Thank you for writing about your beautiful son. My boyfriend has tics and we have never discussed it. I was not quite sure what it was at first but thru research online I figured it out. I have never brought it up and don't know how. It does not effect how much I love him but I am concerned about getting pregnant. I am convinced that his mother has tics also and therefore my (unborn) could possibly too. Do you have a family history of ts?

Hello.
I guess this a really tough question, isn't it?
My older brother has TS. My 8 yr old son has TS. I've always known my brother had it but until my son's appeared I admit I never knew it was genetic.

I don't think there is anything in this world that ever would have put me off having kids. Nothing. I was born to be mother, can't imagine not being one.

I know that even with the genetic info I would still have had my 5 kids.

Love goes way beyond any tics... and beyond many other things. And ofcourse there is nothing to say your child will have tics.

There are 4 brothers and me in my family, only one brother has it. I have 2 sons and 3 daughters, and only youngest son has it.

Hope this helps.

Lyn

My son was diagnosed with TS a year ago and I was devastated. He is almost 7 and the tics are about the same. We limit his sugar intake but have not changed his diet. He was also diagnosed with ADHD and has been getting in trouble at school a lot more lately. My question is was your son diagnosed with ADHD along with TS? If so, did the diet help?

My boyfriend has TS, and as far as I can tell, it is almost certain that any child of his will have it also. However, it really isn't that bad. A child's life doesn't have to be hell just because he has TS. My boyfriend absolutely does not want children, because, as he puts it (and it makes me want to slap him), they will "be fucked up like him". His tics are definitely noticable, but they aren't horrible. The only vocal tic he ever had, was he said he used to "squeak". I want children someday - not now - but he hates the idea that they will have TS. I finally found out a few weeks ago, why that is.
He used to go to a school for children with special needs, and I think he assumes his kid will have to, also. He doesn't want his kid to have a childhood like his, "where the teachers push you to the ground if they don't like something you did, putting your arms behind your back until you scream".
I can understand not wanting any child to go through that, that is horrible. But public schools are fine for kids with most types of TS- his sister goes to public school, and is fine. She's twelve, and her tics are more severe at this point than his. (They seem to grow less severe with age, at least in his family).
He also asked me, in maybe the first week of our relationship, if his Tourettes bothered me. Honestly... he had told me before we even met that he had Tourettes, but until that point, I had forgotten. After that, I noticed the tics, but before he said anything, I hadn't. I had seen him for several hours on 3 seperate occasions prior to that.
I think his Tourette's bothers him more than he will admit, ever...
Is there any way I can help boost his confidence, get him to stop feeling "fu**ed up" because of it?
Because he isn't effed up... Hell, I sort of like his tics... in the way you might like someones smile, or laugh- its something unique to him, that no other guy (that I know) has. It's another thing that makes him recognizable, like his sarcasm or his birth mark...

my son is almost 3 and i fear that he may have ts. My dad has many tics, his brother had a few and my cousin has OCD. My brother and i have anxiety/ocd. My sister is ok. My husband has chronic tics, probably ts, he says NO WAY. But no one really notices them. I do one i started looking up ts.

My son started with eye blinking and wiping his face at 2. I just had my daughter and he is an anxious kid. The tics went away after a week. Every so often he blinks for a day or two and now he is wiping his face a lot and now started to kinda grunt or moan for the past few days. On most days, he is fine.

I am so stressed over this and my husband thinks i am nuts. The doctors wont hear me because they think he is too young. They are labeling it a transcient tic disorder. I know he will get a ts diagnosis oneday and i am petrified. I am also worried about my daughter and whether she will get it. But neither me or my siblings got it. Just anxiety/ocd which has been ok to deal with. No one would ever know except my husband.

I obssess over his new quirks or habits everyday. Not knowing if they are tics or not. Sometimes his new things only last a day or a few days. I am so confused. I am glad i found this website. It makes me feel a little better.

Hi Anonymous 2 - I think you should check out ACN.com and go to the Tourettes section. Several people are adults with TS and they can tell you how they did it. I'm just mothering a six year old so I'm not as much support as I would like to be. I also think the key lies in your bf's hands - what is HE doing about it?

Thoughts?

hi ,
my daughter is 8 years old , over a year ago she started blinking, at times quite a lot, it lasted less then a year. After a short break she started clearing her voice , well I thought she just picked up another habit . After about 2 months I lost my patience and took her to the doctor , thinking there was something wrong with her throut, but I was assured there is nothing to worry about. The strange thing was , that the very next day she started twitching , bringing her shoulder and neck together. This has been happening for the last 3 weeks . She also picked up few other things , she started touching things - OCD? I've cried so much the last couple of weeks, just can't get my head around it. I've been reading everything and anything about it .
Today I went to the doctor , somehow explained everything whats been happening through my sobbing , and he is reffering us to childrens neurologist . I've also asked him about food allergies , magnesium supplements .... , he just politely dismissed it .
I feel so much sadness right now !!!!!!!!!

