I have been told that “life gets easier the older they get!” That this is only a stage that every kid goes through and that it will pass and “life will be easier!” The older my kids get the further from the truth that this sounds to me now. Each stage of life presents itself to a new problem that kids are faced with and we as parents have to know how to help our kids through these problems. YM oldest kids is 11 years old, 5^th grade and has discovered girls. He came home and told me that he and his “girlfriend” were not in the same class this school year and that they were not “going out” anymore. Whatever “going out” means in the 5^th grade, they were not able to speak to each other as much and he wanted to know if he could like another girl while he still likes the girl in the other class……I said of course you should just be FRIENDS with everyone! It seems like everything is happening sooner for kids these days.  Let’s just back up to a year and a half ago, when I caught my precious baby, blonde hair blue eyed boy looking at adult videos on his tablet! Let’s just say that I was shocked and appalled by the stuff that I had seen and how I cannot believe that he would be able to watch it and not get grossed out. I do monitor what they are watching but I had turned his controls off because he had needed to do something for school and needed to use web sites that my blocks would not allow him to use anyway so I had to talk to him about the things that I saw and then about what he saw and talk about awkward and mortifying for the both of us! I did my very best to answer all of his questions. I managed to satisfy his wants to know about that genre of life and told him the bare minimum that I could and dress it to where it wasn’t as gory and raw as what I had seen he had watched so that was the end of that. At that moment, I had longed for the days of Handy Manny, Mickey Mouse Club House and for the days of simplicity. This prepubescent tween, they call them now, is becoming intrigued by things that I had only wished would never come. Next school year, he will be in the 6^th grade, which is Junior High, so I am sure there will be much more difficult roads ahead. One thing that gets me is bullying. My kids are a big boned kid and he is a little on the heavy side. He has been getting bullied recently on the flag football team he has been playing on.  I confronted the coach about it because my son did not want to play in his final season. I always tell my kids that if someone is bullying you it’s because there is something about themselves that they do not like. So they are taking their feelings of self-doubt onto you. I just hope to get him through the rest of his school life in one piece. Kids are so cruel these days. I mean there are so many more ways to get to kids to make fun of, bully and torment one another with all of the social media and phones and all of that. I feel that it will only get worse from this point forward.

            My 7-year-old daughter was born and had a beautiful head of dark brown hair.  She is a kind hearted, sensitive little girl. Always giving and willing to help when someone is needing it. She had such a hard time when she was an infant, the first month of her life was so difficult for her and I. We restarted with the no sleep and constant crying and constant vomiting after each bottle. I had taken her to the doctor several times and no one could figure out why she was crying and unable to hold anything down. I started her with some colic treatment and that did not help us so I went back to the pediatrician one day and I was not going to leave until they helped me and told me something that they had not told me yet. I had a nurse practitioner see her that we hadn’t seen before and she diagnosed her with severe acid reflux and told us to change her formula to a soy based formula and gave us medication to give her prior to feedings and that seemed to help her a lot. She was able to have her formula and then start sleeping and getting the rest that had been missing out on.

            This was a blessing for me because when we were in the hospital after she was born, she was constantly crying there and the hospital I had her in would not take the babies to the nursery, they said that moms need to start the bonding process immediately! My response at the time was, I have 18 years to bond with her and you can’t give me 18 minutes to catch a quick nap after being in labor all night and her poor crying that she had been doing since she was born???!!!!When she was 4 months old, I had to go back to work and like all mothers do when they return to work, I felt like I needed to be home with her, but I had to make the money at the time, my husband was trying to start his business at that time and he had been there for me through school and everything, so it was the right thing to do at the time. Fast forward to when she turned 3 years old, I had enrolled in preschool to get her some socialization with other children because until this time she had only been around adults unlike my oldest who had made playmates when he was younger because we lived in a community where there a lot of kids for him to play with. She did not take well to being in the preschool. It was the same school that my oldest had gone to and the teachers and everyone loved them and always treats my kids like they were their own. She went to preschool for almost 2 years before she started kindergarten. In this time period, I had to take her out to give her a break because she just had so much anxiety. I am sure that I will get a lot of judgement on this but, I had to do what I thought was best for her at the time. I think, as mothers, that is all we ever try to do. Whether it be right or wrong we are always learning to be the best we can be as parent to ensure our kids turn out to be respectful, decent human beings. She went back into preschool before she started kindergarten to help her to adjust a little better. It helped a little bit, we made it through the end of the year and she finally could just walk into her classroom and not cry so I thought we were successful at the time. Then Kindergarten comes and it is the same thing as preschool.

