u/LovesAGoodNap

EDIT: wow the feedback is clear, we’ve shifted into a new phase of him exploring reading and the best thing to do is to follow his lead and leave him to it. This is fantastic and we’ll make sure to celebrate his new approach (but subtly so we don’t make him self conscious)

My son took a dyslexia screener recently and everything started to make sense (ie the problem isn’t his adhd or a lack of interest in reading as we’d assumed, it’s just literally harder for him). He’s starting with a tutor in September and she gave us stuff to work on over the summer that’s really paying off. He’s now ready to practice reading books, but won’t read them in front of my wife or I because it’s ’embarrassing’, probably because we habitually correct him as he goes.

He’s currently sitting on our bed reading a chapter of an early reader Horrid Henry book to the dog and his little sister (6) who can’t offer him much help.

Part of me wants to convince him to read with us so we can monitor his progress and correct his mistakes, so I wanted advice on how to put him at ease.

But another part of me is thinking maybe just leave him to it. If he’s reading by himself and gets comfortable with it that’s more valuable than us explaining the ‘ight’ digraph yet again. I was never dyslexic but remember reading when young and not understanding every word but still ploughing on.

Also, he and his sister are both a terrible liars who will give it away if he reads less than he’s supposed to, and she’ll call him out if he bluffs a word and the story doesn’t make sense.

The dog also enjoys the company attention, and getting to sit on our bed.

Intervene or leave him to it?

My son is 9 with AuADHD (inattentive) and has been doing taekwondo for nearly a year but hasn’t progressed up any grade. I spoke to the instructor today to say he has problems staying focused and can we do something like pair him with another kid. The instructor explained they’ve already tried that and tried pairing him with one of the instructors but ‘he’s a gentle soul and just doesn’t seem into it’.

This was news to us as our son is generally pretty happy to go to class, but on reflection I think he just enjoys the unstructured warm up games they play in the first half of class then probably zones out with the actual stuff he’s supposed to learn.

So we’ll ask him to give it another month and really try to follow the instructions, but this is probably not the activity for him.

This was meant to be his ‘social’ activity, ie the thing he does outside of school that actually puts him in the company of other kids. He does private swim lessons with his sister (he would not pay attention in group classes but responds well when it’s just the two of them), and he started doing junior parkrun last week and enjoyed it, but those don’t really involve interacting with other kids.

So what else can we try? He doesn’t want to do team sports because he loses interest and then get ‘embarrassed’ when other more competitive kids give him a hard time for not paying attention or not knowing the rules.

I’d love to hear from older people who are AuADHD about activities you did as a kid that actually helped you explore new interests and meet other kids

My son is 9, diagnosed a few years ago with inattentive ADHD and recently flagged as very likely very dyslexic (complete diagnosis in the works).

He starts with a dyslexia tutor in September and when we were discussing with her what can we do over the summer to help him with his reading one piece of advice was to just read interesting books to him so he learns to love reading. Everything he reads now is bland stories for younger kids with the aim of teaching him the mechanics of reading, so read him what he’s probably be reading if he didn’t have such difficulty.

I’ve been reading him and his 6yo sister Charlie and the chocolate factory all week before bed, but last night we skipped reading as we had friends visiting, so I did a little recap. He says he likes the story and likes when I read to them, but he could not recall one piece of information about the book when I asked the kids questions during the recap. He couldn’t remember the names of any characters, how many golden tickets, what the golden tickets do, anything about any of the children including Charlie bucket who’s the main kid!

I got really frustrated but kept my mouth shut, read the chapters where Charlie finally gets his ticket and then just asked a few recap questions again. He was sitting looking at me the whole time I read, but again couldn’t answer a single question about the stuff we literally just read!

I know this is some neurological thing going on and I can’t take it personally but it honestly makes me feel like crap, like I’m talking to a wall, or he’s just mimicking the body language of engagement while in his mind he’s really thinking about something else.

Please someone give me some insight into what’s happening in his mind and why this exercise is still worth doing

I could write a book on my sons background but the TL:DR is we thought his struggles to learn how to read were because he missed a lot of school where they learn the fundamentals of reading, and inattentive ADHD causing him to struggle with catching up. Then he took a dyslexia screener and everything made more sense.

