• On the Run With Special Olympics
• The Patient Is Fine, But the Fit Is Funny
• Wordless Wednesday: Chalk Talk
• Twenty Things I Learned Reading Children's Fiction
• Opening Locks and Lockers

• Good Reading From the Carnival of Family Life
• Texting Teens to Remember Their Meds
• Understanding Medical Consequences and Medical Force
• In the Forum: What Am I Dealing With?

• Audacity
• Autism Games
• Stuffed With Hugs
• Children's Book Week
• Alert Program Games

1. Activity: Newspaper Hut
2. Kids' Site: Leading to Reading
3. Shopping: Just Tomatoes, Etc.
4. Humor: "Good-Bye Hawaii"
5. Just for Fun: Sketchfu

Hey, what happened to the book review that usually pops up in this space late on Fridays? It's chugging on over to Mondays, to start our week with a good read instead of our weekend. The inaugural review for the Monday Book Look will be Talking Back to OCD, a program of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for kids with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Since it's all about changing routines, it seems appropriate, no?

Getting your child dressed is one of those things that can so easily turn into a power struggle. Sometimes, kids are just testing, and you need to follow through on your demands -- but sometimes, there may be a problem like Dysfunction of Sensory Integration driving those clothing preferences, and then, overpowering your child's resistance to certain garments can cause even more problems. That's the struggle shared by a poster on the Parenting Special Needs Forum.

Writes Christian: "My daughter turned 2 in Jan. About a year ago we noticed her having a hard time dealing with the belt in her car seat and problems with pants and certain shirts. When I would put her pants on ... esp. jeans ... she would cry and pitch a fit saying 'they hurt ... please can I wear something else.' Well I didn't know if we were dealing with a temper tantrum or if something was wrong with her. I finally got rid of her jeans and she wore pants with elastic waist bands. Even then she would sometimes struggle with those. ... She can't stand to change out of her pajamas. She would wear them all day if she could. When we do change into our clothes for the day it usually ends up with me and her fighting over what she will wear. Of course, I make her wear what I have picked out, because i don't want her to think that she is the boss. I struggle to put her clothes on and she begins her fight. ... The more it goes on, the more I feel something's not right. I looked up Sensory Integration tonight and I am wondering if she might have that. If this looks familiar to anyone, please let me know. Is this a behavioral problem or a sensory problem???"

It sure looks like it could be a sensory integration problem to me. What do you think? Visit the forum, and join the conversation.

The Alert Program is a system for helping children manage their sensory integration needs by asking "How does your engine run?" and providing strategies for speeding up or slowing down.

Parents can learn about the program through an introductory booklet and leader's guide, but for kids, sometimes fun activities work better than words on a page for getting the message through.

That's where these two new games on the Alert Program site come in. "Alert: Go Fish!" and "Alert Bingo" help kids recognize different states of alertness and different sensory strategies and learn about self-regulation while playing.

The games cost $8 for "Alert: Go Fish!" and $10 for "Alert Bingo," and after paying you can download everything you need to print and play -- no waiting for the postman to drop it off. There are detailed audio instructions to help you with the printing.

With a long Memorial Day weekend and a longer summer vacation coming up quickly, this might be a good time to learn more about the Alert Program yourself and help your kids have some fun with it.

Looking for something new to add to your bag of tricks, that needs-to-be-bottomless collection of toys and trinkets and things to occupy children during times of great boredom? Try tossing a lock into the mix.

Learning to work a combination is a good fine-motor and motor-planning exercise for kids, and will ensure that when the time comes to worry about hall lockers and gym lockers in middle school and high school, your student will be ready.

One type of lock kids might particularly enjoy toying with are word-based locks like the ones at right from Wordlock. Your child can pick a word to serve as the combination, and then practice getting it right.

If the time has already come for your youngster to do locks at school, read Opening Locks and Lockers for some additional tips on teaching tumbler turning.

I've written before about the dilemma of families of young cancer patients who disagree with doctors and find their rights overruled. There have been a number of stories lately about parents losing custody or being threatened with it for siding with their kids over alternative treatments or a desire to give up after a long hard fight.

There's always a question of whether children can really understand the choices they're making and the consequences thereof. I've generally felt that the wishes of parents and kids should be respected -- at least to the point of discussion and consideration, rather than knee-jerk custody seizure.

