Blog: School Struggles, Learning Disabilities & Other Kid Stuff

Many of you who watched the last Winter Olympics became captivated by the curious sport of Curling, where players slide a stone across a sheet of ice towards a target area.  Probably the oddest looking aspect of the sport are the “Sweepers” whose job it is to sweep ahead of the stone to reduce friction and allow the stone to travel further and to stay straighter.

A mom came in the other day to talk about her struggling eight year old daughter, Hayley, a third grader.  She presented with many of the common concerns  – difficulty with decoding, reading  fluency, spelling and writing,

“What has the school done for her,” I asked.

Sometimes I think that we have the notion that all of us before being born lined up in heaven to receive our IQ scores.  You can almost imagine hearing the announcement from one of God’s helpers, "If you are about to be born step up so that God can stamp a number in your head.  You will carry this number around with you wherever you go on earth.  Line up everyone. Get your IQ scores!!!!”    

We have been discussing the theme of difficult (opposite) children and how they can cause families to feel like they are being held hostage by their child's challenging behaviors. 

In the last post, I suggested that parents were often not to blame for creating their child's behavior, since in most families one or two of the children are typically flexible, while one is more challenging. However, I also noted that the intervention to address the difficult child was to be focused on the parent, not on the child.

Why is this so?