LD, ADHD didn't show up till age 4

Hello Jackson,
When my daughter was 4, I knew something was amiss. I could say, you’re 4, remember you are going in to the 4’s class. Ask her a few seconds later and she could not recall her age. (she knew it- she would hold up the correct fingers when questioned.) Although she spoke well, she could not find the words for things that I knew she knew. This was the single reason that I suspected a problem. She was evaluated first at 4, found to have language processing difficulty. She is now 6 1/2, entering first grade, her learning disability has been proven through testing, and is said to be dyslexic. She had a great deal of difficulty recalling the names of the letters and numbers despite superior intellingence. To this day, she cannot recall our last name at times.
So, yes, in our case I definately saw signs at the age of 4, enough to make me seek help. Prior to that, she spoke on time (“hot” at 8 mos), walked on time ( at 10 1/2 mos). interacted fine and was a dream of a baby. Even looking back, I saw nothing in her prior to about 4. That was our experience.

Well, Jackson, a learning disability is a discrepancy between IQ and achievement, so no one could look at an infant and know they were going to be LD. However, early speech/language delays can be a precursor to learning difficulties, so those may be recognizable before age 4.

Janis

For both of my LD boys, it was really not apparent until they floundered in Kindergarten. My older one with sight words, reversals and still to this day (age 10) can not tell you what “sound” a letter makes. Yet the school thinks he’s doing just fine.

My younger one had his first problems in K with making a sequence or a pattern. I tried to tell the teacher that his brother is LD, he is probably following in his footsteps. She did not agree and had him tested for color blindness. I just laughed when she told me he was not color blind.

Both were very normal boys as babies and toddlers. Actually did things early, so I really had no concerns until they hit school.

They are not ADD or ADHD but have attention issues in the classroom. Both score average on all of the surveys or evals for ADD. At home, attention is fine. Older one, this was not a problem till last year (age 9) but the younger one was getting points taken away in K for not being able to “stay on task.”

Now, temperment I could predict way before age 4. Neither have the tolerance for repetition nor the persistence for doing things till they get it right, unless of course it has to do with sports.

I hope you are not blaming yourself for not seeing it sooner? I think developmental problems are more evident before age 4, but from what I understand LDs tend to show up after being introduced to the school environment.

18 months when my #3 son became an escape artist and
safe cracker.

Nothing was off limits to him because of his abilities to
see in three dimensions. Luckily he never took the medicene
that he liberated from their child proof caps. He only drew
a blue arc flame from the socket once. He was only nude
once on his trips out the front door. And he always beat
me at putting things together because I had to read the
directions.

As a toddler he did not want to be read to, he did not
watch sesame street and spent most of his time helping
the beagle break into the vegetable garden.

He was spotted in kindergarten as being ‘different’
when he solved a puzzle activity in the most unique
way the teacher had ever seen in 20 years of teaching.
But I already knew that…

He is dyslexic, at 13 reads slowly at a fifth grade level
and is gifted in math and loves computers.

Anne

I agree with little lulu it is easier to spot problems if the child is “way off base”. My youngest son age 10 I noticed problems with before 1 year of age. He was very quiet, no babbling, hard to engage, content to be left alone. As he got older it got even easier to notice, he had head banging, spinning, rocking, humming, no eye contact, no speech or language by age 3. His older brother was a different story, we did not catch his problems until 1st grade, he had letter reversals, confused left and right, difficulty concentrating on academic tasks, difficulty with sounds in words, ect-but at the same time he could already draw in 3D, build things without instructions, solve problems in unique ways. The youngest received services starting at the age of 22 months and now functions close to grade level with some areas at grade level or above. His teachers credit his progress to our quick identification of the problem and not letting it go until he got in school. He was different and so off base how could we not notice? His older brother did not receive appropriatte services until much later and his progress was much slower. But now at age 14 despite his learning differences he is making in all regular ed freshman classes—so far.

Well, I think it just depends on their severity and whether you know what to look for.

Our son wasn’t diagnosed as ADHD until age 6 when he got a teacher that just couldn’t cope with his wandering the classroom and fidgeting. Looking back, I now know that his attention span was extremely short even as an infant, but as a first-time mom I had nothing to compare it to. His ADHD is only considered mild, and we just put him on behavior modification plans.

