Name Changing Post

Posts about changing names have been popular lately so I thought I'd add a short note of my own.

Sunny has a very standard Anglo-Saxon first name, middle name and then his biological mother's last name, which is kind of unusual but also Anglo-Saxon.

By coincidence, his middle name is the same as Guy's middle name and his father's first name.

We never thought about changing his first name, because that's what he's used to. We might have thought about changing his middle name if it wasn't already the same as my husband's. We were originally going to add on (my last name) hyphen (Guy's last name). Our workers said they didn't think that was a good idea, the name was too long then, and we should just drop his original last name. We went along with what they said.

A few months ago, when I talked about names with Sunny, he mentioned that he liked his last name and didn't want it to go away completely. We have the final word over that, so we're going to go back to the original plan and he'll stay with firstname middlename biolastname adoptedhyphenatedlastname. It's going to lead to bureaucratic complications, but what the heck, tons of people with Spanish-style sentence-length names deal with that already.

That's one of the advantages of adopting older kids, I guess. You don't have to make all the tough decisions. If Sunny feels like changing his name later, it's up to him. Right now he's happy with what he has.

As for me, I have an Anglo-Saxon first name, Japanese middle name and Anglo-Saxon last name. When I meet people for the first time, I frequently get a double take. "You're (confused look ) (insert name)?" It's irritating because I like my name and think it suits me just fine. The worst is when I tell someone my last name and then they sort of knit their eyebrows together, sigh, and ask me how to spell it, because since I look Asian of course it's got to have tricky sneaky weird spelling. I can tell when they're doing this to be obtuse as opposed to regular spelling confirmations. My last name should be impossible to misspell! It's like "Miller" or "Cook" but they're expecting me to spell it "Ng".

When I was born, my mother gave me her last name. My father was there, but they weren't married at the time, and weren't even planning on getting married. The hospital staff didn't understand her freewheeling feminist ways, so they gave me my father's last name even though she told them not to. She later corrected them and my social security card was issued under my correct last name. My original birth certificate still has the wrong name on it, and I had to do an official name change five years ago even though I've been using my current name all my life anyway.

All of this makes me very resistant to the idea of having the "right name" and conforming to social conventions on naming.

On the other hand, I've done some career counseling before. And this has never come up, but if I did career counseling with someone with a very "ghetto" name, I would almost certainly float the idea to initialize their name on resumes or applications. There's a difference between what's right, what's ethical and what will actually get you the job. The statistics are pretty grim.

One argument against conforming is that you wouldn't want to work in a racist workplace anyway. I think that's too stark of a choice. We're not comparing working at Office KKK versus Office NAACP. Many hiring managers are subconsciously biased but can make more egalitarian decisions when actually face to face with someone. Also, a lot of people just really need the paycheck right now. For example, given a choice between depressing jobs, I'd rather work in a racist call center than in a non-racist chicken-processing plant.

There are plenty of good ethical arguments against conforming. It's a terrible thing to give up a little piece of yourself like that.

The better off you are, the more control you have over your environment and the less your name matters. I'm lucky I have a decent job and I don't have to worry about it much. And my face-not-matching-name issues are irritating, but they've never really affected me economically.

If I had my father's last name things would have been different. My father's last name is long and incredibly difficult for the average English speaker to spell or pronounce. It inspires panic and can almost produce tears of frustration. It's kind of funny to watch, in a perverse way.

Mellow Yellow

Sunny got to watch the inauguration on TV with his first-grade class at school. I got to watch the inauguration behind a corporate firewall which screwed up the webcast, so I didn't get to watch it at all.

Sunny said his favorite part was when Rev. Joseph Lowery said "mellow yellow."

WASHINGTON (AP) — Amid the outpouring of inaugural joy over the racial progress represented by President Barack Obama, there was a single, humorous mention of work still to be done.

After the first black president had been sworn in, Rev. Joseph Lowery' ended his benediction with a rhyme familiar to black churchgoers:

"We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around..."

There was laughter from the enormous crowd. The 87-year-old civil rights pioneer continued:

"When yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen."

