NVLD / EF & Attention Issues (to SueJ)

That is such a good question. I hope someone can answer you because we have similar issues with my son. He also spaces out when he’s feeling anxious, which further confuses the issue.

We were describing some of my son’s social issues to his psychiatrist. My son clearly knows what ‘s going on around him but doesn’t always respond appropriately. The doctor described much like you do - the info . is coming in, but my son doesn’t know how to process it and produce the appropriate output, which is different than not getting the info. in in the first place.

I believe that this is, in MY child, NOT ADD. When the work ‘clicks’, he is fine — no attentional problems. When the work doesn’t — at home or at school, including when working one-on-one when a topic is new or ‘hard’, the ‘add-like’ behaviours kick in again. He is much better at pulling himself back than he used to be…but that’s the difference between a 5th grader and a 2nd or third grader! (He is also a classic daydreamer, who dislikes school cuz it is not HIS agenda, and he has plenty going on — constantly writing stories and comix, designing future video games, making up alternate worlds which will be someday used in games and stories, acting out his stories, etc, etc.)

School, of course, said ADD, smiling gently at my protest that there was something MORE and different — but the resource teacher in the summer program I took him to agreed with me — that his problem is his learning difficulties (visual dyslexia and ‘left handed thinker’, plus HATES academics!) NOT attentional. Since she got him reading in 6 weeks after 9 mos of absolute failure, I decided her opinion would count…His test scores 3 months later bore this out — though school STILL preferred to try to convince me he was ADD — now, in Grade 5, I am vindicated. Over the years, everything I have seen and read has only made me more convinced of the difference. It is subtle, yet profound, in my opinion, and very important that you decide where your kiddo fits through careful research and, in the end, gut instinct.

It is a hard call… among many others, Patti M’s description of her child helped me greatly to tell the difference and bolstered my ability to ignore the school and keep on keeping on — because her descriptions of ‘TRUE ADD’ helped me to see that my child did NOT fit the profile.

“making up alternate worlds which will be someday used in games and stories, acting out his stories,”

That is my kid. He plans to found and run a video game making company.

Off topic question for you Ellizabeth - how does he do socially? My son would like nothing better than to act out video games , and bless him, so far he’s found enough kids that like that stuff too that he has playmates. But I do worry that the kids will find it weird or babyish?

I wouldn’t be so sure about the creative ones not being ADD….your son’s are still young yet… wait until high school hits…that is when controlling imagination while in class and focusing in 6 different classes, staying on topic and on task, not procrastinating on assignments, scheduling assignments hits the fan big time.

My ADD-Inattentive son wasn’t diagnosed with ADD until 9th grade…he couldn’t keep track of everything…his classes, his homework, his chores, etc…He was falling apart. The signs were always there in elementary school, middle school, he skated by with A’s and B’s putting forth the minimum effort… but with High school the minimum inattentive procrastination king..wasn’t enough and as more was demanded of him, the harder it became.

I felt bad that I didn’t put it together sooner… :oops: now he has these ingrained inattentive behaviors/habits that I wished I had gotten ahold of, as I did with his sister… It is a hard thing to deal with retraining the brain to ditch old inattentive ways…..and guess what…he is artistic, loves video games, writes incredible stories, poetry and does his own illustrations…He always was building on his imagination…Just look at the perimeters of his notes in his classes off meds…they speak volumes… :?

[quote=”Elizabeth TO”]I believe that this is, in MY child, NOT ADD. When the work ‘clicks’, he is fine — no attentional problems. When the work doesn’t — at home or at school, including when working one-on-one when a topic is new or ‘hard’, the ‘add-like’ behaviours kick in again.

You know your child best, but this does sound quite like ADHD. No issues when he’s getting it and he doesn’t have to struggle to maintain mental effort, but problems when things are new or hard. Kids with ADHD have great difficulty with sustaining effort when things are not interesting or easy for them. They have lots of issues with easy frustration when they are unsure or being pressed to do things they perceive as hard. Again, as his mom you are in the best position to judge this, but if this gets worse as he gets older you might consider an ADHD evaluation.