With our other son I only realized there was some type of learning issue when he still couldn’t read or write [anything readable] by age 6. But again, many signs were there much earlier, including speech and language issues as far back as age 3—I just didn’t recognize them for what they were. And I could kick myself for how clueless I was about it then. Just dumb enough to think that the teachers or the school would clue me in if there was an issue. (But then I found out that they would have never clued me in on the LD. Some kind of quota thing going on there - they would wait until parents specifically asked them to test—they wouldn’t initiate on their own. But that’s a whole ‘nother story that makes me furious so we won’t go there.)

Then at age10 I finally figured out that son two had ADHD also, only his was inattentive type. Hadn’t previously known this even existed, but I found it in a book I was reading. No teacher ever complained because he was never a behavior problem (although every report card at every grade level said needs improvement for staying on task). He was always sitting at his desk quietly, completely lost in his own world. He wasn’t getting classwork done but they attributed that to his writing LD (not to ADHD). But I had been going nuts for years at homework time because of his inability to stay focused (even when I was doing the writing). The ADHD meds (ritalin/concerta) were like a miracle cure for him. He could finally concentrate long enough to learn how to read, and how to do the math, and we finally started making some progress remediating the LDs. Two years later, he is a completely different person and succeeding in school past our wildest expectations.

The diagnostic criteria for ADHD says the symptoms must appear before age 7, so I’m sure there are plenty of cases where it is not diagnosed until elementary school or even later. But usually looking back you can see issues which hadn’t been recognized long before then.

At 6 months I read my son a sad book. He cried, not in the bwah baby way but with really empathy. My mom stood shocked and then stated with her pronounced Irish brogue, “This child has been here before.”

When he was 1 year old he spoke in sentences.

He was in daycare starting at age 1. I will still, even know, pull out the very specific report cards that proclaim his fine motor skill were excellent, he pays attention well, and was just an all around joy.
When he was 2 he asked for only musical instuments for Christmas. When he was 3 he would insist I read him a high school level book on the orchestra.

Around 3.5 he would tell me about the other time he was here and he had a robot suit and fought in a war. He would say you know like metal all around my body. He said that God sent him back but that his friends couldn’t come. There were many converstations like this. I wish I wrote them all down.

I know that last part makes me sound like a flake but it really happened and I do believe it could just have been his extreme imagination. This kid would amaze everyone around him with his vocabulary and his ideas. His imagination was always profound.

He now struggles in school, has bilateral motor dyspraxia, in and out attention, visual perception deficits, sequencing deficits. The fine motor issues became apparent in preschool and he never really enjoyed visual activities like puzzles, coloring, not even TV.
Kindergarten really rocked our world.

He did have Lyme disease at the age of 3 but it was caught and treated early.

PS. My nephew didn’t speak until the age of 3. I used to think, “The poor boy has such a terrible deficit.”
My nephew is now 5 th and is always the top kid in his class, MVP of baseball and unbelievably sweet but a little shy.

It all seems just a little strange.

This is an interesting question.For me, my two boys, during kindergarten, became very evident that there was a problem. Now for my younger son,things were looked at earlier,because of having an older brother,BUT. The more I learned about LD,the more I researched,the more I seemed to be able to pick a young child with flags out of a crowd. My boys giftedness was what I remembered when they were toddlers,the questions they would ask ,observations,etc. But I got to tell you,a month or so,my kid found video’s of when they were young. One was my oldest’s four year old birthday,and the other was a visit with santa claus at two and three. Oh MY GAWD,I was absolutely appalled at the flags that were there that I never recognized before! The way they seem to not really understand language. You could see the processing difficulties. It was really strange,because I had a whole other rememberance of both events,then what I was watching. I suppose it is all about experiencing things and learning what to look for. Unfortunately,I just hadn’t learned enough at the time.

We were looking at videos of a family reunion when my son was 4. He seemed so young—so immature. He was already receiving speech services through the school district at that point. But I still thought that was all that was going on. I think you get used to what your kids are—and learn to respond to them. When you see a video, it is like you are seeing them for the first time. Also, in the mean time, we have all learned more than we would ever want to know about LD.

Beth