When it comes to either beginning new or making significant changes to a medication in regards to our kids, there’s always one rule that we follow whenever it’s possible. My wife and I never like to make changes to medications during the school week. There are some times when it doesn’t matter or it’s medically necessary to begin a medication during the week, but for the most part we like to wait.

The reason for this is very simple.

We take medicating our kids very seriously and when it’s deemed necessary to put one of our kids on a medication, we want to insure that they don’t experience any side effects. In order to do that, we need to monitor them closely for changes.

Again, I’m talking about medications that have a potential for side effects. For example, Elliott is going to be starting Prozac and while it’s a low dose, we’re waiting until after school on Friday to do this.

We never want to send our kids anywhere, on any medication that we don’t have confidence in. We don’t want to send him to school after taking his first dose because we don’t know how he’s going to react to it. It’s not his teachers job, nor are they trained to watch out for dangerous side effects of medications like Prozac.

If one of our kids needed antibiotics for something, that would be one thing because we know how they react and assuming they aren’t contagious, I’ll walk them into the school and hand deliver them to their teachers.

In my family, we deal with a great many physical and emotional health issues that require a great deal of medication. We’ve had an experience where starting a new medication almost killed Gavin. It was terrifying and he spent the better part of a week at the Cleveland Clinic being treated and thankfully, recovering.

People ask me all the time about medicating their kids for the first time. I’m happy to share our personal experience with a particular medication, with the understanding that it’s not medical advice and everyone can react differently. Should they choose to use a medication, these are some things that we do when beginning a new medication.

I hope this helps someone.