I think constantly having to “switch gears” is difficult for my daughter, which may point toward ADD again, but like w/ almost every symptom, I wouldn’t doubt that it overlaps w/ some other category of diagnoses as well!

When I was in school, I remember wishing I could just cover one “serious” subject at a time (throw in a couple “specials” for variety!), until we’d completed the requirements for the year. Once we were finished w/ Science, we’d move on to Social Studies, Math or English, for instance.

I imagine there are many good reasons why the school system is NOT structured this way, and it was only the daydream of a junior/high school student to do that, but I think the transitions were difficult for me as well. Doing things the way that they do, students just have that many more books to worry about dragging around at any given point in time; that many more competing quizzes, projects & homework assignments; and so forth — AGH! It seems like too much to juggle, at times.

I always wondered why they couldn’t just do like they do during an intense summer-school course. It always seemed so much easier to get through those. I felt like I was practically “stealing” the credits!

One rather important quesiton is whether you did better with the intensity becfause you could just stuff stuff into short term memory, brute -force your way through it… and then forget it all.

Experience with intensive HS courses:

I worked for a while correcting correspondence papers for the provincial government’s correspondence school, at the high school level. These were planned for kids in such remote rural areas that homeschooling was the only option, kids in small high schools that couldn’t offer many options, kids who were ill and housebound, etc. The required Grade 8 guidance course clearly set out organizing a good homeschooling plan, with a specific study and work area, regular breaks, and a schedule that had you do every subject every day. Each course had a text and ten papers, planned to be sent in and corrected and sent back with commentary once a month, and four exams, planned to be spread over the year. Almost all courses were available for all grades, including even French and Latin and physics and creative writing (all of which I marked), among others. It looked like a really good organization.

Well, two things went wrong with this program.

First an awful lot of kids signed up for the courses were not the intended population at all; a lot of kids who were expelled from the regular schools signed up for correspondence instead so they wouldn’t “lose the year” and others just decided it would be easier. These were not success-oriented students to begin with and they didn’t last long.

But far worse, the director of the correspondence office got the bright idea of doing things “efficiently” Instead of giving the courses as planned, all at once, a little developed in each topic every day, he actively encouraged students to take only one course at a time, and he said, even to the students, that they could just fill in all ten papers in a week sitting at the kitchen table — as if this was a good thing??
As markers, we were supposed to make comments and suggestions on the work, the idea being that each paper would get a little better all year. Well, with his system of course the kid handed in all the papers and the tests for the course in one package and just passed or failed, no feedback.

I sent back a lot of senior creative writing papers to be re-written because they were just so bad that they couldn’t be graded, didn’t even do the assignment given (the assignment on formal poetry was supposed to be done with a planned rhythmic pattern and rhyme scheme — I felt that at a minimum there should at least be a consistent number of syllables … and the assignment on writing a story, I thought that it should be more than five paragraphs long, and at least the characters should have identities, not just He …) and boy did I catch flak for that, interfering with the nice plans of killing high school in a month.

End result? Well, let’s face it, there is a lot of review and overlap between grade 7 and Grade 8, so most of the kids passed Grade 8 just on what they knew before, although the average mark hovered around a C-.
Never having learned anything in Grade 8, and still “efficiently” processing paper with no actual learning, in Grade 9 they dropped like flies. We had hundreds of students in Grades 8 and 9 and maybe a few dozen total in the upper grades, and those were mostly in small schools taking an option, working on a daily schedule with supervision.
There was a newspaper article after I had done this job for a year or two, celebrating the ONLY student in the northern half of the province who had EVER graduated by taking all of her high school by correspondence. Hmmm, a school that takes in hundreds of students every year and only graduates one in a decade — methinks this system may have had some problems.

Yes, you can rush through material intensively. I’ve taken a few summer courses myself, and taught a few. Retention of the material is *always* a problem. You just don’t have the time to process it into long-term memory. In courses like college math, which I’ve tried to teach in summer school, there are also problems of maintaining attention to detail over a long class and of absorbing a lot of new concepts at once. If you get teachers in private, most of them will admit that their summer-school courses just don’t teach as effectively as courses where there is time to spread the material out and absorb it gradually. In fact we ran into this problem in my daughter’s high school where they semesterized math and English and science in Grades 9 and 10, and she got really watered-down courses because they simply couldn’t cover as much material; you just can’t keep the class’s attention for the full 90 minutes. The administration loved it because it made scheduling easier and saved money on double use of texts, but it was bad for the learning process.

