Hi all, I have a little sister, she's 10. We have a somewhat large age gap. I've noticed since forever now that she is extremely negative. Meaning, her thoughts and thoughts about her self especially are bad. Before you attack me and say my family would be the cause of this I will tell you that it is not, otherwise why would I be making this post? Anyway, she is extremely negative and I'm sensing that although she is quite a bright kid on the outside, she might actually have depression as this is also something that runs in the family. The main purpose of this post is to seek help on her extreme learning difficulties. I'm getting the sense that her teachers don't exactly place a lot of effort into helping her understand concepts at school and I am not blaming them since they do have possibly 25 other kids in the classroom to teach but this is incredibly impacting on her learning. She cannot cope with any sort of homework at home. Online learning has revealed to us that she stresses as much as a student in college would. She has a breakdown every time she does not have an answer - which is all the time. She refuses to 'try' to understand and flatly bursts out that she's 'dumb' and cannot equate to anything more. It's crazy. I can't tell you how much this makes me so upset and makes me also want to cry because it's hard to try to convince her and encourage her to do what she can because she will lift up a pencil and say "that's all I can do" and place it back down. If she is not supervised, she will end up playing on her iPad. She was given a task, a task that usually would be completed in an hour at school- 3 days.. and counting. She has not yet started this task and I've sat with her and given her examples but she's telling me that she's too 'dumb' to understand. One of the main things she does is GET DISTRACTED. Her attention span is crazy short. I'm really trying but I don't have any training in teaching at all, I can't teach. It's hard. I don't know who exactly to bring this up to? A doctor, the school, the teacher.. who?? I don't have much control because I am just a uni student who can barely pay to take care of myself. I really wanted to get her a private tutor who specialises in teaching kids with learning difficulties so she could get a professional to help her with her studies but as I said, I cannot afford it. ANY help is IMMENSELY appreciated so so much.
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