No I CAN'T -- Yes, You CAN - Building Your Learning Disabled Child's Self Esteem

Reading has always been a struggle for Madison.  It has taken a long time, has been challenging to figure out words, and she just plain has not liked it.  This is all related to her Visual Processing Disorder.  In order to help her with this she has endured Vision Therapy for 2 years--the problem is, she does not recognize the progress she has made.  She has programmed herself to believe that reading is difficult, and will be difficult, regardless of the gains she has made over the past couple of years.  So the question is, how do we reprogram our children to believe that they CAN do something that has been forever difficult and challenging to them?  How do we encourage them to take the risk to forge ahead?  How do we get them to ignore that "bully" in their mind telling them "this has always been difficult, therefor I still can't do it and I don't want to try...I'm just going to fail".

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Vision Therapy

Boy, getting Madison to read is about as easy as asking someone to jump into shark infested waters.  As I mentioned before, everything was (and much still is) difficult for Madison.  Trying to teach her to identify the letters of the alphabet or numbers was painstakingly difficult.  We tried singing, coloring letters , tracing letters in sand and whipped cream, lacing letters, making them out of clay, stamping them, making them with our body, among many other activities that I did with students in my classroom that had difficulty with letter and number identification.  Many of these were useless activities that although were fun for Madison, had no lasting effect.  In the end, I'm not really sure how she retained this information, I just know that it took quite a few years.  And then after all that, she was expected to learn how to read...really?  That process was (and is) just as difficult as letter identification.   Her teachers in kindergarten and first grade continued to tell me that there was nothing to worry about, that she was "just a little behind".  However, they had no idea how much effort Madison was putting in to be "just a little behind".  I knew there was something more going on and decided to have her privately tested at the end of first grade.  That is when we learned that she had a visual processing disorder.  She is now in fourth grade.

 It was good to finally have a diagnosis.  We took her out of private school and put her back into public school where she could get the services she needed.  I also decided to get her a tutor so that I could spend more time being "mommy" and less time being the one that was always making her "do school stuff".  During this time, I tried all the reading programs I had used as teacher, as well as purchasing additional ones recommended by various educational specialists.  These are some wonderful programs, but Madison still had trouble retaining visual information and learning basic reading skills.  I was so frustrated for my daughter and would have done anything to make school easier for her.

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Madison's Journey--Living with a Visual Processing Disorder

Madison is a bright, sensitive, caring 9 year old girl who is growing into a beautiful young lady. When she was born, as most mothers say, it was truly one of the happiest days of my life. She was a wonderful baby...always happy and smiling. She met most of her milestones on time, although she didn't crawl until she was about 10 months old. However, she walked at 12 months and kept cruising along. She talked early, had a large vocabulary, but did have speech issues with articulation. She started speech at age 3 and "graduated" fairly quickly.

She began preschool at age 2 and absolutely loved it. She enjoyed the "play" based program and grew socially and emotionally. During the next 2 years she continued in this program and blossomed even more. She loved having books read to her, singing songs, coloring pictures and dancing around. As a former kindergarten and first grade teacher, I knew how much emphasis was being placed on kindergartners knowing their letters so I began to casually introduce the letters of the alphabet to Madison. This was an extremely difficult task for Madison. She may remember one for a minute, then forget it the next. She may remember one for a day, then forget it the next. She may not even be able to tell me what a letter was 2 seconds after I had told her the name of the letter. So, being the teacher that I am, I began to try all of the "fun" things that I used to do with my students. We made letters out of play dough, we wrote letters in whipped cream, I had her trace them on sand paper, lace letters with yarn, write them in sand, make pictures out of them, etc. But no matter what we did, no matter what had worked with most of my students, Madison could not retain letter names...please do not get me wrong, we did not do this daily or even weekly. We would just do this periodically until she reached kindergarten. However, this is when I realized that something just "wasn't right".

In the fall of 2005 she began kindergarten. She struggled to learn her letters. My husband and I conferenced with her teacher who said she needed to work on letter identification, but when asked if she thought there was a problem she assured us everything was fine. Madison changed schools in the middle of kindergarten and started her second semester at a private school. She was still having difficulty with letter id, but the teachers assured us once again that this was nothing to worry about. Meanwhile, at home, we were working diligently to try to get Madison to retain her letters...not an easy task. She stayed at this school through first grade with the same feedback from the teachers. She is a little behind, but it is nothing to worry about. And let me tell you, as a teacher, I was asking, "Do I need to be concerned?" The answer was always "No".

In many cases, well behaved girls fly under the radar when it comes to learning disabilities. They follow directions, they can be quiet, and in Madison's case, she has a strong work ethic, so she is always on task. Well, at the end of first grade I told my husband that I knew there had to be something going on. She was different than any student I had taught and we needed to get her the help she needs. Most private schools do not have testing, so we decided to have Madison privately tested for a learning disability. As it turned out, she has a visual processing disability. This effects many aspects of her life and education.

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