Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis

Stephen M. Lange, Ph.D., Psychologist

Pine Ridge, SD

Perhaps you had this experience: You approached your child’s school about your kindergarten age child, expressing concern that he or she may have a learning disability. While sympathetic, your school’s psychologist, reading specialist, or other diagnostic expert responded that learning disabilities cannot be diagnosed until a child has been unable to succeed academically despite conscientious instruction. Several years later, you attended a meeting with your school’s multi-disciplinary team who explained that your child indeed does have a learning disability. Your emotions felt chaotic – a mixture of relief, worry, sorrow – and perhaps frustration or even anger that years had passed since you recognized that your child’s development was not typical, but rather different from his peers in subtle yet important ways.

It is a fact that learning disabilities cannot be diagnosed in early childhood. Unlike severe developmental disabilities, learning disabilities are mild neurocognitive deficits that cannot be easily distinguished from the broad range of typical early childhood development. However, it is also a fact that it is possible to identify children with increased risk for developing learning disabilities as elementary school students.

Children with increased risk for learning disabilities frequently share one or more of these characteristics:

• A mother, father, sister or brother with an Autistic Spectrum Disorders, ADHD, or Learning Disability
• Low birth weight, defined as a weight less than 2500 grams or 5.5 pounds
• Delayed speech—failure to combine two or more words into short phrases by 24 months of age
• A diagnosis of ADHD

These risk factors are associated with increased risk for learning disabilities because learning disabilities are the result of a developmental trajectory that starts before birth, and continues through adulthood.

As preschoolers, children at increased risk have trouble:

• Rhyming
• “Reading”—really recognizing—signs like Coke, McDonalds and other frequently occurring printed words
• Recognizing parts of books such as the cover, title
• Recognizing letters of his or her own name
• Quickly retrieving words, measured by asking a child to rapidly name a category such as “animals”

But what about prevention? Many of the home-based interventions that can reduce the risk of learning disabilities, especially reading disabilities, are parenting habits that apply to all children. The common element of all home—based interventions is the systematic exposure of children to rich, engaging, and expressive language. The best example of this is shared reading. When parents read to their children, books take on an added dimension of parental love and affection. Children hear models of reading that are more advanced than theirs. They begin to associate letters with sounds and words with meaning. Using books with predictable rhyme patterns and rhythms such as the Dr. Seuss books teaches the sound system of our language. Old fashioned entertainment, based on interaction between adults and children rather than video, fulfills a similar purpose. Telling stories about family history, sharing folk tales you learned as a child, playing word games such as 20-questions or I-Spy are ways parents teach their preschool “language apprentices.” Apprentices need teachers who listen well and listen patiently, and who can demonstrate good conversational skills such as taking turns speaking without interrupting. Helping children to play creatively, with other children, and with their imaginations is the oldest form of language and social skill training.

Professionals and parents can team-up to help children at risk for learning disabilities. Get Ready to Read! is a 10 minute screening tool to identify 4 year old children who need help with foundational language skills required to become readers. Children who are vulnerable can receive small group preventative instruction in letter recognition, letter-sound correspondences, rhyming, and segmenting and blending sounds. Even brief daily interventions by volunteers with minimal training appear to result in substantial growth in language skills. Speech and language therapists can be very adept at helping to remediate language delays in one to one or small group sessions.

In summary, while diagnosis of learning disabilities is not possible at young ages, parents, schools, healthcare professionals and others can be very attuned to delays in language development that confer increased risk for learning disabilities. As well, adults can focus particular attention to Low-Birth-Weight children, and children who were not talking by their second birthday, viewing them as especially vulnerable and needing developmental assessment. Parents, schools and speech and language therapists can team-up to help reduce risk for learning disabilities.

Reference

The National Center for Learning Disabilities. www.GetReadytoRead.org.

The Author

Stephen M. Lange, Ph.D. is a child and adoelscent psychologist and parent of two. He is a very grateful adult with ADHD. He can be contacted at smlangephd@gmail.com.

Edited by Howard Margolis, Ed.D.   www.reading2008.com