking on Robin. Or she may have told enough tales of kids having trouble that they wanted to check it out. Or it could just have been after comments from his preschool teacher.
But I don't think Robin necessarily has ADD. The only sure thing about his depiction in FBOFW was its inconsistency, so I didn't see a consistent pattern to justify a diagnosis.
I could, however, see Robin as having enough difficulties that a nonprofessional would think that he might have the disorder, and a therapist having to tell them that, yes, X and Y are kind of like ADD, but not without Q and T as well and non-ADD X and Y can usually be addressed with behaviour techniques like Z...
I really am not sure if this is going to go very far. But the contrast between Robin and Francoise's development was going to come up. I thought the problem with how Robin acted in-strip ought to be acknowledged if I was going to address how Francoise was doing.
Robin would be four as of this past November, and Françoise should be turning four in March. Given Robin's late birthday, Mike and Dee might have been given a choice between pre-K and preschool this past fall. Francie would be awfully young to have started kindergarten for this school year--this would make her two years ahead! Were you playing up the "prodigy" aspect?
I wonder how Elly and John will react to Liz's telling them not to worry about her future to the extent that it leads to the problem we saw Christmas Eve. I know John will probably think she's trying to help but Elly, given her condition, is a big gray area. It seems to me things could go either way.
April: If you will remember, this strip is a year ahead of the normal strips. So while it is Jan 2009 in normal strips (or Dec 2008) in THIS strip, it is Dec 2009/Jan 2010. which means Robin turned 5 in Nov, and Francie turns 5 in March.
I WILL say, as a teacher in the USA, it is highly unlikely that Francie would be in a kindergarden at 4, no matter how advanced she is, if she is in public schools. She might be, if her mom put her into a private school, because she was so advanced.
As for Robin....I am wishy washy there. I see a lot of my son in Robin, but mostly because he is not use to the structure of school. School structure is so different than home structure. My own son had huge difficulties the first couple of months with learning to deal with the structure of school. And it wasn't because of the home environment. It just was because of the way he was. He was USE to being with his granny and pawpaw when he wasn't with mommy and daddy. This was totally new. He wasn't use to playing with lots of new kids and he wasn't use to having people he didn't know tell him what to do. The only people who use to do that was family. It took him much longer to adjust than it did my daughter. And part of that is their personalities. My daughter had absolutly no fear of strangers, so loved going into new situations. My son had a fear of people he didn't know, so going into a new situation was not an easy thing for him to coap with.
And some of that, I wonder if might be what is happening with Robin. And if Robin doesn't have a good, patient, and understanding teacher, could it be that the teacher is trying to get him medicated just so she doesn't have to deal?
And looking at the way Dee is, she will probably trust whatever the teacher tells her.
*plops her $.02 into the hat and walks off*
aprilp, remember that I skipped a year. Robin was born in Oct 2004, making him turn 5 in Oct 2009, and kindergarten would be quite likely.
Francoise was born after New Year's (the usual cutoff when I was a kid), so she is just about 5 in Dec 2009, and in one-year-early kindergarten. She's a bit of a prodigy, but not that much.
Just wanted to chime in how much I love the new penciling, very nice.
D'oh! Lost sight of the fact that we're ahead almost a year.
Robin's date of birth was November 1, 2004, and Françoise's was March 7, 2005. She'd definitely be in "prodigy" land, but only for a year instead of two years. November, depending on the school system, can be one of those "parents decide if the child will be the oldest or youngest in the class" situations.
morga_rose, I'm going for plausible ways to deal with the "little prodigy" and also the "kid LJ used to illustrate jokes for younger ages than appropriate".
I agree it's unlikely. If they had to in order to get her in early, they would have put Francoise in a private kindergarten. However, some Canadian schools (years ago) were very open to putting kids at their level (and not their age group). A boy failed Grade 2 in my class, and kids were skipped up grades, although I never asked if anybody had an early start. So maybe they were able to get away with it in the public system.
I think Anthony and Therese were able to cooperate on what would be best for Francoise, certainly after Therese *had* to get more involved after Anthony's "cry for help" incident.
IMH--I dunno how they do things in Canadian schools, but I took a number of education classes in undergrad in the US, and, unless you were in a class specifically about learning disabilities/special ed students, there was very, very little mention of those issues. At my school, sp. ed. was a different certification program than the regular elementary ed one, and there wasn't a ton of overlap, unfortunately. She never struck me as the kind of student who went above and beyond what the bare minumum, so she probably wouldn't have taken classes she didn't need to. It's entirely possibly that Liz does have little little experience with cognitive disabilities, and wouldn't really know what she was talking about.
Cedar: It depends on the university you go to. The one that I went to required all elementary ed degrees to have at least 2 classes in special education. (this was 12 years ago. It may have changed.) I think that it is highly plausible that Liz did take at least a couple of classes in Special Ed. Now whether or not she paid attention, that is another thing totally. :D
I just started reading this - it's great! I love your artwork and how much more in-depth the comics seem. I especially like here how you show Therese proudly showing a picture of her child, while the original comics seemed to act like she didn't care at all.
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