            She just starts crying and crying and every day that I had to drop her off she would cry and the teacher and I had really good communication at this time and I would ask her if she would cry all day or if she would stop and the teacher would inform me that she would stop and go about her day and do the normal school stuff. Like I have said, really, does it really get easier the older they get?!  I feel like it is just not getting any easier.

            The end of her kindergarten year, I had noticed that her eye brows were gone and I asked her if she had shaved them off. Previous week she had cut a huge chunk of hair out of the back of her hair. I know, this only because I found the remnants of her hair under my coffee table where she quietly swept it under to hide it from me! I laughed and said why did you do this to your hair! So as you can understand why at this point I would assume that she had shaved her eyes brows off because she had recently done this to her hair. I waited and waited for them to grow back and then I start to notice that her hair on the top of her head is thinning out. So I take her to the doctor for her yearly check-up and they tell me that she has Alopecia Areata, which is an autoimmune disorder where the body attacks the hair follicles. So here we go, it’s not getting any easier at this point. I am absolutely terrified because I do not know what this is and what is going to happen and what we have in front of us. We go to the dermatologist and they say that she may or may lose all of her hair and it may or may not grow back. We start on some topical creams and some other medication which seems to start helping and her hair starts to grow back in the patches that had fallen out already. I thought we were on the mend at this point and within the next week another patch had fallen out. On the side of her head this time. Well, at this point we are feeling defeated. The creams aren’t working and the dermatologist only other recommendation at this point is to try oral steroids and steroid injections. These recommendations are coming with a we are not sure that it will help her hair stop from falling out or grow back. Which, as a nurse and a mom, I know the side effects of these medications and without a 100% guarantee, I was not sure if I want to put her through this. I know that it would not just be one shot of steroids it would be multiple shots.

            Everything else in her lab work and everything checked out to be just fine. We took her to naturopathic physicians put her on supplements and changed her diet to a gluten free, dairy free, etc. to see if that was going to help and it didn’t either. She completely lost her hair in the beginning of her first grade year and she started getting made fun of school and retaliating against other kids that were making fun of her. I got a call from the principle and she had been caught on video camera retaliating against one of the kids that were making fun of her. I had a long talk with the principle and told him that there needed to be some education within the classroom about what Alopecia is and that it is not a contagious disease so that kids wouldn’t be afraid of her and she could go about her business and continue on through school.

            So refer back to preschool, the crying, this was still going on when I dropped her off at school. EVERY SINGLE DAY! My heart was absolutely broken for her and the not knowing about what was going on with her medically. I decided to take her out and homeschool her. Which I am sure I will be judged tremendously, but that is what I felt was best for her. She has since completely lost all of her hair it is now Alopecia Universalis.

            I have been to many different foundations and web sites to get support and information about this disease and have learned a lot about what to expect and what to do. I think that soon she will need to be enrolled back into school because it is not good for her to seclude herself because of this disorder.

            My 3-year-old has at the same time developed asthma that comes with any cold or allergy attack that he may come in contact with! So there have been many trips to the Doctor for steroids shots and we have used the nebulizer and inhaler like it’s part of a daily routine! So life just isn’t getting any easier the older they get. He is supposed to start preschool in August! So please stay tuned for the summer adventures we will have!

            Again, I am not finding where it is getting any easier to raise these kids the older they get. It comes with its own challenges at an older ages and they get more and more complex. We as parents have to shift our focus from infant and toddler stages to more issues and have to know how to cope with these problems as they come because our kids look to us for comfort and guidance.