On the other hand, there are folks who struggle with short-term memory who really do better with complete immersion — but complete, thorough immersion (with a dose or five of accountability along the way). These are the ones who sort ofneed to “season” their brains for a while… then things cook nicely, and stick; they do the little at a time stuff superficially, without making connections to other things, so it doesn’t stick.

It’s a question of where the attention issue is breaking down — let’s face it, there are *lots* of reasons why a person wouldn’t be able to pay attention.
I think executive function disorders and ADHD have a *LOT* of overlap in the diagnoses because they’re going to look essentially the same. Your brain doesn’t do that automatic filtering of “this matters;” “this doesn’t.” So when you’re doing your algebra work, you give equal attention to the interesting font in the graphic in the word problems as you do to the numbers in the problem. You multiply numebrs because you can. Slowing down the mind to figure out whether you should multiply or not and why… oh, that’s a toughie. Is it ADHD? Lack of the right chemicals to attend to the right things? Or does the brain not know how to filter out the imprtant stuff? I’m not sure which is happening with this person but it’s amazing to watch.

Ummm, urr, well, but I DO pay attention to the graphics of the font while I am doing algebra … took a correcpondence course once for which the professor had hand-written the notes and I literally could not study it because his printing/writing was so irritatingly bad … when I visualize words they are on a white screen in black letters, Lord help me in Century Schoolbook font, I do not make this up …

Hmmm…. and we all know neither of us has any attention or executive function issues, right? :-)

I’ll never forget talking to you in person at the IDA conference…when all of the sudden half way through my hyper jabbering about literacy :lol: I realized you were listening to a conversation at another table…and me at the same time…How you can do that I’ll never know… :roll:

“How you can do that I’ll never know…”

Most likely because this person was never listening to you from the start…

Oh, I don’t know. In high school I used to read novels in the back of the room and be able to participate in class discussion at the same time.

Some of us are awfully good at dividing our attention. It is a talent that is very useful for motherhood.

Beth

It’s a hyperacuity to verbal stimuli thing ;) (tho’ it doesn’t have to be verbal… how can people *not* know what music’s playing in the background or when somebody’s breathing changes… and then they want to know how can I *not* see that clutter…. ah, humanity and its foibles!)

I don’t have that “talent” of dividing my auditory attention. :oops: It is too hard…for me to concentrate and listen to auditory information and probably because of my CAPD/ADD co-morbidity. I have a hard time following the TV without closed captioning. It is too hard for me to catch all the nuances of the jokes and language.. However, if I have an assistive listening device I do much better in multi-tasking visually with the auditory support…but not auditorially only as that is my weakest link.. :lol:

At an IEP meeting recently where I was the reporting SLP…. I used a micro-link ALD and put the transmitter in the middle of the huge table and I heard everything without straining. I was on task more-so than the person taking notes for the meeting…as I was corrected her when she got the notes wrong.. :roll:

Ii don’t really have the talent, either — there was some word I heard over there that caught my ear and I tuned in long enough to figure I should go over and chat with them later. I never did learn to get distracted without it showing :)

My daughter claims that she can run several auditory channels simultaneously; she is very musically and linguistically talented so I believe her. On the other hand she can’t read with a TV or conversation in the room.
I on the other hand can read, maintain a conversation, and keep tabs on the TV news or a comedy at the same time, as long as they are all on different channels — auditory for conversation, visual for TV, and taking breaks on the visual to go back to the book. Most people talk so darned s-l-o-w-l-y anyway, you can fit a lot in around the pauses … (Told you I was hyper) . .. meetings drive me up a wall until I’m hanging from the ceiling by my claws.

