To Parents of Kids With NLD

Joan,

I haven’t read her book, but I have read articles by her. She seems to paint a very accurate picture in her articles. Have you read the articles by Susan Thompson on this site? They are very good. There are also a couple of other good sites:

NLD on the Web! nldontheweb.org
NLD Line nldline.com
Asperger Syndrome Coalition asperger.org

While I haven’t read any books on the subject, I have been in contact with other parents in various chat rooms. It is uncanny, but all our kids behave almost exactly the same way, and are affected almost exactly the same way by this disorder. When we started to compare notes, we were all surprised by the consistency. These traits ranged from problems with social cues, to clumsiness, to extremely literal thinking, to problems with written expression and beyond.

If you have any specific questions, I’ll be happy to try to answer them.

Lil

Thanks, Lil. I was curious as to whether other people who’ve been getting their kids really good interventions and skills acquisitions were also seeing the very good improvements that the author describes with her own child. It sounds very, very positive and hopeful but the author’s child, at the time of writing the book, was still only 10 years old. It would make sense to me that if the child gets great therapy, the neural pathways in the brain would be developed.

I have Sue Thompson’s “The Source for Nonverbal Learning Disorders”. Is that the same Susan Thompson? That book really explained this sort of kid to me very well a couple years back when I first encountered him in a tutoring session.

Joan,

Yes, it is the same Susan Thompson. My son was just diagnosed with NLD about 7 weeks ago - and I finally got some appropriate interventions (accommodations) for him at school last week.

My son was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, CAPD, and a disability in “written expression” last September. I’ve been asking the school sysytem for appropriate interventions and techniques ever since. So far, the system has provided none (except worksheets in the resource room), and I have had some services done privately through my insurance. I have also simply decided to tutor my son myself over the summer, to try to provide him with the active remediation he needs at this age. After that, I will look into the Lindamood Visualization/Verbalization program.

I’ll have to pick up Rondalyn’s book and read it - it sounds like it has some good information that I need to see. I have read a couple of articles by her, but nothing terribly in depth.

Have you been to the NLD on the Web! forum in Delphi? There are a lot of willing parents there! :)

Hi Joan,

There’s a lot I like in the book, but as with other books that are mostly about one child, there’s a lot that doesn’t fit My NLD’er quite as well. Plus, as you said, it ends with her son at 10 years old. Mine is 11 1/2, and we didn’t even learn about NLD until he was 9 1/2. I think that’s (unfortunately) the more common scenario.

My son has always been one of the quiet NLD kids, who has never been considered a behavior “problem”. He doesn’t melt down in school… If overwhelmed, he just sort of “freezes” and doesn’t do ANYTHING. I know at least as many parents of that sort of NLD kid as I do parents who report the kids who totally come unglued behaviorally at a young age. These quite ones tend not to get help as soon as the ones who act out. (They just get labeled as “lazy” instead!)

Even so, although I’m not an OT, nor do I have any formal educational training, I seem to have sort of instinctively (or else by dumb luck!!!) managed to provide the right settings, and the right kinds of activities for my son to help develop his weak areas as we build on his strengths even before we knew anything about NLD.

Our experience with educational settings has echoed Ms. Whitney’s. When our son has been in the right kind of very structured but flexible classroom with a nurturing but well organized teacher, you would hardly even guess he had a problem. In fact, these teachers find him delightful and “easy” to teach.

Teachers who are disorganized find him “lazy” or “inattentive”, and teachers who are rigid and overly demanding just get him so anxious and stressed that there is all sorts of emotional fall-out. This leads to him being called “oppositional” or now, in 5th grade, it is sometimes chalked up to “adolescent behavior”.

At least with my kid, environment and teaching staff are everything. And our percentages run very close to Ms. Whitney’s too. We’ve had 2 incredible, outstanding teachers, several who have tried hard and that we’ve been able to work with, and one who was absolutely horrendous. As you may remember, we moved him out of that class as a lost cause.

As far as my son is concerned, so far it seems to me that he can learn anything as long as it is presented in the right manner, and he is allowed to learn on his own time schedule. Pressuring him only shuts him down to the point that he learns nothing. I think he has a wonderful future ahead of him as long as we can get him through school emotionally intact. That’s my number one priority.

Karen

> I think he has a wonderful future ahead of
> him as long as we can get him through school emotionally
> intact.

Karen, I’ve always thought the same thing of most of the kids I tutor (as well as own son who had a tremendous struggle with reading/writing in school but is thriving as an adult). I like Mel Levine because that’s basically his philosophy as well.

I think, now that it’s being recognized as a real learning style, NLD is being diagnosed more often. All of a sudden, I’ve got a bunch of kids to begin working with, all of whom have received the same dx. very recently. I’ve using the LMB programs with some kids and it’s seemed to work fairly well. But I’m curious about so much, esp. about these kids as adolescents. How do they fare in school?

I well remember your struggles with your son’s teacher a little while back. He was in a horrible situation. My own son, while not NLD, had a teacher for two years who had him so terrified that he had a headache every morning of every schoolday those two years till the day we removed him permanently from her class. Best thing we ever did.

One of the kids I’ll be working with daily this summer sounds like your son. He too is very quiet, and freezes rather than acts out. He’s been variously dx’d as ADD, CAPD and now NLD. I think the truth is that nobody quite knows. He’s extremely concrete in his thinking, doesn’t “discover” anything on his own.

I’d love to hear your comments after you read the book.

Lil,

No, I haven’t been to that website but I will visit it. I’m in the midst of trying to really understand some of the kids I’ll be working with soon. I was hired to use the LMB programs with them. I’ve worked with other kids with NLD but I find that they’re all so different from each other. I was really curious as to how parents of kids with NLD saw this book - would love your comments after you have a read.

Hi Joan,

I HAVE read the book. It was interesting, and in many ways validating. Not unexpectedly, she heavily weights her interventions in the direction of OT.

While I am glad I bought it, I have to say for my personal situation it was the least useful of the 3 NLD books that came out this spring. (in large part because it _is_ geared toward interventions for kids younger than mine)

I _loved_ “Helping a Child with Nonverbal Learning Disorder or Asperger’s Syndrome: A Parent’s Guide” by Kathryn Stewart. She’s the headmaster of Orion School in California. (the only NLD/AS focused high school in the country) It is just packed with good ideas for NLD kids in their pre-teen, teen and young adult years.

I’m part way through Pam Tanguay’s new book, “Nonverbal Learning Disabilities at School”. The book has a touch of the same problem as Whitney’s book does, in that the emphasis is clearly slanted in the direction of her own experiences with her own child. But I think she does a better job of presenting other possible behavior patterns, and alternate interventions than Whitney does. And again, it includes a lot of interventions for older kids as well as the elementary school age group. It has a more empathetic, “parent” feel to it thatn Stewart’s book, again, what you’d expect considering onebook is written from the perspective of an educator and one from the perspective of a parent. I find both perspectives useful.

From a publishing standpoint, I think all three of the writers have a clear, easy to follow writing style. But all three books seem to have been pushed through the editing process too quickly. All could have benefitted from a little more polish at the editor/publisher level. The Whitney book, in particular is on coarse pulpy paper and doesn’t look like it’s going to stand up as a reference source over time.

Karen

Hello,

I would like to get to the Delphi Forum but the nldontheweb forum email address is down due to being hit with a virus. It says to keep trying back but it’s been a week.

If you could somehow either post my address to someone who manages the forum so I can get a password to it I would appreciate it.

Cori
[email protected]