Excerpt from Your Child Learns Differently, Now What?

Probably the thing we’ve heard most from parents in the past few years is how hard it was for kids to do school online. But MOST IMPORTANTLY, we’ve heard what parents learned from watching their kids struggle. In many cases, it was unexpected. With children expected to learn remotely from home, parents could see their children falling behind and not getting support.

But the problem isn’t just the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Likely you can identify with some of these situations:

• • All those freshly sharpened pencils and new school clothes and new friends that ring in a new school year are not the real stuff of school. For many families, the new school year doesn’t really offer a fresh start. The same concerns and disappointments start to emerge even before that first report card.
  • Or perhaps you’re like many parents who dread parent-teacher conferences because they are full of problems and no solutions are offered. Just Lincoln or Christina needs to work a little harder. Most of the time, the true solution is not about working harder.
  • Many of the families we’ve worked with have sought help from a parade of tutors or months or years of tutoring services without seeing any real change.
  • And you’ve probably been through nightly homework battles or meltdowns. You despair over how to get your child through an assignment and into bed without the roof caving in.
  • The family arguments over your child’s learning struggles make other relationships difficult. Your partner, parents, in-laws or other children all seem to have something to say on the topic. The stress of learning struggles often affects everyone in the family.
  • Often, parents have been through what we sometimes call the gauntlet. If problems have been uncovered early, perhaps you’ve been to a series of experts or other therapists. If we had a nickel for every parent who’s said to us, “They just tell me what’s wrong, they don’t tell me what to do about it,” we would be ridiculously rich.