It’s that “slowness” that is how I do it, too — you break off in between andattend to other things.
People have accused me ofbeing “patient” with my students. Silliness — I’m extremely engaged in observing what they’re saying, their body language, etc, and coming up with thirteen hypotheses to test as far as where their thinking is going. It’s not patience at all — if I were just *waiting* for something I’d have to have a book :)

the attention issues from the LD issues, or at least discuss it intelligently, when no matter HOW many ways my child does NOT fit the ‘ADHD’ or ‘ADD’ profile, I still must listen to people who reply to my posts to say ‘that sure sounds like ADHD’??? I could go on for HOURS about why he doesn’t even come close — in fact the preference for interesting occupations is probably the ONLY way he does fit the profile — yet some people are SO SURE.

WHY? What factor is there in it ALWAYS being ADHD? HOW is that helpful, in a thread where we are discussing the DIFFERENCE, does it advance the discussion to fixate on that point?

BTW, though I don’t have much post time and therefore my posts are often less than perfectly clear and informative, the vindication in Grade 5 is my son’s continuing IMPROVEMENT in ability to attend to oral instruction, copy from the board, get his work done (including the work he does NOT PREFER) without prompts — THIS is what is telling me I am right and he is NOT ADD or ADHD. If you want to argue he is ‘borderline’, then we are MOSTLY borderline and so where do you draw the line? It is either a DISORDER or it ISN’T…go to the CHADD site, they have some GREAT stuff there, Guest!

Although my son has been known to be (on occasion) silly, poorly behaved, hyperactive, inattentive, and absent-minded, outside of school he has these traits at a level that is DEVELOPMENTALLY APPROPRIATE. With ten years of active sunday school teaching/cub scout leadering, I AM qualified to judge — and yes, at a recent camp of 20 kids, 6 were med’d so I DO have some ‘true ADD/ADHD’rs’ to compare him to…again, check the CHADD site for some effective criteria in determining the difference.

Rant over, sorry folks! Return to essential discussion, and apologies to the thread-starter for any unintentional hijacking!
Back to our important discussion:

Attention issues vs. Learning Issues: I think this is an essential question for every parent — it seems to me that the remediation question can’t be answered unless you clarify, for your child, to what extent attentional issues are impacting the child’s learning.

My take is that if the ATTENTION is the problem, you must fix that before remediation can help. If the LEARNING ISSUES are the problem you must find the right type of /teaching remediation but a pill ain’t gonna do it, even if the child has BOTH issues so that a pill helps some. Since I believe we should be, as a society, FAR MORE cautious about who gets the ‘Vitamin R’, I think this is an essential discussion…I’ve solved it for MY CHILD, but obviously others are still in their learning/decision curve…

It bothers me that parents seem to get really exercised when it is suggested that ADHD is even a possibility in their child. Why is that? Its not like its a curse or something to be ashamed about. Listen up parents, your child can have only borderline readings on the typical ADHD scales but still have ADHD that is truly disabling. That a child does not fit all of the items on a general list does not mean he doesn’t have ADHD. That you as a parent don’t always observe the same behaviors in your child does not mean he is free of ADHD. LD and ADHD can look similar, but if you are addressing the LD and you are still seeing the inattentive (or failure of perseverance) behaviors, an evaluation is most definitely warranted. Some parents get so up in arms at the thought that they don’t get their kid looked at by someone who knows from ADHD. That just leads to suffering for the child. Its not fair to the child to withhold an evaluation out of fear. If everybody is telling you that your kid is acting in ways that sound a lot like ADHD, then get that kid to someone who knows how to distinguish between LD and ADHD. Head in the sand is simply unacceptable.

