My son is eight months old and clearly utters his first word, and quickly starts to add more words into his daily speech and quickly starts to put them together to form ‘sentences’…in multiple languages! At 9 months old I start to potty train him, and he understands what I am trying to teach him.
‘This child is brilliant’, all the adults in his life agree.
My son is about a year and a half. He goes to play at a nearby kids gym which has an area to climb and slide, a Lego area, an area to jump, balls, puzzles, magnets and blocks, etc. So many fun things for a toddler to do. Most kids are so excited. They run in and start playing with all of the toys. But not my son. He walks in and stands off to the side to observe the other children and watch what they do. To understand what is expected, I suppose. Once he understands what the other kids are all doing and how he is expected to behave and play with them, he joins the fun – and he has a blast – never wanting to leave.
When he is 18 months – 3 years old he takes ‘mommy and me’ classes on subjects he enjoys, like construction, art, French, music and cooking. He is tentative and does not participate straight away. It takes some time for him to warm up and I (or my mother, who is his daytime caretaker while I am at work) have to do most of the activity for him until about 10 minutes before the end of the 40 minute classes, week after week.
He is almost 3 and has started ‘school’, a few times a week, 3 hours at a time. The teachers comment that he would rather talk with them (and his vocabulary is amazing for a 3 year old – he started talking at 8 months after all), than play with his friends. He watches his friends and directs them (tells them if they are breaking a rule, or shows them how to do something), but does not easily go and play with them. He is more like one of the teachers than one of the 2 or 3 year-olds. I also notice that he doesn’t recognize, or confuses his letters (like mixing M and W), like other 3 year-olds.
This trend continues, although he does get better at socializing. He does get better at playing with other children, but only because he mimics their actions (good or bad). He doesn’t realize when an action is” not good”, because someone else did it before him, so it must be okay.
At 4 years old he starts having tics. His pediatrician tells me it’s normal for boys, there is nothing wrong with him. I take him to an eye doctor (one of his tics involves rolling his eyes), and he does need glasses, but the opthalmologist tells me that the tics are normal. I take him to a neurologist, who tells me nothing is wrong with him. Over the years I continue to express my concerns to the pediatrician. We realize that the tics are caused when he is stressed or excited.
“Nothing wrong,” says the doctor. This is not very reassuring.
I speak to his teachers over the years who assure me he is incredibly bright. He is mature. His vocabulary and speech are well ahead of his age, yes he is still mixing up letters, but the teachers assure me that it is within a normal range. He is indeed a very special child, teacher after teacher says.
But all of the reassurances in the world do not stop me from thinking that my son is different.
I watch to see if the other kids shun him…. they don’t seem to, but he is not choosing the friends that I would like him to have. That is to say, the nicer, gentler boys. I am afraid that he may be choosing the rowdier friends because he is over compensating. He is trying to fit in.
Fast forward to this past September. He started first grade as a normal 6 year-old. He was given a reading assessment (as were all of his classmates) and no red flags. About two months into the school year his teacher noticed that he was not doing as well as she would like, so she had him assessed even further. This time there were warnings. He is having problems reading (which I had asked his teachers about previously). He starts to spend one-on-one time with the reading specialist in his school and he has been making some progress, but there is some concern. I mention to the reading specialist that personally, I believe he may be dyslexic. She agrees that he does in fact have a “reading disability” (apparently dyslexia falls under that category these days), but that she is not qualified to be able to properly diagnose him.
That conversation was a few weeks ago. I feel relieved and worried. We have to keep working the system visiting specialist after specialist until I get an actual diagnosis. I don’t want to frighten him by taking him to see these specialists, but I do want to get an understanding of what I should do. And once I get a diagnosis, what should I do with it? How can this affect the rest of his learning, his education, and ultimately his life? What if the other kids make fun of him or shun him? How is this the same child who scored in the 90th + percentile on his kindergarten entrance exam on vocabulary, conversation and comprehension? (Yes they actually administer this test in NYC.) What if we decide to move, and have to change his school…will he have the help he needs to succeed? I have so many unanswered questions, and feel overwhelmed and not sure where to start…
Does you child have a learning disability? How did you find out? How have you helped your child learn to cope?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog by Maman Aya and was inspired by fellow WMB contributor Sophie Walker’s post, The Book I Never Thought I would Write.
