Special Needs

What a phrase and yet there is so much meaning behind it. There is fear, anger, sadness, jelousy. Because of the stigma placed on Special Needs kids there is an attempt to hide and shield people from the diagnosis. This is spoken of as "I dont want my son/daughter to be judged by the alphabet soup." or "I want my child to be who they will be." What I have recently realized is by trying to shield my son from the negative connotations that come with his diagnosis, I may have prevented him from having some of the positive ones.
Frog was diagnosed ADHD in Kindergarten. We have since then worked at keeping his diagnosis quiet. We told the bare minimum number of people to help Frog, but we did not announce it to the world. You see Frog went to a small charter school that only has one class per grade. This was a great school, but it led to the issue if Frog had problems in class, there was no other class to move him to. I figured if we told everyone about his diagnosis, Frog would be teased more about it and he had a hard enough time fitting in to add to it with something like this. I also was trying to avoid those that are of the mind that he is over diagnosed and he is just a bad boy that I am making excuses for. I am coming to realize this probably was not the best approach. Frog still wasn't accepted in his class. He still faced a stigma and we lost the oportunity to train young minds.
Looking back and hindsight being 20/20, I am realizing I should have embraced this as a teaching oportunity. I had the chance to impact the minds of other peoples children and work on teaching acceptance. To teach these impressable young minds that people are different, but that doesnt make them bad. It makes them different. I missed the chance to help my child become a voice of his own to other students up till now. These children are growing up. They are getting to the age where different is no longer acceptable. Because of this, the ability to teach them about accepting differences in people is dwindling.
We have recently changed schools because Frog was so bullied it was not possable for him to be in school without severe anxiety. We are starting anew. And with the new start, hopefully I can squeeze a few years out of the children and teach them about how just because something isn't the same, it is still beautiful.