A recent story, though, had a particularly heart-wrenching twist. The Globe and Mail report, which I originally saw linked in a ParentDish post, seems to tell a tale much like the others, of a parent losing custody for supporting an 11-year-old cancer patient's desire to pursue alternative treatments instead of continuing chemotherapy. But there, way at the end of the article, is a sentence that sure upped the degree of difficulty on the whole thing.

This particular young cancer patient also has fetal alcohol syndrome.

I have a 15-year-old who is on the fetal alcohol spectrum, and he sure as heck would not be able to make a life and death decision like that. One of the hallmarks of FASD is an inability to understand cause and effect, or to fully see the consequences of actions. I have no doubt that my son, if put in the terrible position of needing painful and debilitating treatments, would be enormously in favor of discontinuing them. Being incapacitated and restrained and unable to pursue his normal routine would be excruciating for him. And for me, to force him. Unimaginable.

But could he make a decision, truly understanding that it might mean the end of his life? No. No way.

I surely sympathize with this family. What a terrible position to be in. I sympathize not at all with the authorities whose answer has been to seize custody and make this child go through the ordeal without the people who love him. That sort of disruption is devastating to any child, but a child with FASD, who so desperately needs stability and routine, would be entirely unable to understand or withstand it.

Surely, there has to be a better way for authorities to handle these situations. They may consider the abandonment of life-saving treatment to be child neglect, but they're overlooking the fact that wresting children from loving parents can look a lot like child abuse. Abuse of power, for sure.

There are also resources here to enrich your child's reading experience. Click on the "For Teachers, Librarians and Booksellers" tab to find printable puzzles and games, or download the PDF of this year's official bookmark, which also includes a coloring sheet and paper doll.

Elizabeth Kennedy, About.com's guide to Children's Books, reminds us that it is both Children's Book Week and Reading Is Fun Week, and that's got me thinking about the many, many children's books I've read with my reluctant readers, and how sometimes that reading is not so fun at all.

I get that books for children or teens are written to help kids work their issues out, and that's why parents in these plots are so often part of the problem. We're not the target audience, us moms and dads who have to read with our reading-challenged offspring, and so we should just pass the words through without taking them too much to heart.

That's easier said than done, though, isn't it? Am I the only one who has trouble getting through these tales of school bullies, friendship traumas, teacher oppression, and sibling strife without wanting to grab those fictional parents by the lapels and yell, "Hey, pay attention! Something's going on with your kid!"?

Even when I like the parents, and they're trying hard, these books can be heart-wrenching. My shoulders sag a little each time Marty's dad in the Shiloh trilogy gets the weight of the world dumped on him, courtesy of his good-hearted, right-thinking, not-well-enough-alone-leaving son. That man needs a vacation, and so do I after I've read those books.

Still, just as our kids are supposed to learn from the fictional struggles of their peers, I suppose we can do the same. Here are twenty bits of parenting wisdom I've gained from children's books:

1. Listen when your child talks.
2. Listen when your child doesn't talk.
3. If your child doesn't want to talk about it, you do.
4. Never leave your child unsupervised.
5. If you wonder whether school is a living hell for your child, the answer is yes.
6. Check every hiding place in your house regularly.
7. Having a personal life of your own will cause you to neglect your child.
8. Not having a personal life of your own will cause you to smother your child.
9. If your child is sneaking food from the table, it's probably not to have a snack later.
10. Any surprise you get for your child will always be a letdown.
11. Don't take a teacher's or a principal's word on what's going on at school.
12. Don't take your child's word, though, either.
13. Or the word of your child's friends, or alleged friends, or siblings.
14. Might want to drive by the school at recess time now and then to see what goes on in that playground.
15. If your kids come in with ashes from Mount Vesuvius in their hair, don't believe them when they say they were just playing in some treehouse in the woods.
16. Get to know your children's friends. Run background checks, if necessary.
17. Never assume that because you told your child he couldn't have a pet, he doesn't have a pet.
18. Show up at your child's sporting events, talent shows, award ceremonies, and other important occasions. And not at the last minute, either.
19. There is one child at whose house you must never let your child stay overnight. You know which one, right?
20. The odds of you doing or saying the wrong thing are very high. But you've got to do and say stuff anyway.

Add your own lessons learned in the comments. And for more on children and reading, check out these articles:

• If Your Kid Hates Harry Potter
• Luring Reluctant Readers With Nonfiction
• Books on Reading
• Reading Sites of the Day

A scene from Camp Mom.
(Photo by Terri Mauro)

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