Dear Katie,
You have given your children love and support since before they were born. You have done NOTHING to warrant any kind of guilt inflicted upon yourself. Stomp that feeling into the dirt and keep doing what you were already doing.
Love, Cathy

When we first become parents, we have prepared by reading 5 dozen books on parenting that over-analyze and obsess about every detail of infancy and toddler-hood. The instructions for preschool and beyond are simply, “send them to school.” Instincts tell us to help with homework, volunteer to run the copy machine for the teacher twice a year and say yes to whatever the PTA tells you to do. Everything else is on-the-job learning. Nobody warns you that your child might learn differently. You have probably unconsciously adapted your parenting style to accommodate your child’s needs all along. It can still be a complete shock to the system when you suddenly have a light bulb click over your head as you realize that there is actually something going on that’s not “he just needs to apply himself.” Parents are not taught to know about learning differences. You know who is? Teachers. I promise you without a shadow of a doubt that there were some teachers who just knew that your child needed to be taught differently. You know what they can do with that knowledge? Nothing. Teachers are trapped in a bureaucracy that weighs on their talents like a ton of bricks. They can’t identify anything for fear that the school will be made accountable for some new expense. They can’t change the curriculum that they planned without someone questioning their decision to do so. They are so over-scheduled that the school year is over before they can sneak in adaptations that could help. School administration needs to change. NCLB and IDEA need to be rewritten to stop asking schools to pay for things that should be billed as medical expenses. An uninsured child in the hospital can be fast tracked onto TennCare. Schools need that kind of power to get help for students. More than anything, teachers need to be given more freedom to help their students. Parents and teachers have too much work to do to get mired in unwarranted guilt. Politicians need to stop wasting time and focus on making a difference. Our children can’t wait.