The crowd thundered, "Amen!"

I don't go to a black church but I'm pretty familiar with that rhyme. He used it at the rally we went to last year. I've seen Lowery speak a bunch of times at different Atlanta events. The man is a powerhouse. He's everywhere! I even have a picture of Sunny and him together, although it's not a very good picture and you really only see his back.

I explained to Sunny that the different colors in the rhyme stood for different groups of people. Yellow stood for Asians, like me and Ojiichan. I also added that I normally don't like being called "yellow" but I'll give Lowery a pass on that one. Black stood for black people and African-Americans, red stood for Native Americans and so on.

He asked "What about me?"

I told him he was black and white. He said, "Yay!"

MLK Day March and Inauguration

We marched in the MLK day parade again, this time with Sunny. He had a great time. I didn't take any video footage this year, or I'd post it.

Today he'll be watching the inauguration at his school.

American Family just had an interesting post about "dumbing down" King's message in school. It makes me think about how I teach these issues to Sunny. It's so hard to think of how to balance everything. I feel like he's very fragile. He's just now learning what being African-American means, and that he himself is African-American. I don't want to push him too hard and tell him what he is or how he has to identify himself. I don't want him to think that being African-American means cutting himself off from his multiracial heritage and his white family. I just drop things now and then, such as telling him how Barack Obama is a lot like Sunny because he is black but his mother is white.

Whiteness is an insanely difficult concept to grasp for an adult, much less a six-year-old.

Since Sunny goes to a very diverse, minority-white school, one that I know doesn't tolerate bullying, I don't have to worry so much about direct attacks with racist abuse. I do have to worry about more subtle but powerful problems, like colorism among the black kids.

I also trust his school to teach history. So far he hasn't come home with anything that sounds wrong to me. He knows, in very general terms, about slavery. We're still working on the Civil War. I recently explained that Atlanta was burned to the ground and that's why we don't have any nice older buildings like some other cities do. He wanted to know who the good guys were and the who the bad guys were and which side we were on. I couldn't really answer to his satisfaction. I said the North was right and the South was wrong, so even though a lot of people died in the war, a great thing came out of it: slavery ended.

I didn't tell him that my ancestors on my mother's side fought for the Confederacy. I did tell him, once, that when my mother was born, it was illegal for her to marry my father. I don't think he could grasp that yet -- he looked so confused -- so this kind of family history is something to put off for another year until he's ready. And talking about race in my maternal family is going to be more pleasant than talking about race in his biological family...

In a way, it's easy to teach this kind of history because we're surrounded by it. Today, waiting for the march to start, we were standing next to a Civil War plaque on the ground that commemorated the first civilian death in 1864. At the end of the march, I pointed out to Sunny the church in which Martin Luther King Jr., and his father before him, preached. I'm trying to keep things factual, and also tied to the present day. King's message is relevant to a huge spectrum of social issues, from local to global, represented at the parade yesterday. Stopping the execution of Troy Davis. Union solidarity and the Employee Free Choice Act. Peace in Palestine.

I don't think Sunny is ready to understand how bad things really were/are. I wouldn't take him to any exhibit on segregation or slavery. In a year's time, he might be, and even if he's not he'll start absorbing it anyway, so I have to be ready.

It's so strange the things he tends to focus on. The fact that Lincoln was shot in a theater seems to haunt him, and he brings it up now and then out of the blue. He's fascinated by violence and shooting, the kind you see in video games and children's cartoons (and I don't think it's an abnormal fascination at all, or else these cartoons wouldn't be full of it) but he really has a very low tolerance for realistic versions. "Hide my eyes, mom! Tell me when it's safe to look!" he'll say. I think that's why he likes Scooby Doo so much... it's a safe way to be scared.

I feel torn about the inauguration today. I want him to understand how important this milestone is. But to understand the real importance, he would have to understand the pain. He doesn't now, but he will soon.

Adoption Tax Credit Clarification, Plus Some Obnoxious Opinions

I got a lot of comments on the last post, so I thought I'd elaborate a bit.

