Reply to 6 year old arrested at school. Florida, of course.

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[quote=Anonymous]New poster, here's my two cents.

When DS was 6 in Kindergarten, he had a brain anomaly that caused a significant change in his behavior. it took two months to be diagnosed, and lucky for us was treated and is in full remission.

For the two months between his  overnight change in behavior and diagnosis, he had very serious behavior problems - anxiety, physical responses to fear stimulus, random outburst, obstinacy and defiance, etc.  At home, we were having to regularly pin him down and restrain him.  At school, they evacuated the classroom multiple times, brought in multiple staffers to guard the doors of the class to prevent flight, and on one occasion me and the special ed teacher had to do the "two person physically drag him out of the class to a safe space" thing.

My kid is white - the school gave him and us the huge benefit of the doubt.  He was suspended multiple times, but did not escalate to resource officer or other serious consequences.

Before a physical issue was found in his brain, we and his doctors were pouring over the DSM trying to figure out what was going on.  Age-5 onset autism?  ODD?  anxiety?  bipolar?  BPD?  I spent a lot of time reading about these disorders.  You know what I found out?

- Mental disorders impact a HUGE portion of society. ADHD is easily 5-10% of kids. ASD is 2-5% now.  Anxiety impacts a ton of kids. While there is overlap between those conditions, together they easily account for 10-13% of kids. Then add in the rarer ones like ODD, bipolar, BPD, etc. 
- It is not abnormal for any of these disorders to come with physical violent/tantrum symptoms in kids.  
- Kindergarten is the first time many kids have been put in environments that have the potential to really escalate these responses.  ADHD and autism kids are highly responsive to sensory stimulus.  Anxiety is obviously going to be a big problem for kids starting school.  Etc.  Families may have unknowingly put in place systems that have mitigated their kids' challenges at home, and kindergarten is really going to put them on display for the first time.  No surprise, it takes a LONG time to get these issues sorted out once K starts, and that means a long time of challenges on full display in the classroom.  
- While most kids don't have physical behavior problems in early elementary, the above disorders mean that it is not abnormal to see these responses.  I was horrified by what was happening with my son (and extremely proactive in getting to the bottom of it), but the school assured me it wasn't the worst they would see that month, and they deal with physical stuff pretty frequently.  That said, administration were pretty "martyr-like" about DS's physical behavior, and recorded everything in his file as "violent" "hitting" "assault" etc.  His teacher and I became good friends, and she confided that what they would mark down as "attacked teacher" was pretty minor physical stuff that they see all the time.  The school, as caring as they were, addressed everything the same - if son had a freak out and climbed under the table and knocked over his chair, they evacuated the classroom and brought 4 teachers in to stand at the doors with their arms crossed, and then one teacher would try and corner him to dial down his behavior.  You can imagine that this is going to escalate the panicked out of control behavior quickly.   
- Per several developmental pediatricians, young elementary age kids do not physically misbehave just to be brats.  They do so because they genuinely don't have the tools to deal with what has bene thrown at them.  You can have more philosophical conversations about bad behavior in later elementary school. But at age 6, a kid doesn't have physical outbursts because of "bad parenting".

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