Click here for some great mommmy and baby freebies from BabiesOnline.com

Main Page Site Index Getting Pregnant Pregnancy Parenting Pregnancy and Parenting Journals Fertility Nutrition Pregnant Moms Morning Sickness Women's Health Child Health	Vlad The Impaler I have a friend whose teenage daughter has ADD, a milder (or different) form of ADHD. She wasn't diagnosed until she was a teenager, as her behavior had always been fine at home and any problems at primary school level had been put down to temperament/bad teaching/whatever. She is now on a very successful drug regime, does well at school and at sport, and is overcoming her problems very admirably. I know that the diagnosis period was extremely distressing for my friend, as she tried to come to terms with what was happening to her daughter. I have seen documentaries about the condition, met other young children who have been diagnosed with it, done the usual There But for the Grace of God Go I routine. I understand that it is a very real condition, which carries some social stigma and causes families a lot of distress. Therefore I found it profoundly infuriating that people who know little about the condition bandy the term around to explain any tantrum in any child. I imagine how upsetting it must be for the parents of children who really do have it, to hear an ordinarily badly behaved child being labeled in that way by the ill informed. I am speaking from a position of experience here! We went on holiday recently and, among other things, visited my father. I haven't seen him for eleven years, owing to sundry family feud-related issues, but have been corresponding with him for the last couple of years. Since my return to Australia we have tentatively resumed a telephone conversation sort of relationship. Graham kept pushing and pushing for us to meet up with him so that he could see his grandchildren for the first time. I was reluctant to do so, fearing that it could all go very wrong, but Graham persisted in a distinct Head of the Household way, and I gave in for the sake of family harmony. We spent a long afternoon with him. He and I together would probably have got on all right, even Graham and I together. He is an intelligent, interesting man (I mean my father in this instance, though I would say the same of my husband too!) and can be pleasant company. He has always been one of those people who are a real charmer on the surface and an unspeakable tyrant in private. I had assumed that he would get on well with the children, as he has always been fond of children and often has a real rapport with them. What I had forgotten was that he has always had a real rapport with FEMALE children. I don't mean that in any nasty way, he just likes girls and doesn't particularly like boys. Nothing illegal or kinky, just the way he is. He has also always had a thing about children being perfectly behaved. My brother and I were, in general, too frightened of him as children to behave badly. I've probably said enough about Angus in this column for readers to have gathered the idea that he is, well, lively! Feral is the word we tend to use. Beautiful and cute, and very loving, but not a quiet, well-behaved child. My father lives in a tiny hovel completely crammed with books. Each small room has a narrow walkway through it, and is otherwise chockablock with books, in boxes and piles and even, occasionally, on shelves. The only book-free rooms were the bathroom and kitchen, plus a small square of hallway. The children were expected to spend five hours in this place with nothing to play with, nowhere to go, not even a television to watch (the last ditch resource of the desperate parent!) They were allowed into the garden, but there was no fence between his front garden and the other tenant's back garden, so of course Angus kept digging up her plants and garden ornaments. (Not something he normally does, I think he was feeling stressed! We don't normally have problems with him in gardens, not since he was about eighteen months old). Needless to say, though Tamsin rose heroically to the occasion and behaved wonderfully, Angus became a little urban terrorist and did behave APPALLINGLY. The rest of the holiday was fun but this bit was the pits. I heard from my mother afterwards that my father had found Angus a little hard to take. At that level of comment, I didn't mind too much - I find him hard to take a lot of the time! But ten days later I received a brief but viscous letter from my father, saying the cruelest things about Angus, things you cannot imagine ever saying to someone you are supposedly close to. In a nutshell, he believed Angus had ADHD and needed immediate treatment, but he didn't even dignify it with medical terminology, just skated around the issue. We certainly don't believe that Angus has it, even though the fear of it drove me to surf the Net to find lists of symptoms and neurotically dismiss them. My friend with the ADD daughter, and another friend, have had their hands full recently assuring me over and over again that he is perfectly normal! But I feel that anyone who really does have an ADHD child would be furious that the terminology can be bandied around like that by people who know very little about the condition or about the 'normal' behavior ranges of children. My theory is that Angus, like his big sister, is very sensitive to atmosphere. If he is somewhere where he knows people disapprove of him, he behaves like Vlad the Impaler. And good on him, I say! Why should we be polite to people who obviously dislike us! Judy Edmonds was born in England, grew up in Australia and is married to Graham Peters, a fifth-generation Australian. From 1990-1999 they lived in England - it was meant to be a two year working holiday but it took on a life of its own. They returned to Australia in May 1999, and are enjoying readjusting. Judy worked as an academic librarian until the birth of Tamsin in 1993, and since then has been a full-time mother to her and to Angus, born 1996. She is now embarking on a new career as a freelance journalist. Her writing can be found all over the Internet now, and she is the owner/editor of an Australian parenting EZine, Chloe & Jack.