First of all, the tax credit isn't really $10,000; it's increased every year and I had an older figure in mind. For tax year 2007, it's $11,390 and it should be $11,650 for adoptions finalized in 2008. This link at NACAC does a good job of summarizing the situation for foster care adoption families.

Basically, you can get the whole credit if you've finalized a special needs adoption. If you're getting any kind of state adoption subsidy, that means it's a special needs adoption. It doesn't matter if the adoption was free. You don't have to claim expenses. If your adoption in 2007 was free, you get $11,390. If your adoption cost $5,000, you get $11,390. This is in the form of a tax credit. So if your tax liability is less than $11,390, the rest of it rolls over to another year. NACAC has some examples and a link to the IRS publication.

I'm going to pay some money for my adoption finalization, which should happen this year very soon, so I'll expect to get this tax credit money next year. My finalization isn't going to cost anything at all, because I get a reimbursement from Sunny's state. My trip expenses for the first trip visiting him are also going to be repaid at that time.

One thing I don't understand very well is the situation for non-special-needs adoptions from foster care. I suppose these would be children who were fostered from birth. In foster care, "special needs" is a very inclusive category and encompasses plenty of kids who are quite healthy. Here's the definition from Georgia:

In the State of Georgia a child who is considered special needs for the purpose of adoption meets the following criteria:

a. Any child eight years of age or older.
b. Any child of African-American heritage who is one year of age or older.
c. Members of a sibling group of three or more who are placed together.
d. Members of a sibling group of two where one is over the age of eight or has another special need.
e. Any child with documented physical, emotional or mental impairments or limitations.

People who do private domestic adoptions and international adoptions get the same tax credit, but they have to file expenses. So if they paid $5000 for an adoption, they would only get $5000 back. So at least in that one way, special needs foster care adoptions are privileged.

Here's my first obnoxious opinion in response to Sang-Shil's comment/question. I don't believe people who are not independently wealthy should be encouraged to adopt internationally using short-term lures like the tax credit. It's just too dangerous.

This doesn't mean that working class and middle-class people can't be great adoptive parents. It's not a judgment on parenting skills. It's a judgment on the terrible state of children's healthcare in this country. I've just heard too many horror stories.

It's not easy for families who have adopted from foster care to get services, but at least we have Medicaid and subsidies. When things go wrong for international adoptive families, there's no safety net. When they start off, they don't think anything will go wrong. The agencies certainly don't have any vested interest in telling them scary stories about attachment disorder and PTSD and fetal alcohol syndrome. If they're lucky, and they usually are, things will go reasonably well from a health perspective. If they're not lucky, they will end up shattered, bankrupt and their children will be taken away and age out in foster care.

I've heard so many of these stories. Here's a comment that a person just now left at the link I gave for my tax credit policy suggestion:

derinever
1/15/2009 10:44 AM
I adopted a child internationally. There is no social suport for these children He is not able to be educated in America's failing education system. These orphaned children have a risk for learning disabilites and psychological problems from neglect abuse malnutrition and lead posoining. Stop the adoptions until America can commit to helping these kids. My son has NO school. He is eight years old. We have tried to get him help paying more than fifty thousand dollars of failed therapies and tutoring. Tax credits wont change his future of less hope due to poor education help

Just another example. Sunny's foster mom has adopted several children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. I want to do a detailed post about some of these children later, so I won't talk about them much more. I was shocked when I found out that one of the girls was 14, because she looked and acted like she was 10 years old. She was also an incredibly sweet, caring and peaceful girl. Sunny's foster mom worries about their future, obviously. But she knows a lot about their disorder. Their medical care doesn't cost her anything... and one of them was hospitalized for months, at death's door, when he was Sunny's age.

His foster mom told me that one of her neighbors had adopted a girl from Russia, and sort of sadly shook her head. She had severe FASD. The family put the girl in an institution when she was 12 years old and she's been there ever since. I wonder what kind of toll that took on their family.