My husband has mild TS. No one else in his family has it. We have a two year old son and because my husband has TS, I'm constantly looking for signs of TS in our son. I never noticed any facial tics in our son. When he gets excited, he sort of twitches his arms and moves fingers in a certain way. I'm just wondering for those mothers with children of TS, when did they start noticing signs of tics or TS? What types of tics did your child start doing? Am I just being so paranoid?

Magneisum Calm helps with TS

Your website has helped me feel a bit better after reading through it today, thank you. My daughter was just diag. with ts two weeks ago and I must say I feel so sad every day. I have so many questions and am now looking for a different doctor in our area who can spend a little more time with us. The nurse practitioner who gave a the diag. was only with us for about 20min and gave us the word and sent us packing. Not even sure she falls into the ts catagory or chronic tic disorder. It just feels good knowing there are others that know what I'm going through and that maybe I will feel better so I can focus on her more and more.

2 year old son has had tics for nearly a year has severe head and neck twitching eye blinking arm movements and grimacing and acually laughing while doing the movement and at one stage was crying with pains in his neck had him back to doc 6 months ago did not do anything do i have to watch him in so much pain .i have 3 children aged 15 10 and 2 who all had these tics up to aged ten or eleven but not as bad as my two year old has them have never gotton any help from anyone also my 10 year old has noonan syndrome which makes it harder should i demand he be seen at hospital or just leave it what should i do

TS is a genetic disease,autosomal dominant. That means a child of a parent with TS has a 50% chance of having it. The severity and symptoms may be different. Also, OCD and TS are on the same gene only with different manifestation. Therefore, the child of someone with OCD has a 50% chance of having OCD or tourettes or both.

Tracy and Lina...I have read all of the postings and identify mostly with you two, although my story differs a bit. I feel so much sadness too. I feel like I am in a nightmare. I took domperidone to help with breastfeeding for many months, and I was told that it was totally safe. Well, as it turns out, domperidone does something to the dopamine, and can cause extrapyramidal symptoms, such as the ones in ts. He would hum, shrug a little, sometimes spit, sometimes grunt, and twitch in his sleep. I noticed that my son started with little things, and similar to the mom who posts this thing, I used to believe that I could control it through diet, like taking out sugar and milk products, and airing out the house when new furniture came. Everything was great. Life was normal, or so I thought. I had allowed him to have pizza on pizza days at school for a whole month, and he stayed up late to perform at some of his performances. Anyways, my 7 year old son started getting sick, on and off right after that, and eventually I gave him some over the counter cold medicine that had a decongestant in it. His nose was so stuffed up. I should have followed my instinct and just let him deal with the stuffy nose at night, rather than introducing some chemical. I purposely went to the store to purchase it. Huge mistake. Boom...he started doing things like turning his head from side to side repeatedly, then at night when I read him stories he would start rolling his eyes and stretching his mouth, then he started with the shoulder shrugs continuously. Oh my God. Life as I knew it had changed. Who was this child? We went to see a play, and you know what, it was the worse time of my life. My son turned his head from side to side the whole time...the whole hour! I was devestated. I wanted to go home. I told him that everything was ok, it was just a play, and he said that he knew that. I hated being there. Just before going, he had some ginger cookies from whole foods and a green drink from whole foods. I thought that it might be the sugar. I threw out the package because I was so shocked by what I saw from him. He enjoyed the play so much. My child has changed. All of the things that I used to do to minimize stuff no longer worked....plus...he was now exhibiting things worse than before. It looks like the stressors that he experienced just before he got sick (presentations etc), staying up very late to do a performance, eating all that pizza (dairy) and other things that had dairy as treats, and possibly an untreated strep infection (he had strep many months before) and ... the decongestant in tylenol cold. boom. All of those previous tricks weren't helping as quickly as they did before, such as giving him camomile tea, doing the epsom salt bath, eliminating dairy again, no sugar, no food dyes, no fortified bread or cereals... I felt devestated. I prayed and continue to pray, and I search endlessly on the internet for some answers. I started giving him some magnesium, that didn't help. I asked his pediatrician about pandas, and she prescribed penicillin v, the red one. I looked it up on the internet, and it can cause some kind of movement disorder that starts with the letter m. I took him off it. She did blood work, and then went on vacation. So, I don't know. I will ask for a different prescription for something else. Are things improving? Yes... little by little. I took him out of a lot his programs, except for sports. I don't stress him out. He does epsom salt baths every night, and some mornings. I give him a lot of meat, which used to help before. I took out the gluten and corn and sugar. At school he eats cookies and freezies... they also look at the computer at school. I don't watch tv so that he won't watch tv. I noticed that the ds made things worse, so we don't do that either. No wii either. Sometimes he gets camomile tea. I continue to have hope. I love that this forum exists. Thanks for letting me vent.

I think that I have some ocd qualities, considering that I have relentlessly searched the internet and am obsessessed about this topic.