In Ireland it can take a while to got a formal diagnosis and that will unlock loads of support programs, but in the mean time we’ve come up with this strategy:

• get chatGPT to write a story about a 9yo boy in the Zelda/pokemon/minecraft/whatever he’s into this week universe. Story should be 10 chapters of about 500 words long. Keep vocab and layout suitable for a 9yo struggling with dyslexia. Include comprehension questions at the end of each chapter
• read 1 chapter a day with him, get him to answer the questions at the end of the chapter to check for comprehension, take note of the words he struggles with
• tell chat where he struggled and ask it identifies what rules he’s struggling with (eg first read he struggles with ‘igh’ and ‘silent e’ rules to name a few)
• find lessons on these rules, eg mr spelling on YouTube, UFLI lessons, etc. practice these rules with my son
• ask chat to write a new story, and to make sure there is lots of opportunities to practice these rules rules he’s struggling with

Rinse and repeat while we wait for formal dyslexia support. I’ll note here he already gets support in school but it’s around movement breaks and regulation, and lots of reading support but the missing piece is those lessons need to be fit for addressing his dyslexia.

Does this strategy seem like it will halo him, or am I just kidding myself?

Our daughter has made a lot of progress in the past year and has gone from going straight to meltdown mode when overwhelmed, to seizing up, then making an elaborate demand befofe she’ll snap out of it.

Eg today I brought the kids to the playground and the beach while my wife finished packing for our holiday. My daughter was having a great time but was told ‘no’ three times in just a few minutes (‘no you can’t walk from playground to beach in bare feet it’s not safe for your feet’, ‘no you can’t go in the water past your knees you’re not in swim gear’, ‘no we can’t extend out holiday past 10 days because mum and dad need to go back to work’).

This last one pushed her over the edge and she just seized up, refusing to talk or move as she processed everything (to her credit a year ago she would have melted down after the first ‘no’ so she’s making progress).

Then it was time to leave and she was still processing. I said we need to move because we have more holiday prep jobs to do, but she still refused to move, then came the demand: ‘if we can’t stay on holiday more then 10 days then you have to carry me home!’.

Long story short I was carrying too much stuff to carry her as well so that was another ‘no’. Then the meltdown started and it ended with her 9yo brother having to carry half the stuff and me carrying her over my shoulder while she kicked and screamed and abused me as we’re walking home through town.

When we got home and everything calmed down my wife and I sat her down for a talk and asked why she does this ‘things aren’t going my way so I’ll just demand X’ thing so often. It’s the number 1 thing we argue about as a family, that she’ll seize up on the way to school or in the cinema or in a restaurant at the slightest disappointment and when she’s told ‘no you can’t wear your pyjamas to school tomorrow’ or whatever she just explodes. She said it’s because she just wants something to go her way.

Has anyone seen this kind of behaviour and managed to shift their kids to a different strategy? We’re happy to do what we can for her to help her regulate, but it has to be reasonable. There have been times where she’s asked to play a specific game or to have a body brush massage or whatever and we do it and everything gets defused without incident, but we have no control of whether she’ll demand something reasonable or off the wall.

We’ve tried making a ‘menu’ of things we can do for her and asking her to pick, but she still sees this as us controlling her and restricting her choices so usually rejects our suggestions, even when they are things she loves.

For years, about once a week I’d get this popup on my phone saying something like ‘please update your password for [my email]@outlook.com. The option were either ‘ignore’ or ‘settings’. When you go to settings it was just a list of every app on the phone. I don’t use the outlook email and ignoring didn’t seem to have any consequences so I just ignore for years.

The other day I got fed up and started to check every app on my phone, and found the calendar app was flagging the outlook password had to be updated. I entered the password and turned on the toggle to use outlook on the phones mail app (where I park old unused email addresses).

That worked fine but it appears every contact I’ve added to my phone in the past 6 years has disappeared. I open what’s app and it’s just pages and pages of numbers. The contact names have all disappeared.

Why would updating the outlook password remove contacts? Is there any way to get these contacts back from iCloud backup or anything?