Photo credit to Lesley Show. This photo has a creative commons attribute license.
Oh my, I can feel how overwhelmed you are, as I read this, so firstly…hugs.
It is so good that your son has such a strong advocate in you and you are prepared to help him anyway you can – being able to read his body-language through recognising his signs of stress must be so useful to him.
If it’s any help, I can add my reassurances that mixing up letters for a six year old is very normal and even, for much older children, this is true.
All the very best. xx
Thanks Karyn!! Sometimes I wonder if I am not advocating enough for him! It is reassuring that it’s normal…but I still can’t shake that feeling that there is something underlying it all. xx
Oh, how I recognize this!
Our son was also seen as ‘extremely bright’. He didn’t have the socializing issues that much, but he would (and still does) go into some kind of mental ‘block’ when he went to a new place with a lot of kids. It has something to do with have to much unknown parameters he needs to control and having problems to filter all the input. He does understand good and bad though, but he is really fixed on rules. He doesn’t understand why other kids break rules. He never ever lies (which is convenient 🙂 ).
He also has a strong vocabulary and a very strong sense of maths. An example: when he was four, they collected pinecones in school, 60 of them. There were 5 kids, and they wanted to divide them fairly, so the teacher started to give them all one by one. Then my son said ‘just give everyone 12’ and the teacher was stunned. These kind of situations happened a lot. We were proud but worried at the same time.
Last year, when he was 6, he also went to first grade and started reading. He was very VERY eager. But it didn’t go as well as we expected. Not terribly, but something didn’t feel right. He didn’t make much progression (we have levels and he got stuck in level 2) and he felt miserable. He kept reading words backwards, mixing up letters, and he was reading very slowly. Dyslexic was what came in mind too. But then I decided to read ‘Geronimo Stilton’ with him, which was above level 9, and he did equally well as in level 2. He even managed to read difficult words easier than the short ones. Apparently he reads ‘images’ of words. Once he has read them once, he remembers their image and he doesn’t need to spell them the next time. But small words look more alike, so he mixes them up. I explained this to his teacher and although she doesn’t really know whether this kind of reading is a good or a bad thing, it helps her to guide him. And, he is getting fond of reading now (he hated it last year) because he gets to read books that match his mental level (he thought the level 2 books were plain stupid).
He is 7 now and this year he had a problem with maths, which was very surprising. The teacher was new in school, so she didn’t know about his ‘background’ and we deliberately didn’t tell her at first. We didn’t want her to be prejudiced about him and we also didn’t want to be the bragging parents I guess. But it didn’t work. He started saying he was getting more stupid every year in stead of smarter. He couldn’t do 8+4 anymore, which he mastered years before. Turns out he couldn’t grasp the idea of splitting it in 8+2+2, so he struggled with the techniques the teacher tried to explain, while he already knew the answer.
After I had a talk with the teacher and told my son he could make the maths ‘his own way’, things went better for a while. But because he was doing his sums so fast now, she kept giving him more. Which made him revolt and refuse. Why should he do MORE exercises if he already mastered it? He was getting ‘hungry’. And in the mean time, I was worried because when occasionally something new came along, that he didn’t know yet, he couldn’t understand that he had to ‘learn’ it. He urgently had to get some challenges, to feed his hunger and to trigger his ‘learning’ abilities.
Now, finally, we are really on the right track. He gets special math problems to solve, like logic questions, construction issues etc. And he LOVES them. He can read whatever he wants, although he still is in level 3 according to the official tests. He doesn’t feel stupid anymore, but he does feel he is different. He stil freezes when we enter a party and he still explodes when something doesn’t go as it was agreed upon (when a ‘rule’ was broken). Some people think he is autistic, which is clearly not because he feels a lot of empathy and understands social behaviour even beter than his peers (which does make him react in a strange way).
