New here and looking for guidance (m)

Just hoping someone with any kind of experience can reply.

Thanks.

I have a 13 year old son who has been diagnosed with nonverbal LDs and dyslexia, as well as adhd-inattentive. We have done about every therapy around. My son’s nonverbal LDs are not at the level of a syndrome so may not be as severe as your older boy’s. However, he is also dyslexic.

We have done a variety of therapies with much success. We did do IM but my son was 10 and we had already done Neuronet therapy with him. I initially had him evaluated at 8 for IM but he was so far off beat (well over 200) that the therapist recommended that we do other therapy first. This worked well for us. We actually found that the two therapies (IM and NN) worked well together. We had stalled with Neuronet and IM helped us get past that hump.

We have done TLP and it helped make learning easier.

I think you have to focus on the motor-sensory level with your oldest son but you have to make sure he can actually do the exercises.

In first grade, I was told that my son couldn’t learn. He is in sixth now (we had him repeat fourth when we moved him from public school to parochial). He is a solid B student.

My son was also scary in the motor category. He ran into a parked car on a bike when he was 6. I didn’t realize he had vestibular issues because he learned to ride a bike when he was 4. But he always went fast. I thought it was his personality. I later realized he was incapable of going slowly.

He is now a decent athlete. He was even a starter this year for his school’s JV basketball team (fifth and sixth graders in a Catholic school league). We saw direct improvement in athletic ability through IM and NN. Frankly, we saw the athletic improvements before the scholastic but decided that the former alone was worth the time and money.

Beth

to know that others have had success with remediation.

Ds does fit the NLD syndrome. Hopefully it’s not as bad as the depressing experts describe; I tend to think not, but it is hard to be objective when it comes to my own kids.

Naturally, my ultimate dream would be for all of my son’s issues to be remediated but at this point, my main focus is improving his atrocious motor skills and getting him to problem-solve in novel scenarios.

There’s more but just those two areas would make a huge difference in his life.

I’m a bit less worried w/younger ds because he is very persistent. He struggles with reading, but not at the level where he can’t read at all and I’ve seen some good improvement just lately. And his issues just are not as pervasive as his brother’s.

Anyway, thanks for the background on your son. It must feel great to have found help that makes a difference. :D

Donna

My kids complain about having to do Audiblox.

I’m not all that worried about younger ds, as this is just his personality. Once he realizes he’s not getting his way, he settles down and enjoys the challenge of the exercises.

Older ds truly hates it. I know it’s boring, *I* find it boring to administer. I’ve talked w/ds about it, why we’re doing it, etc. I know he understands. Maybe it’s just that he’s approaching 9 and he’s got that eye-rolling attitude things going on.

Any thoughts?

Donna

We never did Audioblox. I have heard good things about it though. I guess I would make sure that it would help a child with your son’s profile. Have people successfully used it with kids with a NLD profile? You don’t want to push his good will for something that isn’t going to bring significant gains.

When my son was 8, we did PACE. PACE is supposed to work faster and be more comprehensive than Audioblox. It really didn’t do much for him and of all the therapies we’ve done, it was the closest to a failure. I don’t mean to discourage you but one of the problems for him, in retrospect, was that his problems were motor based and PACE is more cognitive.

Beth

Or is this just something that becomes apparent after the fact?

So far the cognitive weaknesses have not had a significant affect on his school work. He has the attention issues typical of NLD, he’s majorly disorganized so needs support there and has difficulty keeping up w/heavy hand-writing demands.

I’ve always felt whatever cognitive issues he has, they stem from the motor. From my understanding of the testing that’s been done (WISC) all of his weaknesses are in tasks that rely on visual-spatial and visual-motor abilities.