I think that a lot of parents adopt internationally, realize they're in over their heads, then pull it together and scrape up all their resources and work through it. But the ones that don't... I wish there were more statistics about the intersection of international adoption and the foster care system.

There have been about 20,000 international adoptions a year in the past decade. So the tax credit is costing the government $200 million a year. I think this money could be better spent 1) regulating international adoption agencies and preventing corruption 2) ensuring potential parents are educated about the psychological AND cultural needs of international adoptees 3) scaring the hell out of them (the same treatment foster care adoptive parents get in trainings) so that they know for sure what they might be getting into 4) ensuring better healthcare, or at least educating parents about what services are available.

I realize that a lot of what I'm saying could be taken as pathologizing international adoptees, so I feel like I should apologize for that. But I'm coming from a background where you assume an adopted child will have issues due to a traumatic background, so that you're pleasantly surprised when they don't.

Take my dad, the international (non-transnational) adoptee. He's incredibly strong, tough, brilliant, humorous and independent. He's also got some attachment issues. The more I learned about adoption as we were researching, the more I realized how losing his parents in the war affected my father and could have caused him to behave in some really extreme ways that almost permanently alienated me from him when I was a teenager. Ah, the fistfight episode. I'll save that for another post someday.

Anyway, I think that ALL children and families should receive the best care. In a better system (and I hope an Obama administration gets us there as quickly as possible) all families will never have to worry about giving up custody of their children because they couldn't afford residential treatment. Ultimately, this is a problem that affects adoptive AND birth families of all varieties.

Second obnoxious opinion: I am not quite so sure about removing the tax credit from private domestic adoption. Ultimately, I don't think the tax credit there is a good thing. But I've heard one convincing argument that it ultimately relieves strain on the foster care system and helps some children, because otherwise some of these children would end up in the foster care system, with all the huge delays and potential for disrupted attachment that the system entails.

I hesitate to put out that argument. Private domestic adoption is not a subject I blog about, but I do know that there is a lot of stigma on women who voluntarily give children up about adoption... popular ideas that they do it because they're hopelessly dysfunctional and drug addicted and so forth. It's a stigma I don't want to contribute to. I think that today, women decide to relinquish for really diverse reasons that are linked to a lot of factors involving class, race, ethnicity and religion.

However, stating the opposite -- that there's no overlap between mothers who voluntarily relinquish and mothers who get involved with CPS and go through involuntary termination of parental rights -- would be false. There is a small degree of overlap. I've heard many cases of women who "voluntarily" relinquish via a private adoption, because they've had other children who ended up in foster care, and if they didn't do a private adoption, they know they'd have their baby taken away by CPS anyway. At least with private adoption, they have a greater degree of choice.

(This certainly wasn't the case with Sunny's mother. She had a case open with CPS because of Sunny, but everyone, especially her caseworker, was pulling for her to keep BB. If she hadn't died, she certainly would have kept him, and I like to think they would have been very happy together)

So the countering argument is that maybe the tax credit for private domestic adoption does serve a societal purpose. It can also help encourage African-American parents to adopt privately, thereby increasing intraracial adoptions. I've heard a lot of African-American parents are leery of paying any money at all for private adoption because of moral reservations as much as financial ones.

Ultimately, I still don't agree with it. I think it should be replaced by more specifically targeted tax credits and subsidies. And private adoption agencies are so poorly regulated that I wonder how much of the adoption tax credit really goes to the parents. Like I said in the original post, I wouldn't be surprised if an agency would just build the subsidy into their fees and treat it as pure profit on their end.

Also, when it comes to private domestic infant adoption, there's no shortage of parents due to money. There is a deeply disturbing hierarchy where healthy white babies cost the most, and black and/or disabled babies cost the least. There are only a few infants that are in danger of ending up in foster care because their potential adoptive parents can't afford to adopt... and these babies are the ones that cost the least. I don't blame private adoption. I'm pretty neutral on it, from a perspective of policy. It simply reflects the screwed-up values of our society, no more, no less.

