My friend reports that her child is having trouble in Kindergarten and might have some sensory issues. She's kicking herself for not noticing.
I know the feeling. When my child was in first grade, his writing was all on top of itself and at the middle of a sentence, would start heading up, toward the top of the page. Up until then, we had just been working on some fairly quirky social patterns, using the vaunted "let them grow up" approach. Now all of a sudden my child was feeling like a failure in school.
We finally said "OK, time isn't healing the quirky stuff" and took him in to a wonderful doctor, who gave him a movement exam (Note: this is par for the course if you live in Europe. Every child gets one before they start Kindergarten. We hear that GOOD doctors give those also, but unfortunately, our child's pediatrician spent my son's first five years experiencing a middle-age crisis. He went from being normal looking to getting more and more "hip" until he was greeting us dressed in drapey rayon shirts with loud prints. And then he retired. )
We discovered that my son couldn't stand on one foot at 7.5 And what parent measures THAT? He couldn't remember letters if they were covered up. He is left-eyed and right handed and the two sides of hig brain weren't talking with one another. His brain didn't know where his body was in space. To this day, if you make him close his eyes and touch a spot on his left arm, if he tries to touch that same spot on his right arm he will be a good two inches away. We knew that he had a hard time socially, but were blown away to realize that he had real physical problems caused by stutters in brain development.
Nobody talks about this stuff. This type of thing is not in the public brain. Neurologists don't even measure and monitor movement when they give our children exams. I took my child in for a neurological exam when he was four years old and was basically told to send him to Boy Scouts for social integration. Had the doctor, in his four thousand-dollar examination, given my child some rudimentary movement exams, my son might be absolutely fine today.
If you're going through this typeof thing with your child, don't bother wasting time by kicking yourself. Because if you parented as though you were afraid of nascent developmental problems, you would raise a neurotic little weirdo, destined to hate you for life. And of course, the brighter your kid is, the more he or she hides or compensates for weaknesses. Right?
If there's something going on with your child and people are having trouble putting their fingers on it, settle in and start reading. Because what I have to say will help you. And there's more on my website. Start with the Sensory page. Or maybe the ADHD page. I have not had time to put all of what I've learned onto the site, but it's a start.
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