Edward M.Hallowell

shame, criticism, defeatism, and devaluation.

Priscilla Vail, especially Smart Kids with School Problems, or check out Superparenting for ADD, which I wrote with Peter S. Jensen.

Diagnosing Learning Disorders by Bruce Pennington

Once you understand precisely what kind of difficulty you are dealing with, you are then equipped to make the delicate decision of how far to push.

The disability does not go away; one simply learns to cope with it as best one can.

Some dyslexics have particular trouble spelling. Others are what used to be called “mirror readers,” reversing letters in words, reading “was” for “saw” and so forth.

Auditory processing problems also occur frequently with ADD.

It is struggle enough to have a learning disorder, but to have that struggle compounded by a string of invidious labels—stupid, lazy, and the like—puts one’s whole self-esteem in jeopardy.

We now have the knowledge to identify children with learning disorders early on and thus spare them the emotional trauma of daily being misunderstood, daily being labeled dumb, daily not getting it, and daily wondering why.

Remember how the one thing you feared more than anything else was not failure but being made fun of, being humiliated. Think of the faces of children everywhere as they open their minds to learn.