What I hope is that as our country improves its safety nets, there'll be less of a need for things like adoption subsidies. Also, the need for adoption will decrease and there'll be less waiting children. Poverty isn't the single driving force behind adoption, but it's frequently a major contributor. For example, if you're a mother with a combination of mental health and addiction issues, and you come from a family with resources, you'll probably keep your children. If you have the same set of problems and come from a family with no resources, or grew up shuttled between foster homes, you'll probably lose them.

In the short-term, until we get to that better place, special needs adoption subsidies are vital. I don't know what would happen if I had to pay for Sunny's medication on my own. The very thought gives me shivers. Right now, I'm proud that what we give Sunny is not too far away from the very best. Non-generic-available medication, therapy, a tutor that specializes in ADHD, the prospect of experimental neurofeedback treatment, a college savings fund, all the way down to organic fish oil vitamins. I'm lucky because Sunny's needs are really not that severe, but if they were, we would be able to pay for much more treatment without bankrupting ourselves and driving ourselves to the limit emotionally.

Vote For Me!

If you're signed up at http://citizensbriefingbook.change.gov and have few spare seconds, vote up or comment on my ideas.

They're too focused and specific to make it into the finals, and I also stuck to creating ones that hadn't already been mentioned. However, the site is going to give them a LOT more exposure than they would have had otherwise.

Encourage Foster Care Adoption - End Tax Credit For Private/International Adoption

I am an adoptive parent of an older child from state foster care. Our adoption costs nothing, and he will receive a subsidy until he is 18 and I will also get a one-time $10,000 tax credit.

This is a good incentive for people to adopt from foster care. There are many older children in the system waiting to be adopted. In the case of my son and many others, the option of placing him with birth relatives was explored for many years, but it did not happen because they were not willing.

The incentive makes sense because if these children are not adopted, the government will spend even more money maintaining them in foster care. The outcome is worse for the child and for the taxpayer.

However, what doesn't make sense is that private adoption (people who pay adoption agencies money for infant adoption from birth mothers) and international adoption parents also receive this $10,000 tax credit.

I am not against these forms of adoption, although I do think they need to be regulated more. However, I don't think they should be subsidized by the government, especially when there are so many older children in state systems waiting to be adopted. The money would be better spent improving and reforming our foster care system.

The private adoption agencies that charge money for adoption just pass the cost of the tax credit on to the parents anyway. They may market babies to parents by saying, "oh, this adoption is going to cost $25,000 but since you get the tax credit it's really going to be 'only' $15,000". Without the tax credit, maybe they would just charge $15,000 anyway.

This tax credit is only a sop to the adoption agencies. It should be ended, and this will save the government money. It should also encourage people to look into FREE adoption of waiting children from the foster care system who might not otherwise have an adoptive home.

Standardize College Accreditation and Regulate "Rip-Off" Colleges

College accreditation in the U.S. is a confusing mix. The highest standard is actually regional accreditation*. Six regional agencies establish accreditation of every school from Harvard to two-year community colleges.

National accreditation is something quite different, and regionally accredited schools usually won't accept nationally accredited credits. Many diploma mills and for-profit schools take advantage of this situation to rip off students.

Many for-profit technical colleges are owned by corporations who spent most of their money on marketing and advertising, not on teachers and students. Their targets are working-class and minority and military and immigrant students. They promise that they can help get student loans to pay the overinflated tuition (when the student could go to a less-flashy, government-subsidized community college for 5% of the tuition). They use “hard sell” tactics, walk the students through taking out large loans telling them they are guaranteed to get some wonderful job with NASA if they sign on the dotted line. Once in, they will attempt to pass you through even if your work is not up to college level. Teachers are encouraged never to fail students in order to keep the tuition stream (composed mainly of student loans) flowing. If students graduate, they graduate with a substandard education that many employers don’t even respect, plus crushing student loans. Many default.

College accreditation needs to be tightened up, federalized and made simpler. And then higher education marketing should be much more regulated. You shouldn’t be able to promise some of the crazy stuff those people promise.**

I suggest that the regional accreditors should be combined into a new federal standard. No matter whether you are studying for a PhD in Philosophy or a community college certificate as an Automotive Technician, you should be guaranteed a minimum standard of education.

