School Behavior, Reward Charting, and General Confusion!!

I have two beautiful daughters, age 8 and 6. School has always been a bit of a challenge for me due to their unique skills and abilities and my status as a full-time working mom. (Let's not even talk about my positive history for perfectionism and overachievement in schoolwork). My most recent challenge has been to survive my youngest daughter's entrance into kindergarten. I don't think I am exaggerating when I say my girl is smart. She is very smart, reading well before start of kindergarten. She is pretty outgoing and sweet too.

HOWEVER, she does seem to have a lot of difficulty with sitting down, following rules, and focusing on what the teacher thinks is important. Now, these problems have been around since before kindergarten. In preschool, we had a fabulous teacher who loved and appreciated Sofia, but also worked with her to help keep her on track. I suspect I might have a few blog posts on her preschool days. I remember walking in to preschool and feeling oh so frustrated after getting the "What am I going to so with Sofia?" head shake.

I still believe that children develop at different rates in all areas. I hope that in time Sofia's weak areas will develop and even out in comparison to her strong ones. However, the school system does not seem to share my vision on child development (and at times, i do believe that the school system seems not to care much about any well-documented child development beliefs). I want to say here that this is no reflection on my daughter's teacher. I do feel that Sofia's teacher does have to put in way more effort to keep her on task in addition to her primary job of teaching 24 kindergarten students.

Okay, so this is not entirely a venting session.  It is actually a bid for help! I suppose in the perfect world I would have blogged for years about Sofia's development, her successes, and her challenges in school. But get real, I barely have to time to keep up with the minimum here people!

The issue today is my most recent behavior note I received from the teacher. We have tried a simple smiley face/frowney face chart, a red/yellow/green light system, and our newest behavioral system developed by the teacher. The teacher rates Sofia on 3 global behaviors: following directions, completing work, and focusing/listening. Sofia's day is broken into 5 time frames with a rating for each behavior 5 times per day. So basically she has 15 boxes to be rated as smiley or frowny. Since this chart system started, we have had good days and bad days and I can find little pattern to the madness. I have not found any link between better days/worse days and sleep, food, encouragement, etc. She did do better the one day I took off work and sat with her all day (but then I did what I do at home for homework and sat right next to her and basically redirected her as soon as she wandered off).

Anyway, enough with the context! I just wanted to share one of my recent behavior charts. Sofia received 15 frowney faces! Fifteen! The comments from the teacher were the following: "Sofia had a difficult day today.  I repeatedly asked her to finish her work but she continued to be unfocused and pay around. After lunch I sent her to the office to finish her work. Amazingly she finished all her work for the day in 30-45 minutes." So...what the he** does this mean?

With my training and work history, I have long pondered the diagnosis of ADHD.  I would say both my children show signs of attention problems. Do the meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD? I don't think so and frankly the diagnostic criteria for ADHD is pretty vague anyway. Sofia has always had difficulty focusing. Her problem seems to be that she wants to focus on what she finds interesting or important to the exclusion of anything else.

I fully understand why it might be hard to focus on your work with a classroom full of interesting things and people. I find it shocking more children don't have this problem in kindergarten. And I could see a child being able to focus in the school office which is probably quieter than the classroom. But the fact that she does the entire days school work in 30-45 minutes without supervision sort of stumps me.

No matter how hard I try to set better realistic goals for myself as a person and a mother, this still bugs the crap out of me. I hate not knowing how to handle things or feeling like everything you try does not seem to make a difference. I want to be the kind of person who just enjoys the moment, but I was raised to be an overachiever who craves perfection and reward for good behavior. I have always been a person filled with contradictions. I hate that stupid word balance. BUT, how do you balance the need for your child to learn to follow rules and achieve because the world does value and judge you on those variables with the need to appreciate the unique and wonderful person you already are (great for happiness but may or may not lead to school or career success).

Okay, input appreciated now that I have rambled on with some of my thoughts.  Any comments appreciated below!!