#differentlywired

A few weeks ago, my daughter Lena called me into the room where she was playing. “Mom, I have a worry”, she said. She looked and sounded so cute, I wanted to laugh. But I kept a straight face as I asked her to tell me more about how she was feeling.

Before Amos Cottage, this type of conversation would have never happened. When we started outpatient therapy at Amos, Lena was three and had already been dismissed from two preschools due to behavior issues. By the time she enrolled in the Therapeutic Day Program (TDP), I was close to my breaking point. I remember being asked during the intake process, “What are your child’s best qualities?” and Lena’s therapist telling me how many parents she’d seen struggle to answer that question.

I was struggling too – I missed the sweet, happy little girl I knew still existed behind Lena’s impulsiveness and aggression. The staff at Amos Cottage and Lena’s doctors helped me to decode her behavior and to understand that mental illness in a child can look totally different than it does in an adult.

Most of Lena’s symptoms point to disruptive mood dysregulation disorder but like many of the kids at Amos Cottage, she doesn’t have just one issue. She has a complex combination of mental health issues and addressing them has been a process of trial and error, one that we couldn’t have gone through without the patience and kindness of the TDP staff.

With their help, Lena has developed valuable coping mechanisms to help her little brain and body deal with the big internal problems she’s facing. Our family has also learned how to better communicate with Lena and to discipline her in ways that are actually effective.

The popular belief is that kids who have problems at school and/or behavioral challenges must come from broken homes or parents that are too scared to discipline their children. When, in fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth in many cases. Mental illness is just that - it’s an illness.