All for-profit colleges should be required to provide students with impartial information about tuition, college budgets and probability of credit acceptance. If they make claims about future employment, they must be able to back up these claims. Any college making outrageous promises or using "hard sell" techniques should be fined out of existence.

America is falling behind in many educational areas, and improving our accreditation system should be a low-cost, high-benefit element of any higher education plan.

* read more about accreditation at http://distancelearn.about.com/od/accreditationinfo/a/regional.htm

** Here is one example, among many, of a lawsuit involving such false claims.
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DR

Fully Fund Efforts to Combat the Hepatitis C Epidemic

Hepatitis C is the most common blood-borne chronic viral infection in the United States. Once exposed, most individuals remain persistently infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV), with 70% developing chronic liver disease and its often life-threatening conditions. At least 4 million Americans currently have chronic hepatitis C, with 25,000 new infections occurring every year. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that the death rate from HCV-related liver disease will triple by the year 2019. No other disease burden is expected to increase as rapidly as that of hepatitis C in the coming decade.

Despite these staggering statistics, the federal government has not provided adequate funding or legislation to mount a comprehensive effort against the disease. Only $17 million is spent each year on viral hepatitis programs. This funding is not enough for states to provide testing, surveillance, prevention, and education services – let alone care and treatment for those in need.

My stepfather has lived with this disease for many years. He contracted it as a medic in the Vietnam War. It is estimated that at least 10% of all Vietnam veterans have Hepatitis C. He receives regular monitoring and treatment at a VA hospital, but his long-term future is frighteningly unknown.

I ask that you address this serious public health crisis in three ways:

-- Add language on your website about the hepatitis C epidemic and how you plan to address it.
-- Support a $50 million in Fiscal Year 2009 funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Viral Hepatitis Programs.
-- Support the "Hepatitis C Epidemic Control and Prevention Act *" or similar Act which would create a comprehensive effort by the federal government to address the epidemic.

*http://olpa.od.nih.gov/legislation/109/pendinglegislation/hepatitisc.asp

Tantrum Report

This last week has been a bad one for tantrums.

Thursday night, at bedtime, he had one of the worst tantrums I've ever seen. It lasted an hour but felt like an eternity. Screaming, crying, door slamming, "mom and dad aren't being very nice to me! If Mom and Dad aren't nice to me, I'm not going to be nice to them! Butthead farthead poopoohead peepeehead idiot jerks!"

He went into this "must have control" mode around bedtime. The first demand was that I sleep in the same bed as him, and of course I reminded him I couldn't do that. He knows that. And I would let him go to sleep in the same bed as me, on special occasions, if not for the fact that it's against foster care regulations in the state of Georgia and he could conceivably be removed for it, which is something I am never, ever, ever going to risk. So he basically used the refusal of an impossible request as the trigger to start a huge tantrum. We tried talking it out, we tried ignoring, I tried locking myself in my room... nothing seemed to work. Finally, after an hour, when he was much more tired, we laid down the law and told him he was just about to lose his Gameboy, his 6-year birthday present from his foster mom. We were going to mail it back to his foster mom and she could give it to one of his brothers or sisters. That snapped him out of it and we were able to put him to bed.

He was fine the next day and had pretty good behavior in school and then through the weekend.

Then this morning he had another fit. It started with him having a nightmare at 5:30 in the morning and wetting the bed. He came in our bedroom to tell us. I just told him to put his pad in the basket, change his pajama bottoms and go back to sleep. No one was angry at him. I gave him a big hug.

Then he kept yelling "goodnight!" and "see you in the morning!" at us. For half an hour. And knocking on our door to ask us questions. Could he listen to the radio. Sure, whatever he wanted as long as it wasn't too loud. What time were we getting up. Seven. Did he have to take a shower in the morning. Yes. The last time he knocked on our door we both yelled "STOP YELLING AT US!" and then it was on. "Mom and dad aren't being nice to me! Idiot jerks!" And the door slamming... we'd turned on the house alarm the night before, and he slammed his door so hard that it set off the alarm and a piercing siren woke up half the neighborhood before Guy could race to the panel and turn it off.