But most importantly, I was taught this is all normal behaviour for ‘brilliant’ kids (I hate this term), because they look at the world differently. They get much more input to cope with and sometimes it is too much. They need to have a sense of control over situations to be able to survive. They try to fit in, but it is difficult. Some go underachieving on purpose (to fit in), or because they don’t know how to ‘learn’ something, or because they look at problems (like a word or a sum) in a different way.
My message would be: don’t let your child get diagnosed with dyslexia or autism or an attention disorder or another (learning) disorder too quickly. Especially given his history of ‘briliance’. I have heard all those terms about my son, but I have been lucky to have found a great psychologist for him. She taught me highly gifted children often get misdiagnosed because of their ‘strange’ behaviour, because they didn’t ‘learn how to learn’ in pre-school or solve problems in an unconventional way and then go underachieving in school. Of course, your son might be dyslexic. Or have another learning disorder. I am not a psychologist and I have never met your son. But I hope I have given you some things to think about by telling you my son’s story…
This is a very interesting scenario that I hadn’t thought of (or rather I thought if but didn’t think was realistic) so thank you for writing ‘a book’ :-). My son is also a stickler for rules, which I never realized was strange until having my daughter – I always just thought he was well behaved. LOL. I find everyone’s input so important to helping me get through this situation – so thank you!!
Oh my, I just realized I kinda wrote an entire blog post just now. Well, I hope it helps, once you manage to read through it 🙂
Maman Aya,
I loved the way you took us through age by age, showing that learning disabilities are not so clear to uncover at first. Thank you for offering us this window.
This year my daughter is taking speech classes for fluency. She has so much to say, but her thoughts are flooding the path. The teachers recognized this, and I didn’t see it. It was helpful to get their feedback and to get her working on it so early.
Keep us posted on your son’s progress!
Jen 🙂
Thanks Jen! Since I wrote this post, my son has been working with a reading specialist at school every day for 30-45 minutes, one on one and we have been more conscientious of spending time with him every day reading and writing with him at home. He has gone up one level in reading so far, but still has a ways to go before he is a comfortable reader. And since this post, fellow WMB contributor, Karyn from New Zealand, gave me some great exercises that I can add to our routine. One of the many reasons I feel so lucky to be a part of this great community of moms! 🙂
It is natural to worry about our kids, believe me, I know. So you need to trust me when I tell you this:
HE WILL BE FINE.
For the reading – this is probably just a speed bump. I want you to think of this:
A friend of mine had a number of problems growing up – inattention, acting-out, violent behaviour. Her parents were more of the “why doesn’t spanking work?” types than the “let’s get her diagnosed” type, but I’m convinced (and so is she) that she did (and still does) suffer from ADHD.
When she was in the third grade, a frustrated teacher told her mother that she would NEVER learn to read properly.
Now she has a history degree, reads constantly, and her favourite author is John Irving, author of extremely long and dense books like The Cider House Rules, The World According To Garp, and A Prayer For Owen Meany.
Now let’s talk about John Irving, author of those 600-1,000 page novels.
He couldn’t read AT ALL until he was TEN.
TEN!
Reading is constantly treated like a skill. It isn’t a skill. It’s a passion. If your son grows up loving books, he will read, dyslexia or no dyslexia, disability or no disability.
Now, let’s talk about the other behaviours you mention – preferring adult company, acting withdrawn.
Most of the behaviours you describe sound to me like a classic introvert. Many parents think there is something “wrong” with their introvert – because they don’t enjoy the same things most people do, or because they don’t play the way most kids play.
But it is very possible he is just an introvert. A very smart one.
You have hit the nail on the head Carol…. He definitely is an introvert, I have no doubt that he will be an awkward wall-flower at the school dances as a teenager (that is if he even goes to them :)). And he prefers to play with toys that you don’t need others to play with… legos, his pirate ship models, games on the iPad as opposed to games that we play together. I am OK with all of these lovable attributes of his personality (his 3 yr old sister has actually taught him to be more extroverted in life…. which I find fascinating). What I am concerned that they all might be symptoms of an underlying issue OR it’s nothing at all – like you said.
Question though – does your friend regret that her parents never got her properly diagnosed? I’d be interested in hearing an adult’s perspective. Thanks!