You can also have behaviors *well* into the ADHD scales — because yhou are not able to attend to things in a normal fashion — but the root cause may not be ADHD. At least in this thread ADHD hasn’t been considered a curse — just not a correct diagnosis, and for plausible reasons. THis parent is exercised because of responses like “well, even if you are on the borderline, it still might be ADHD” — the old “if you don’t admit you have it, you’re obviously in denial — and the more you defendyourself, obviosuly the more deep your denial” argument that *does* get folks exercised :-)

Yeah, I always used to get screamed at for being “clumsy”. People especially in gym class would have gladly called me stupid too, but luckily my academic success precluded that. Well, it turns out I am not “clumsy” at all — in fact I participate in several sports and became an expert downhill skier and member of the ski patrol. Fact is, I am 90% blind in my left eye, sever amblyopia made far worse by misdaignosis by untrained and misguided people with eye charts (I am *far* sighted — of course I’m a whiz at the eye charts. Doesn’t mean I can focus eyes together, especially close.)
If I had been educated for “clumsiness” with all sorts of physical and occupational therapy, it might have done some good, but the results would have necessarily been very limited. What actually turned things around was finally getting to a professional ophthamologist who screamed that I should have had glasses for years. Thirty-five years later I still go back to him to make my glasses properly with a tricky prescription.

Making diagnoses on a few observed behaviours is very very dangerous!! Trying to force diagnoses on people, and being unpleasant and accusing them of denial, is not only dangerous, it is treading on practicing medicine without a license. It can also be cruel.

No harm in suggesting and discussing, in as tactful a manner as you can, but it’s a good idea to draw the line at suggesting and asking.

This is why you have to go to a real doctor to get a diagnosis, why the doctor does all those long and expensive tests, why it costs a whole bunch of money — you have to do things right and rule out various possibilities and rule in others. And also this is why diagnoses are rarely black and white 100% but are stated in terms of probablilies and possibilities.

Reality is messy. Too many variables.

UNDERSTOOD!!! Guest, Sue J has hit it exactly on the head — I am exorcised because I have spent SO MUCH TIME trying to get my kid WHAT HE NEEDS…and NOT what he doesn’t need!!! A useless wrong dx of a truly debilitating disorder (when untreated) is just that — USELESS! And I’ll tell you, in my opinion, seeing ADHD ‘everywhere’ on a wide spectrum serves to devalue the dx for those kiddos who BADLY need the understanding and accomodations that come with it — so I truly DO NOT believe it should be given unless function truly qualifies as ‘disorder’.

As this thread illustrates, ALL HUMANS at times are inattentive, spacy, daydreamy, lazy, forgetful — this does not make us ADD or ADHD, even if our behaviours/level of function on some days would warrant a DX!

There are some people in denial — I know it cuz I’ve met them. And some people who suffer from terminal ignorance, and ‘the branch does not fall far from the tree’, in other words the kiddo has problems — and the mama/papa have the same problems, and therefore are finding it hard to understand that their kiddo really IS different. But that is far from my situation, and blindly applying one dx to all kiddos who exhibit similar behaviours is just plain stupid. NOR does it serve children well! ESPECIALLY when an educated parent is trying to help another to tease out ‘what is really happening’ with their child in order to HELP their child in the most efficient way…

The wonderful resource teacher I took my son to after 9 mos of grade 1 failure was intelligent and experienced enough to listen to me, unlike my son’s school. A key point to her philosophy was that she began our first meeting (after one week) by saying ‘I see many ‘ADD-like behaviours’, but then she listened to what I call my ‘argument for visual dyslexia’ and agreed to meet again, once she had had a chance to work with him. SHE LISTENED, and went to see for herself…

We met 4 weeks later and she agreed with me totally — she is the one who gave me the strength to stand against the school’s pressure and argue for my child. Not to mention getting him to begin READING at a level where I was competent to continue guiding him!!! But this is why she agreed with me — she KNEW that an ADD child would NOT be ‘cured’ by 4 weeks of direct, explicit, phonics instruction.

I often wonder — if I had just listened to his Gr. 1 teacher and seen the pediatrician she recommended — instead of taking him (she was horrified by my plan)) to ‘summer school’ and the wonderful Mrs. M (a teacher of your sort, Sue J!) — WOULD He be currently devouring the Lemony Snicket series concurrent with Bionicle novels and Animorphs (whenever he can get his hands on a new volume)? WOULD he read for pleasure (on grade level!) an average of 2 hours a day? WOULD his fifth grade teacher be telling me he is one of the top readers in the class, based both on assessments of reading aloud and written responses to material silently read??? Not to mention WOULD he also be happy, healthy, and socially well adjusted?

