Word: erine
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tantrums, the hitting, covering herself in Vaseline head to toe, day after day. He and his wife Charlene took parenting classes through their church and tried to be fair and firm. "We thought maybe she was just strong willed," Charlene said. By the time they put four-year-old Erin in preschool near their home in a town south of Los Angeles, "she couldn't keep her hands to herself," Charlene says. "She would hit other kids. And she would hug anyone at any time. She would hold hands when other kids didn't want to. She would do pesky...
...parents took Erin to a psychiatrist just before her fifth birthday. "He saw us for 45 minutes," Charlene says. "He read the teacher's report. He saw Erin for 15 minutes. He said, 'Your daughter is ADHD, and here's a prescription for Ritalin.' I sobbed." Charlene had a lot of friends who did not believe in ADHD and thought maybe she and Tim were just being hard on Erin. "I thought, 'Maybe there is something else we can do,'" Charlene says. "I knew that medicine can mask things. So I tore up the prescription." Tim thought that...
Three days after Erin started kindergarten, her parents got their first call from the teacher. "She was a sweet lady. She tried to work with us," Charlene recalls. "But she said, 'I've been teaching 40 years, and I've never seen a child like this.'" Adds Tim: "You could see Erin was trying to sit still, but she was trying all these different ways--rocking, lifting one leg, sitting on her hands." Because California law requires that schools provide appropriate education for each child, the parents met with school officials. After evaluating Erin, they said...
...makes them dopey or slow," Tim says. "That's the stereotype. All my co-workers and family had opinions that were antimedication." But a year ago, they finally tried it. "It was awesome," says Tim. "It worked great." At least for a while, until they discovered that Ritalin heightened Erin's obsessive-compulsive disorder. "She would turn the lights on and off seven times. She would flush the toilet four times and stop; then three times and stop; then four times and stop. There was a numerical sequence...
Last spring Erin's parents took her off Ritalin and enrolled her at UC Irvine's Child Development Center, a model program that specializes in ADD and ADHD. She attended the school's summer program. "It was a horrid summer," Tim recalls. "Behavior modification was controlling a lot of things, but the impulsivity would snowball. She would be told not to touch something--whether a car's gearshift or a radio or a computer. You'd say 'Don't touch,' and she would look at you and you could see she heard, but you'd see her hand slowly moving...