Mental flexibility and response inhibition are two skills essential for the surprises and challenges in our every day lives.

I get to the heart of these skills starting at the 2:55 mark.

Lets walk through a day-in-the-life of a child facing learning challenges, plus review a strategy to turn around their problems

A Day-in-the-Life with Learning Challenges

The Emotions

Imagine, if you will, that it’s the start of the new school year and your 6th grade son, Elliot, is coming home every day angry and on the brink of tears out of his intense frustration. He says he’s quitting basketball, something he has participated in since early elementary school and loves very much, because he’s so overwhelmed and can’t keep up with the homework demands.  He feels like all the lessons are going over his head, and he doesn’t understand anything the teachers are saying.  

The Schoolwork

While your son has an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) in place due to his difficulties with attention, this sense of complete overwhelm is new.  Elementary school, while not easy, was not this much of a struggle for him.  He’s working hours and hours after school to complete homework.  He has a perfectionist streak which makes him spend extra time getting everything perfect, but even so, he’s really trying hard and spending too many hours on homework for a sixth grader.

The Positives

School is very important to Elliot, and he tries to make sure everyone is happy.  He has accommodations, i.e. longer time, a quiet area, questions read to him upon request, and concepts are broken down into bite size chunks.  You haven’t received any grade reports yet, so you’re not really sure how he’s doing in relationship to his teacher’s perspective and expectations.

The Parent Perspective

You want to step in, but you’re not sure if you should or how. You have heard that as the parent of a middle school-er you’re supposed to stand back and let your child handle it, that it’s better to allow him to fail, yet, you know instinctively that something is off. The content goes over his head too often, and he does not yet have all the skills necessary to organize his notes, homework, etc.  

Exasperated by all of this, you throw your hands up, exclaiming, “What do I do?”

If this scenario resonates with you, here is my guidance:

A Strategy to Address the Challenges

1. Decide to take action relatively quickly.

If too much time passes without some improvement, your child could become even more anxious and miss important academic content. It is difficult to recoup lost learning, and they may not be able to catch up if you wait too long to address the issue(s).

2. If your child is in middle school or above, put them in the driver’s seat.

3. Email the teacher to schedule a conversation.  

If your child balks at the suggestion, offer to co-write the email with them.  This co-writing experience is an opportunity for an introductory discussion about how to advocate on their own behalf.  

Resist the urge to take over.  I know it can be awkward at first, but you need to walk the line between helping your child reach out and doing everything yourself.  

4. Meet with the teacher to begin to address the challenges and put a plan in place. 

If your child is in kindergarten through 5th grade, you can include them in a meeting with their teacher for the last 10-15 minutes.

Amanda Gorman‘s journey to the White House shows us that learning challenges are not limits. She has shown that we can tap into our unique genius when faced with learning challenges, and find our own path to success with hard work and a great support team.

Who is Amanda Gorman? Youth Poet Laureate and 2021 Inauguration speaker. She captured the nation’s heart and attention with her profound poem, The Hill We Climb.

And, she has speech and auditory processing challenges. (I know, I was surprised to hear this too!)

Amanda’s Childhood

Gorman, born prematurely, had many ear infections as a baby. She developed an auditory processing disorder that caused a speech impediment — she couldn’t understand or pronounce certain sounds in speech, especially the sound of the letter ‘r.’

Her mom, Joan Wicks, pursued her doctorate in education as a single mom, to help Amanda overcome barriers. And, as luck would have it, her example also inspired Amanda to work hard.

In fact, Amanda graduated from Harvard University in 2020, with a cum-laude status, and became the youngest poet ever to read a U.S. inauguration poem. She’s a phenomenal orator!

Speech Impediment and Mindset

“In my journey as a spoken-word poet and activist, I experience anxiety before a performance because of my speech impediment. Earlier on in my career, I’d actually delete or replace words in my poems because I couldn’t pronounce them as well as I’d hoped. Now I’ve gotten to a point where I’m like screw it—I might not be able to say that word perfectly—after all, what is perfect pronunciation anyways?—but there’s too much at stake for me to censor or monitor myself. I still get nervous sometimes, or frustrated and disheartened listening to interviews of myself, but it’s all worth it when I meet other girls who say: “We have the same speech impediment! You’ve inspired me to keep speaking up.” I see it as an incredible opportunity to connect with so many valuable, beautiful people whose voices have been overlooked.”

