Filia

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My daughter, Filia, has had an IEP (individualized educational plan) for learning disabilities since third grade.

She doesn't have an official diagnosis, but over the years various educational specialists have suggested a Sensory Integration Disorder, ADHD, and now Autism Spectrum.

She did really well in her last year of Elementary School, and we were hoping that she wouldn't need an IEP when she started Middle School in August of last year. Unfortunately, we underestimated just how difficult the adjustment would be.

She reads and doodles during class, thus missing whatever the teacher is talking about.

She ignores instructions for assignments and just does things her own way.

She does her homework and then forgets to turn it in, despite repeated reminders.

She sometimes doesn't turn in work done in class, either because she's not paying attention when the teacher tells the kids to turn it in or because she reads instead of doing the work.

She's not making friends. She can be disruptive and argumentative with other kids. She spends most of her free time with her nose in a book.

Her grades are the inverse of what mine were at her age: the only class where she's getting an A is PE.

We've had several meetings with her teachers, the school psychologist and the special ed administrator. We have a new IEP, and by the end of last semester we had her more on task by dint of my keeping up with her schoolwork and making sure she completed it and turned it in.

Starting this semester she's going to a class called "Academic Communications" which is meant to address the problems she's having. This takes place during 7th period, which would ordinarily be a sort of study hall/catch-up period with her homeroom teacher.

This was the first week of school. Already she's got two math assignments (one classwork, one homework) that she hasn't turned in, and a homework assignment for science class that she turned in but forgot to put her name on.

I really wanted to her to have a good first week. It's disappointing. It's frustrating. I feel like I need to learn to be a completely different kind of mother than I expected to be, and than I would be good at. Some of her problems, such as the asociality, are familiar from my own childhood. Others, such as the inability to stay on task in class, get work done, and turn it in, are not.

My husband and I both grew up in loosely-structured households with high expectations that we generally met. It's been obvious for a long time that this will not work for Filia, but I don't know what would work.

I hate support groups and self-help books, but that's probably what I need right now.