Donna

I’m a person with a pretty serious visual-motor thing and my daughter inherited it; we both read fluently four to five years before we could write a legible sentence. I have a very weak sense of direction and almost no sense of time. I happen to not fit the NLD profile in being a math major, but everything else is me to a T, and my daughter as well.
I refuse to go to those websites or to recommend them to people for exactly the same reasons you mention, that they are very negative and depressing, and not at all useful becasue of that. I happen to be a cheerful and generally happy and positive person and my daughter is a gem; people always notice and compliment us on our smiles, and I help a heck of a lot of tutoring students turn their attitudes around.
As a person who lives with this, I strongly suggest that you do everything you can to give your child opportunities to develop physical skills. It *can* be done; it just takes careful and patient coaching, and a lot more time than the average. Handwriting can benefit (and become a lot less work and frustration) with a lot of direct teaching and a strong stress on directionality and rhythm. Spprts are very important, especially individual sports from swimming to skiing and martial arts and gymnastics, where the child can develop at his own pace and develop skills one at a time. Music can be a big big help, developing a sense of rhythm and listening skills, as well as the physical skill of playing an instrument. Crafts are a good thing. Get your child involved in anything and everything and teach the handwriting and other skills directly with lots of practice; you will see a positive change (and an attitude change along with it.)

I don’t know the answer to that question. For me, it was apparent only in retrospect but I don’t know if that was because it just wasn’t intuitive to me the extent to which my son’s learning problems had a motor connection.

I would say that since you know he has motor issues and you know that they are pretty severe—the inability to improve on IM would indicate that to me—I’d be inclined to focus on motor based therapies and activities.
You don’t want to use up his good will on things that won’t give you the most bang.

I was skimming an interesting book yesterday while observing my son at his Neuronet appointment (http://www.neuronetonline.com/ ). (Neuronet has been wonderful for my son but it is not widely available). It was on the importance of movement in learning. The author, a scientist with an university, talked about working with a group of kids who were labeled LD/ADHD/ED and that the only thing they did differently was add movement exercises. They used Brain Gym by Dennison. The unrelated gains they saw (one girl started to talk) were fascinating. Balametrics is another therapy program that is available widely that uses many of the same principles.

I think there are many ways to get to the same point. Victoria describes learning with sports. My son got too frustrated because of his skill level and avoided most sports until his motor skills improved. Thus we found that therapy provided the foundation necessary. I know one other mom who found herself a swimming coach who was wonderful and taught her motor impaired child to swim. So it can be done with the right people. Gymnastics is another way, although he may be too old for it. Most kids his age who are still doing it are pretty good. We tried the martial arts which are great for LD kids but at the time my son found it too frustrating. His motor planning skills were too poor—he couldn’t imitate the movements. But I have a friend whose son’s life was practically turned around through the martial arts. He was a weak, although probably not LD student, very ADHD like—impulsive and annoying—and now is teaching classes at age 13 and succeeding in school. He is great to be around. My son’s motor skills, at the time, were too poor to get this kind of benefit.

Beth

>>My kids complain about having to do Audiblox.

How long do you do it at a time? If you are doing an hour at a time, I would try breaking it up into three 20-minute sessions. If that is still too much, I’d try two 10-minute sessions per day and just plan on it taking twice as long for improvements to show up.

Most children start showing improvements outside the program after 40 to 60 hours of one-on-one, although some take 80 hours. If you don’t see significant improvements after 80 hours of training, I would set Audiblox aside and do more bodywork therapies.

Nancy

Victoria, thank you for sharing that information about yourself. It gives me hope to know that there are people out there w/similar issues as my son who are successful. I try to stay away from those websites. There is some useful information there, but I would hate to think a parent of a newly diagnosed child would find that and only that…hopefully someone would direct them here instead!

We’ve done and continue to do many of the things you suggest re: developing physical skills. Team sports are out, so we are looking at things like swimming and skiing as areas where he can go at his own pace and just enjoy himself. We’ve also enrolled him in art classes…he truly loves art. I feel he has some latent talent that is being held back by his disabilities. So hopefully as we work on remediation, some of that talent will blossom.

Beth, we are doing bodywork through a local development center that sounds a bit like Neuronet. I don’t know if all of the exercises are the same, but the overall concept is. I like that they’ve tailored it to his abilities; he’s starting at a point even more basic than most of the kids in the program but if it weren’t this basic, he wouldn’t be able to do it and it, therefore, would not help him….like our experience with IM.

Ironically, what led me to this is Brain Gym. I actually read a book about Brain Gym years ago. I wasn’t sure what to make of it; kinda up there with the type of SI that some OTs suggested when he was a toddler, that I never thought was helpful at all….playing with shaving cream, or dried beans and rice, rolling in blankets, brushing, etc.