As a consequence, after school today he is going to have to knock on the doors of our closest neighbors and apologize for waking them up at 6 in the morning.

What a crappy morning. He apologized and was subdued for a while, then had another mini-fit when it was time to go to school. I always refuse to take him to school when he has an issue like this (it actually isn't very common). I just tell him I won't take him to school -- I'll simply wait -- until he has calmed down and made up, and if we have to be late, we'll be late, and we'll go to class together and tell his teacher exactly why he's late.

There's a song he likes from Wow Wow Wubbzie that goes "don't lie, don't lie, don't blame it on the other guy." I told him that he needed to take responsibility for not controlling his anger better. When he blamed his tantrums on "Mom and Dad not being nice to me" that was like lying and blaming the other guy.

My husband feels terrible. He knows he's not supposed to let his buttons get pushed, but says getting called things like "poopoohead" by his son is unavoidably painful. He gets really, really hurt and angry. I don't lose my head, but I've noticed I have a tendency to go into a cold, resentful state, like this morning. I didn't hug Sunny goodbye before school, and I should have. I know it's going to bother him that I didn't.

I don't know if there's anything we can do to prevent the tantrums. They're a difficult mix of calculation and uncontrollable emotional surges. They can't consistently be hugged away or reasoned away or bargained away. They're exhausting, but they don't fill me with despair like they do to my husband. We're having family therapy tonight and I think most of it is going to be for Guy.

He keeps worrying that Sunny will have violent rages as a teenager and physically attack us. I think that's really unreasonable. You also have to understand, Guy has also worried about the future too much. This is someone who gave a two-year leave notice at his last job. Oh yes, and he started worrying about getting divorced before we ever got married. We didn't even have any relationship problems, he just had this premonition we might get divorced, and to this day has the occasional nightmare about it. It's a character trait I've gotten used to.

Nevertheless, the last thing I want to hear when I'm in bed at night worrying about Sunny is Guy's detailed scenario of how Sunny is going to start punching holes in our wall as a teenager, we'll have to spend all this money on fixing the holes, then we'll have to call the police on him, and we'll want to send him to military school but they won't take him and blah blah blah.

I'm a fatalist, not a pessimist. I expect things to muddle through. If something bad happens, it's going to happen, so I might as well not worry about it. I've made it clear to Guy that I think all his scenarios do is send him off down a depression spiral.

Plus, military school is not going to happen and I find the whole concept bizarre. I used to be in an environment where I heard a lot of gossip from military boarding school, and the gossip was all about -- can you guess? -- homosexual rape and prostitution! Military school is almost as bad as prison or a freaking pirate ship! I think whether you're actually gay or straight is irrelevant in those environments... it's all about unhealthy power imbalances and hierarchies. Anyway, this is probably more detail than I intended, but I'm against single-sex education, even for girls. It's true there are certain advantages for girls that there aren't for boys, but ultimately, children need to learn how to have friendly, respectful, diverse kinds of relationships with the other half of the world that doesn't share their sex. I think that's a crucial goal, and sex segregation does not lead towards it.

Anyway, rant about military school aside, Guy is a a great husband and a great father and needs to stop tormenting himself, and in the process, exhausting me because I keep having to tell him to stop tormenting himself. However, on the positive side, at least we talk about this stuff between the two of us. It's a simmering pot but the lid isn't clamped down.

Sunny has been doing well, it's just these tantrums really color my perception.

His 1st grade ITBS scores came back, and they were pretty good. The majority were in the top 25th percentile. The scores that were bad all had to do with listening. I'm sure he's capable of much better when his focus increases.

I've decided on a place for neurofeedback and am setting up an initial appointment.

First Protest

I almost forgot to mention that Sunny had an important milestone this weekend: he went to his first political protest. This is a long-standing family tradition; my mother has been taking me to protests ever since I was a baby.

