Now Dysgraphia

I’m sharing something that has been on my mind for about ten days.

While at the 2008 MassHope homeschooling conference I decided for the heck of it to attend a session titled “Smart Kids Who Hate to Write”. I thought that sounded like my older son as he is just not faring well in writing composition or penmanship or written communications of any kind yet he can mentally compose and orally relate very well and recite grammar rules yet doesn’t use them in real life. The latest development is math operations computation errors due to sloppy alignment of numbers (misalignment to be more accurate). I didn’t know anything about the speaker or the content of the session when I decided to go.

I was blindsided when the speaker, named Dianne Craft introduced herself as a teacher of children with special education needs, and that she helps children with learning disabilities. I didn’t know how that translated to writing or to my child but I was curious to hear what she had to say and decided if it was all irrelevant I could easily exit the room and get back to shopping in the vendor hall.

She was listing out things like “Does your child do this and that and this and that”. I perked up when I saw my older son in many of those symptoms. Then I learned that the talk was about a learning disability called dysgraphia. This took me completely by surprise.

Dianne Craft laid out what dysgrahpia is and said it is a processing disorder which is a brain centered, that is, it is a neurological problem. The remedy is occupational therapy with specific brain integration therapy exercises. Craft then taught us some of them and said we could do them at home. Some parents who don’t have access to this information or these tools get professional occupational therapy treatments and pay others to do those same exercises with their children. In fact a friend of mine pays $125 per hour, one visit per week for some similar occupational therapy. Some children who are identified in school may receive some of these therapies in school.

For now I just wanted to share that I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. The recent diagnosis of an eye tracking disorder in this child gave a reason to why he was experiencing certain difficulties with reading. This dysgraphia diagnosis explains a bunch of other and different issues that have been very frustrating for my older son and for me to deal with. What I had been blaming as gaps in knowledge of English grammar yet what was not being fixed with review of grammar rules (i.e. punctuation rules) now has an explanation. What I’d blamed as laziness and poor work ethic of horrible handwriting now has a label. What other homeschooling mothers said was ‘typical boy behavior at this age’ may actually be abnormal and a ‘condition’ that is a ‘learning disability’.

Because I had not known anything about dysgraphia I didn’t know to look for these signs. I knew the issues, the challenges he’d been facing but had not known it could be a learning disability. I thought I had a ‘typical boy who hates to write’. My son is smart and can orally communicate well and can orally dictate his thoughts or make up long stories. I knew the intellect was there, the ability to think and imagine and gather facts and to communicate was there so I was not worried about his intellect or his ‘smarts’.

I don’t care to have the label so I can blame his challenges on something. I’m not looking for an excuse or something to blame this on. I am a bit surprised that this son now has two labels which technically would mean he has two learning disabilities which would make him a special education child in the schools. Therefore does this mean I have a child with ‘special needs’? (Gasp.) Just thinking of that label, one that I used to think meant only more serious things such as a child born with Down’s Syndrome or a child who has severe Autism that interferes with ‘normal daily living’. Now does this mean MY son is a special needs kid? I thought he was just an average typical kid.

Does this mean now that technically I’m homeschooling a child ‘with special needs’—a category of homeschoolers which seems to be growing? I’m a bit bothered by the label to be honest, is it because my pride is hurt? I don’t know. I do know this kid is the same kid that existed before the conference, before I heard of dysgraphia, before he got the eye tracking diagnosis. This is the same kid; it is just our labels that have changed.

I do know this. Strategies and ideas for addressing some of my son’s problem areas have failed to work by applying academic solutions and creative ideas to them. Now that we have this label even though the dysgraphia was diagnosed by me, I am going forward with addressing it with some brain integration therapies as outlined by Dianne Craft in her book.

The label we have which was made by a Behavioral Optometrist of convergence insufficiency is being treated with light therapy prescribed by and overseen by the doctor but administered at home by me (that is how all his patients do it). Today we started his light therapy. He is also getting passive therapy through a prism in his reading eyeglass lenses.

I’m not up for writing a long blog post of all the symptoms in my older son of dysgraphia, what we’ve tried over these years and so forth, perhaps I’ll do that another day. I just wanted to share today that this is something else that has been weighing on my mind. I’ve been busy researching this and planning how to handle it. Also I am keeping this issue in mind when recalculating plans for how we will handle my son’s homeschooling methods, plans and goals for the rest of this school year and going forward into next year.

Now that I have these diagnoses I am learning more about these condition and we are treating them. There is not much to do. No point in moaning and groaning. No point in feeling pity or shame or guilt. I’m just moving forward with new information in hand.

Links

My recent blog post about my son’s eye tracking problem

Dianne Craft’s website, home page, has articles, conference lecture handouts, and to purchase her books and other products

Smart Kids Who Hate to Write article by Dianne Craft

Dianne Craft’s book about Brain Integration Therapy at home

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