Friday, January 17, 2020

Why I love to talk to parents.


As licensed clinical social worker I have the privilege of interviewing hundreds of parents year about their parenting experience in America. I have noticed how quick and powerful Parent Guilt is in it’s impact on parents lives & children's lives. In my work as a family and child therapist who is particularly interested in how problems move through peoples lives I am uniquely placed to notice how the pathologizing of dyslexia has led to entire generations of children and parents believing that there is something wrong with the child.

There is nothing wrong with a dyslexic child. They are the way that God made them. And to quote Einstein “God does not play dice with universe.”  Your child who is dyslexic it is not broken.  He has traded out some of his ability to learn language or his ability to do some other language base skill in order to gain a superpower. It is your job to find that superpower and to support it's development.

Dyslexic students suffer from a series ideas that exist in modern schooling. They are the canaries in the coal mine of school. Most public schooling in the United States is based on the idea that people learn on an incremental edge and a set average rate. Schools are based around the idea that it is better to teach to the average of the class. Many dyslexic students are “slow” in the first few years of learning to read or write but then exploded later in life into these categories of knowledge

I was once one so myself. I was a student who could not read who could not write in a classroom filled with literate people. It is taken decades for me to recover from that experience. The school and its effort to teach me reading and writing taught me fear, isolation, loneliness and bitterness. Even now 43 years later my heart is heavy to think of the child I was.

I would love the chance to help your family avoid the costly mistakes that my family went through when I was a child.  I coach families nationwide in how to come to terms with the realities of having child with a learning disability.

http://www.ashevilletherapy.net

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