The AJC article is here: Pro-Palestinian protesters march on CNN headquarters

My mother helped Sunny make his own pro-peace sign. He was pretty excited about it. When we got there, he was initially a bit nervous because of the shouting, but once he saw there were a lot of other little kids there, he was fine, and really enjoyed the marching part.

Comments closed on this post because I'm not interested in sparking a debate on this topic. The AFSC/Quakers have the right idea, that's all I'll say.

Six-Year-Old Humor

One of my favorite comics (Tom the Dancing Bug) had an awesome capsule explanation of six-year-old humor.



Sunny is always cracking himself up with his potty humor. He takes his vast knowledge of classic rock and uses it for evil purposes. Here's a recent example of one of his songs:

"You're still the fart
That can itch my back
Still the fart
That can farty fart fart
We're still having fun
And fart fart fart!"

Maybe I'll get him a Weird Al Yankovic CD for his birthday. I think he'd really appreciate "Another One Rides the Bus".

Sunny's Getting Bigger (Another Medication Post)

Sunny has gained quite a bit of weight since coming to us. He's about ten pounds overweight for his age. The scary thing is, it's all muscle. He doesn't look particularly big... he's just very, very solid.

His old swim teacher explained to me that he had a tough time teaching Sunny because of his muscular build. Skinny kids float, chunky kids float, but Sunny sinks unless he forcefully uses his arms.

I think the 15% weight gain is turning his medication into a proportionally lower dose. It was already a very low dose... now I'm forced to consider the horrible prospect of raising it.

The medication is just so closely linked to his school. When he forgets it in the morning, or when we were trying to get him off it last year, his school performance just falls apart, and he can't write at all. He becomes so much more unhappy. He keeps falling into a cycle... frustration, anger, attempt to leave the situation that's making him angry, rebound back because he's scared of being alone, getting angrier, melting down, blaming himself. He still goes through those cycles on the medication, they're just a lot more frequent and severe when he's not on it.

Last night it was a simple request "please come over here, it looks like you need some chapstick" that started it off.

I don't want him to have to take medication for the rest of his childhood. He doesn't have any side effects now, but what if we raised the dose? What if he stays on it for years?

I'm going to try something new... neurofeedback. I've been researching it a lot. I'm not a believer in alternative medicine at all -- I think scientific trials are better proof than anecdotes or tradition. Neurofeedback seems like it's in a different category: promising, though not fully proven. The medication carries just as many if not more unknowns, however. With neurofeedback, the beneficial effects are supposed to be permanent.

The medication is free, because of Medicaid. A full treatment of neurofeedback might cost more than $5000. It's not covered by any insurance. The cost makes me nauseous. What if it doesn't work and turns out to be a complete waste?

I'm just thinking out loud. I haven't come to a decision yet, but I'm leaning toward giving the neurofeedback a try.

It's not like we're completely at the end of our rope. Sunny's behavior can be annoying at times, and I'm very worried about his future in school, but most of the time he's just a great little peppy kid.

On the plus side, he's had times recently when his focus is fantastic. Honestly, I never thought he would be able to play with his Star Wars Lego kits. Their boxes even say they're really for ages 8 and up. After a few rocky starts, he's starting to get the hang of it. He can focus and work on putting them together for up to half an hour at a time.

Sunny also spent more than half an hour yesterday taking apart a coffee machine. Guy likes to give Sunny small broken appliances to take apart, using real tools (hammer, miniature power screwdriver, pliers, wire cutter). Guy says the trick is to cut off the power cord first so Sunny won't be tempted to plug it into anything. Every ten minutes or so, Sunny would run into the house, show us a piece of the coffee machine, and breathlessly explain his theory behind why it worked.

We're also considering child modeling for Sunny. It's something he might really enjoy, because he's a total camera ham. Maybe we could pay for his neurofeedback that way! Errr... that sounds unethical, but I have to be honest, it's crossed my mind. Anyway, that's an easier decision. If he likes it, we do it; if he doesn't like it, we don't.