I’m sure I mentioned before that our boy child is not the brightest spark and after much persuasion we have finally managed to make some headway in getting him assessed.

It seems he has a mental age of 8 and an IQ of 60, (bear with me, it’s a long list) Frontal Lobe Damage, Learning Difficulties, ADHD and is borderline Autistic, it’s no wonder he’s not top of the class at school.

When you know all the things that are wrong with him it’s surprising he can function at all and it’s even more surprising that all the time we insisted to the school that he wasn’t the full shilling, they persisted with their opinion that there was nothing wrong.

We’ve seen that many councilors lately I’m loosing track as to which one is which and what their purpose is, let alone which of us is actually being counciled.

The counseling does help as it’s the only time the boy opens up, or at least attempts to do so, the world must be quite a confusing place for him.

Obviously with the ADHD you can see when he drifts off and is not with you and you call his name and he comes back, but the worrying aspect is his description of when he’s drifted off.

One example was at school in DT, what we in the old school used to call Woodwork and Metalwork, he described drifting off and when he came back he had damaged the bench with a drill.

Now maybe I’m being overly dramatic but I’m hoping that sometime in the future he doesn’t find himself, (having just returned from drifting off), holding a blood stained kitchen knife and wondering where the rest of us have gone to.

Disciplining children is a new experience for me, I used to use the old school method, the same method used to communicate with foreigners; you say what is necessary in a raised voice with perfect English pronunciation and that used to get the job done.

Apparently this method of child rearing and for that matter, communicating with foreigners has been superceded by a more considered approach, and one which I embrace wholeheartedly; apparently foreigners actually expect to be spoken to in their own language nowadays.

At school it has now got to a point where the Peter Principle is having an effect, ie; the boy has risen to his level of incompetence.

He is in year 10, higher tier doing GCSE except Maths where he is in the Foundation class, this may mean something to my younger readers but it’s all Greek to me.

I was extremely lucky when I was young and had the benefit of an excellent school, but as far as I recollect we just had classes and some children were clever and some not so clever, which left everyone else somewhere in the middle, it was so much easier in the old days!

It seems quite extraordinary that the school would have him in the higher class when he is so obviously completely out of his depth and even he has realised he’s not going to get to University all we have to do now is get him in the right class and hope he can scrape some sort of qualification.

I believe the wife knows someone who is a supermarket manager so perhaps he could employ our boy to stack shelves and who knows, from little acorns!

It is some time since this was first written perhaps in retrospect slightly too tongue in cheek for I have to report that our ugly duckling has developed into fine swan in many ways and has now left home and is fending for himself working as a graphic designer.

Personally I was delighted when he decided not to go to University as you see so many young people saddled with enormous debt and a qualification that isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

Our boy always had a bent for the artistic side of things and it has proved to be his forte having taken a job which was part of a apprenticeship he has now progressed to another firm and is doing very well and luckily is not saddled with debt.

All I can say is bravo and well done.