Tag Archives: potential

What Cannot Be Understood or Solved Gets Labeled

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Labels in SchoolWe just received this from one of our NACD moms:

I wanted to share with you a jaw-dropping experience I had today:

I was having a meeting with an educational diagnostician regarding my daughter’s evaluation for next school year. I kept voicing my concern about how I didn’t think that the school district was up to date with newest research in neuroplasticity and wouldn’t provide her with the best possibilities that are available. Anyway, I must have used “neuroplasticity” 3 times in our conversation. At the end of the meeting, she said, “I’m sure that most teachers would look up any label that a child would have and make themselves familiar with that label. Now I’ve never had a student who had Neuroplasticity, but I’d be sure to look it up!” Then she asked me if I had any other questions and I said, “Nah, I think we are done.”

I’m afraid that this story typifies the current state of affairs. Training for those who work with educational and developmental problems is much more about labeling and categorizing than about addressing and fixing problems. The educational system and other disciplines that “help” us with our children and to take care of ourselves perceive that they are serving us if they can successfully give us a label. It sounds a bit better if it is called a diagnosis, but it is still a label; and once given, we are often categorized and a corresponding prognosis assigned. As this mother’s story has so well illustrated, it’s not about understanding and addressing a problem; it’s all about what you call it.

What cannot be understood or solved gets labeled, and then solving the individual’s problem often becomes less imperative, and the focus becomes how to make “appropriate” accommodations.

Psychologist: “Mrs. Smith, we have done comprehensive testing and we now understand why your son isn’t paying attention and is distractible. He has ADHD.”

Mrs. Smith: “What is ADHD?”

Psychologist: “That means he can’t pay attention and is distractible.”

Greater and greater percentages of our children are being labeled every year, and according to the professionals, they have diseases. Because they have diseases, they are all kind of the same; and because they are all kind of the same, then they need to find the cure that fits all of them; and until they find the cure, your child is essentially incurable. Having an incurable disease means that they can perhaps treat/mask the symptoms, but until the cure is found you’re kind of out of luck. Not.

What about your child being a unique human being, a person who has never existed before on the planet?

What about that thing that makes our brain development possible, and which wires each of us uniquely, and which is affected by everything we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and think? Neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is not a disease; it’s not a label. It is that thing that makes each of us who we are at this moment and which makes us a little different every millisecond. That thing that also affords us unlimited potential.

Neuroplasticity:

Understand it.
Believe it.
Take advantage of it.

Parental Lesson #1: Talk to Your Children

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Could the key to your child’s success be as simple as talking to them? Could our educational and probably cognitive decline be at least in part attributable to less and less quality time that permits parents to simply talk to their children? I believe that the foundation of cognition–the ability to think, hold pieces of information together, and manipulate information–is based on auditory processing. Decades of measuring the processing abilities in children and adults as well as developing tools to help develop processing skills has demonstrated tens of thousands of times that your complexity of thought is built upon and limited to how much auditory information you can process and manipulate. We all have the potential to do better; we all have the ability to do better; we just need the opportunity to do better.

 

Related Links:

The NACD Simply Smarter Project

Simply Smarter Kids: Memory

The Simply Smarter System: Video Teaser

 

Related Articles:

TSI – Auditory Processing: What is It?

NACD Journal – Parenting 101: A Child’s Education Begins with Educating the Parents

 

Learning Isn’t Tough

Learning isn’t tough. It actually can and should be fun and easy. It never ceases to amaze me how our schools can take learning, which can be so much fun and comes quite naturally to all of us, and make it all so very difficult, so painful, and fail so many of our children in the process.

I just saw one of our families who came out to Utah for their two “typical” girls to go skiing on the “best snow on Earth” and to get their evaluations and new programs. Both parents work full time and manage the girls and their short programs as they can. Both of the girls have been doing program since they were about two months old. The girls showed me their stuff at their evaluations, and both are doing very well; but big sister GiGi really showed off. GiGi had an auditory digit span of 5, and her reading tested out at the level of the average child in the nation in the middle of third grade. She has excellent language skills, is quite conversational, bilingual, and was skiing independently on her first day ever on the slopes. GiGi, during her little sister’s eval, sat quietly and read to herself, quite the mature young lady. All and all a great child whose little sister isn’t going to let her get too far ahead. One other rather significant piece of data in the equation is that GiGi is only three years old!