But then my son’s gym teacher, who has really taken a liking to him (you’d think gym teachers would like the capable kids…how refreshing to meet someone who wants to make a difference w/the kid who struggles) told me that one of the other gym teachers in our district has been using Brain Gym w/great success. So then I started getting interested in this concept and around the same time, I saw the advertisement for where ds is now doing therapy.

Nancy, we mostly do Audiblox for about 30 minutes at a time. We get in one long session on the weekend and some days, we only manage 20 minutes. We don’t do it every day, either.

I know it is boring, but I am not sure that is the entire reason for the complaining. Lately, they’ve been complaining about everything and I”m not sure what is going on. It could be that there’s been some stress in my household lately; my sister is very sick and I’m sure there is a ripple effect from my stress over that to them.

I’m hoping that since we are going on vacation and getting away from everything, they will be de-stressed when we get back and we can get on an even keel again. The constant complaining has me ready to ship them both off to boarding school.

Thanks everyone for the help and insight.

Donna

Donna,

The complaining issue needs to be resolved. I wouldn’t be able to tolerate it either. When you are asking a child to do extra work that is unpleasant to him, you need to have a reward system set up. How many of us would continue working at our present jobs if the paycheck was suddenly taken away?!

Just last week I told one of my student’s parents that they should consider a summer intensive reading program for him. The mom told me she had mentioned it to him earlier and he had said no way. I told her about the necessity of having a reward system. The next day I asked him if his parents had mentioned going to a reading clinic in the summer, and he said yes, he was planning to go! I was surprised, and he proceeded to tell me that he was excited to get to order whatever he wanted from his skateboard magazine (within some price limit) at the end of the session. There are some smaller rewards in place weekly.

I would do it by a point system where if there is complaining taking place, points will be subtracted. Cooperation wins points. This should get rid of the complaining behavior if you stick to it.

I will also mention that programs like Audiblox which are meant to be used everyday or at least 5 days a week will not have much effect if not used almost daily. I don’t tutor children in reading once a week because that is just not effective either. Plus the parents do have to practice with the child between my sessions.

although, lol, the Audiblox creators are NOT in favor of them. ‘Course, I don’t buy their theories on learning disabilities either, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful program.

Anyway, yes, we do use rewards but I probably have not been as consistent lately as I need to be. I should mull that over during the vacation.

We do the Audiblox about 5x per week, though some weeks get crazy and we might only get 4x….still, we generally manage 2-3 hours per week.

That’s my minimum goal for right now, but starting when we return from vacation, I want to gradually increase. I want them primed to have some type of therapeutic activity every day in the summer so I’m working them up to it.

I will probably take up the suggestions here about spreading it out through the day, 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there. THat is more manageable during the summer than it is when we are dealing with school, h.w., dinner, etc.

Donna

For what it is worth, my 13 year old son has done tons of therapy, from age 7, for almost no extrinsic rewards. Neuronet is not set up that way and I don’t give him rewards on any regular basis. I have occasionally given him a surprise for finishing something but nothing dangling out there. The one exception was when he did 4 weeks of Seeing Stars. We went on a family snorkling trip for the day the weekend after he finished. He had wanted to go to this park and we did.

Now that he is older, he sets up his own rewards. For example, he will ask if he can draw after he finishes or have icecream. Tonight we did 4 of the six exercises and then made a cake and then finished them.
So you can structure pleasant things after hard work.

BTW, my son who couldn’t draw at all has developed into a really great artist. Therapy really unlocked the potential. Honestly, though, I don’t know where he gets the talent. I never got beyond drawing daisies and my husband isn’t any better!!!

Beth

Let me say that some kids certainly do have the self-motivation to not need material rewards. I do not have any students at the moment whom I have to reward. They are very motivated by finally learning to read. But when behavior needs to be modified and verbal rewards are not enough, then you have to make a more structured plan to get the behaviors you want and to eliminate those you don’t want.

It sounds like you’re doing a good job with the Audiblox.

Off the beaten path…
have you done any creeping and crawling with your child? I read the book by Glen Doman and it really fit my son’s profile. My kid did not creep (drag tummy on floor) at all as a baby and did a poor job of crawling. Then when it came time for walking, he could barely do that! Running did start until I made my son creep and crawl again. Suddenly his walking style improved and he began to run. Here is the great news! His fine motor skills drastically improved and I never worked on them. He still have problems with buttons but he can zipper, cut with sciccors and follow a maze.
Just adding my two cents for a home program.