How is Amanda’s success possible? Early diagnosis, inspiration, a strengths-aligned outlet, and a great support team.

Reaching Out for Help

Amanda freely admits that at first, she wasn’t so receptive to getting help. She stubbornly refused to use her accommodations. Her mom pushed her to use the extra time on her tests. And sent her to a school that championed critical thinking, creating meaning and taking action. As Amanda got older and found some success, she began to appreciate the extra help.

As part of her speech pathology remediation she would listen to the song, ‘Aaron Burr, Sir.’ This rap has many ‘r’ words recited at a rapid pace. Gorman felt if she could master this song, she would gain better control over her difficulty with the pronunciation of the letter ‘r.’

Finding Her Gift

“Every child has a gift, it just has to be discovered,” her mom says. “Where there’s a deficit, there’s a place where the child makes it up.”

For Amanda, that place was poetry. She loved writing stories, metaphor, and words from a young age. Poetry came naturally to her, and it led to breakthroughs and ultimately the White House.

Amanda believes she’s a part of the new type of genius. “Intelligence can come from anywhere and expresses itself in many forms.”

It is possible for your child to thrive with a learning challenge given inspiration and support that unlocks and nurtures their natural strengths. I hope that you and your child find your magic key and a stellar support team, so that learning challenges are not limits for you, either.

It’s critical that parents and teachers nurture self-esteem in students with learning differences. The mismatch between learning style and school programs can cause students to doubt themselves. Constant correction and poor performance lead to thinking they are not “smart.” There is also the social stigma of being “different” that can hurt their self-perception.

Remember, school-based learning programs are developed with a neuro-typical child in mind.

You can strengthen your child’s resilience and nurture self-esteem with a bank of their wins. Some fun ways to keep track of their accomplishments are:

• Catch them in the act! If they are being kind or having a sucess, write that down on a slip of paper and keep in a jar. Pull from the jar on a tough day and on New Year’s Eve.
• Put a white board on their bedroom door. Every day write something positive about your child, about both who they are and their efforts, on the board.
• For the visual learner, keep track of wins with stickers or pom poms in a jar – when they get to a certain amount, go out for cocoa or another small reward. 

You are an amazing parent! Keep up the great work! 

Flexible thinking is essential to problem-solving and learning, but many kids with learning differences have trouble with it. They can’t shift gears, and find it hard to think about things in different ways. But, you can strengthen flexible thinking with activities that teach multiple ways to do things.

Activitites that Build Flexible Thinking

• Play board games, card games, and playground games as much as possible. Each time you play a game, it’s different. And, learning to be a gracious loser helps build emotional flexibility.
• Use joke books to talk about the different meanings of words. Think about how changing the meaning of a word makes it funny.
• Invent new rules for your games – Uno is a great one for this! 
• Try doing everyday tasks or routines differently, or switch up the order. You can make it silly, like have a backwards day. Or, have a different music playlist for each day. 
• Brainstorm together – meal planning is a fun and easy way to do that.
• And most importantly, use positive reinforcement. Praise them when they show flexibility.

Incorporate Supports as You Build Flexibility

While you’re building flexible thinking, incorporate these training wheels for kiddos who don’t like change or surprises. 

• Before you make a change, explicitly explain (or show through visuals) the change. It could include specific situations, expectations, sights, sounds, smells, or people. Be clear and detailed, so there’s no room for confusion or doubt. 
• Acknowledge and empathize with their frustration.
• Use a calendar to minimize surprises

Have a flexible day! When you keep flexibility top of mind, youll see many ways to weave it into your parenting. 

It can be hard to unhook from procrastination, which is why I’m giving you a simple process to help your child initiate tasks. You will be teaching them a critical life skill, self-confidence, and a growth mindset.

Here’s my proven process to help kids get going when they are stuck n procrastination mode:  

1. Recognize that ,any kids simply don’t have the skills to get going. A big job or even a small task can seem overwhelming to them.
2. Work with your child to break down the task into its smallest steps.
3. Ask, “how does doing one small step feel?” If it’s still too hard, tell them they only have to do it for the length of a song or a 5 minute timer. 
4. Remind your child of a time when they independently started something and it worked out well. Imprint those moments of success by retelling those stories. That will help build your child’s self-belief.
5. Create routines for tasks that are a recurring problem. Even if there’s kicking and screaming when you start the routine (i.e. laundry or screen-free Saturday), eventually it will become second nature.