I also just received an email from Lyn Waldeck, one of our evaluators based outside of Dallas. Lyn has raised and home schooled five boys, while working with/for NACD since 1993. Lyn’s boys have all done exceptionally well, and she and all of us at NACD are very proud of all of them. Today’s news was that Grant, Lyn’s youngest, will be starting college classes this fall at fourteen! Grant attended school this year for his first and only school experience so he could get his feet wet in a classroom before taking college classes. He will be attending a really cool STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) school and will be off and running, chasing after his very successful big brothers.

We have seen many of our NACD kids enter college at fourteen and go on to have very successful college experiences and excel in their professions. Learning isn’t tough, but school often is. Someday we might succeed in fixing our very broken educational system, but in the meantime, parents, you had better take charge. Whether your child attends school or not, parents still need to assume the primary responsibility for their child’s education, and, of course, a little NACD program and guidance never hurts.

We are really proud of all of our exceptional children and their exceptional parents.

Related links:

“Raising Expectations”
NACD Guide to Child Development & Education – NACD Bookstore

Living the Dream

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I had heard about a young restaurateur who happened to have Down syndrome a few months ago, but today I was sent a link to a youtube video about this young man. Take a look:

I have imagined a “Tim’s Place” for years. A business owned by one of my grown NACD kids, a place that can take advantage of their talents, a place where they can contribute, make a difference, make a living, and spend their days doing something they can be passionate about. For a number of years I have been encouraging the parents of children with developmental issues to look toward their children’s futures and start thinking about creating a business to help take advantage of those talents, abilities, and passions. Tim is a good example. Like so many of our kids Tim obviously really likes people and defines a “people person.” I suspect that Tim also remembers people’s names very well, as so many of our kids do, and I suspect that once he has met you that you get added to his list of friends. Tim is ideally suited to be the upfront, greeting-the-customers small business owner.

I have been frustrated along with many of our families with the lack of opportunities for our young adults. I have seen families work hard to help their children develop their cognitive function, the academic abilities, social skills, and to become highly capable and then fail to find meaningful work as adults. I have even had individuals with Down syndrome get regular high school diplomas and even college degrees and still not find decent jobs, let alone jobs that they could be passionate about.

The job world is not kind to our kids. If you look at the reality of employment, you start off with the real unemployment rate, which could be pushing 20%. So what is the unemployment rate for people who are really short, have a speech impediment, have any physical problem, or who just look a bit different? If it were possible to gather these numbers they would be ugly; and add on any type of mental challenge and the reality is truly frightening. Enter the NACD Foundation “Exceptional Entrepreneurs” Project: http://www.nacdfoundation.org/entrepreneurs.php

Through the NACD Foundation I would like to bring together a volunteer team of parents, business and legal folks to help us create some templates to help our families help get businesses going for their kids. I have also wanted to build some models such as coffee shops and perhaps have the Foundation assist in raising funds to help build some of these businesses for the kids.

I’ve had a dream, and Tim’s Place: Where breakfast, lunch and HUGS are served is the realization of that dream for one deserving, lucky young man. We need to help more of our kids live this dream.

Teaching Your Child To Think – From the Brilliant Baby Series

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What is preventing you or your children from achieving your potential? Often at the top of the list is simply the ability to take in information (short-term memory), manipulate information (working memory), and to think (executive function). Many teachers are just talking to themselves because their students can’t process what is being said. In this video I also mention that The NACD Foundation’s Simply Smarter Project is working to help people understand how well they “think” and is teaching them how to do it better. You and your children can go online and take a quick test and find out how you are doing. Don’t be scared; you can learn to do it better.