Homework or Second Job

If the emotional toll of having a kid in wilderness therapy isn't enough, the paperwork involved is like having a second job. There is so much and it takes so much time. When I get home from my job, I have homework, just like college or high school, except I don't get off of work at three in the afternoon. It is exhausting.

I have a friend who was on the PTSA Board with me a few years ago. She was a single mom with a high skilled but low paying job. Think something like social work. She worked with low income students. She said while there are lots of scholarships for summer camps and after school activities for these families, the volume of paperwork was a major hurdle these parents had to overcome to access these programs. Imagine not speaking much English, holding two jobs, and having three kids. There were pages and pages these families had to fill out to prove they were broke.

My friend Sarah has a son with profound autism. He is turning eighteen soon and she needs to transition him from being a child with a major disability to an adult with a major disability. She has to work numerous government agencies to get her son the support he will need. Sarah is super smart, college educated, and can afford to be a stay-at-home mom, which is good because managing all of this for her son is an unpaid part-time job. She was talking about the pages and pages of forms she had to fill out to prove her son was disabled.

(You can see where this is going.)

With the Boy, we had to fill out the paperwork to apply for the Education Consultant, the woman whose firms serves a a matchmaker for kids and programs. Then we had to apply directly to the selected wilderness therapy program, even though the Education Consultant had 97% got the Boy a spot in the program. The program might have had a few extra questions not covered by the EC, so we had to fill out almost exactly--but not identical questions. Once he got in, we had to fill out enrollment forms, which had different questions, like details about his meds. Then there are health insurance forms and the forms for the psych evaluation. We are paying for the privilege of filling out mounds of paperwork to prove our son is depressed and anxious.

Why? Why does our society place this huge administrative and bureaucratic burden on families who have the most to take of at home? The upside of this is at least we are empty nesters and don't have other kids to take of right now. Some families have two or more kids at home that need attention. I can barely keep up. How do they?