In previous posts I have introduced some of our children with great processing skills. I just finished a Skype evaluation and wanted to show everyone once again what great potential our children have and to encourage all of you parents and professionals to raise your expectations.

I would like to introduce you to another of our NACD kids, little Facundo from Uruguay. Facundo has Down Syndrome, but he and his family are not letting it slow him down. Facundo’s parents have been doing a great job with this terrific little guy who just turned three. As you can see from the video, Facundo is processing four pieces in a sequence better than most of his typical peers and doing it in English, which he has just begun learning.

To put this in perspective most typical children do not have this level of processing ability until they are four going on five years old. Facundo did it while hearing/processing the sequence in English—a foreign language for him. He then mentally translates each word one at a time to Spanish to locate it, then point to it, then translate the name back to English to name it, then remember the sequence in English, picks out the next word in English, translates it to Spanish, finds it—and so on and so forth—doing that whole process four times. If you’re not impressed, you should be—this is one very smart boy!

Potential has a lot to do with a vision. As parents and as professionals if we do not have a vision for our child that is high, the odds are that we are never going to help them achieve anything close to their innate potential. This is a universal truth, whether we have a typical child or a child with some issues. We need to raise the bar, believe that all of our children have fantastic potentials and work to provide them with the opportunities needed to achieve that potential.

You start with a vision.

Bob