Or would I have an unhappy, rebellious child, barely reading but suffering all sorts of trouble from the effects of inappropriate medication due to the incorrect dx of a disorder he does not have — not to mention a terrible burden of illiteracy that would take a Victoria or a Sue J a few YEARS of private tuition to straighten out, if at all…trust me, the school did NOT advise me to come here, educate myself, have him tutored….they are not ogres, just MISGUIDED…and convinced that ALL children who stare into the fishtank and don’t learn are ADD…

What do you say, Guest — does my reaction make any sense now? I am sure you posted with good intentions, but they were not useful — forgive me for not using more honey in conveying my disagreement with your comments, but I get a wee bit emotional where my kid’s well-being is at stake.

And in case you think I’m one-sided, I would get just as emotional if someone told a ‘truly-ADD/ADHD’ child’s parent that ‘Meds were not appropriate and amounted to child abuse’… I have watched several of my Cubs since age 5-6, who are now 10-11, for whom failure to give meds would mean a terribly unhappy, unsuccessful child who does not manage to function appropriately at HOME, at SCHOOL, at CUBS, or at PLAY…

But Elizabeth TO have you had your child actually checked to rule out ADHD or are you rejecting that possibility because you think the diagnosis is too easily made and ritalin is too often prescribed? And I don’t mean by your pediatrician either. I’m talking about a real specialist. You may think I’m mean, but you should see what happens when kids who can compensate and who get some help but not enough grow up to be. My husband is an example: supersmart, never hyperactive, did pretty well in school, some attention paid to fixing handwriting and reading but nothing done for his inattentive ADHD. He grew up to be a guy who suffered repeated bouts of major depression, felt that he was less worthy than everyone else, could not understand why he could not keep it all together, even when he was working as hard as he could. When he finally as an adult got his ADHD diagnosed, the difference in how he felt was remarkable and when he got it treated, it was even more remarkable. You may think “vitamin R” comments are funny, but believe me, they are not. You certainly might be right that your child’s issues are not caused by ADHD, but what is the problem with getting it checked out?

Hey, we’ll have no exorcisms here :) Now I’m going to go get exercise!

If the attention issues go away when other issues are addressed, then one of my over-40 studetns could tell you “what’s wrong with checking it thoroughly?” He recalls the feeling being shuffled from one “specialist” to another, feeling like there must be something really screwed up about him, for all this testing and examining and questioning to be happening. He *is* dyslexic and ADHD… but the emotional baggage is real.

There’s a real tendency for us not to wish our hard times on anyone else — but we all have different hard times.

Now let me tell you about mine… oh, no, that’s right, I”m going to go get exercise. Where’s that helmet???

No, Guest — I don’t think you’re mean — just different. Our philosophies re raising children are worlds apart — sorry for arguing with you, I should have thought ahead to that before replying. And, of course, it is impossible for you to know me or my child or anything about our relationship/lives even given my lengthy replies, which is why I should have kept my mouth shut! I apologize to the original poster for taking her thread off topic…

I realize now that your hubby’s painful past prompts you to post, in order to save others the same sadness — wish I’d thought of that before posting my first reply. I also traveled the school system as ‘gifted/misfit/underachiever’, and this influences my choices for my son. I am rather the opposite of the ‘in denial’ parent — more like I have BEEN where I don’t want my son to go, and am quite convinced that we are on the right road to avoid that painful journey. Hence my over-reaction to your comments! Be assured that if I saw signs of depression/maladjustment or unhappiness in my child I would ACT and if a neuropsych evaluation was warranted I’d get one. But thanks for your concern on our behalf!

Best regards,
Elizabeth

On this subject.

My son would definitely have met the criterial for adhd if I had him diagnosed by a professional when he was younger.

I am glad I developed an understanding of his specific deficits and got them addressed while he was still young. I shunned broad lables and still do.

Being the open minded, leave no stone unturned parent that I am, I actually mentioned adhd at our final IEP meeting and got a very weird look from his teacher. What a difference a little real help makes?

You know it is easy to see in others what is in your own little world and for that reason I try not to see visual motor deficits in every child I meet.

Elizabeth, I know you have left no stone unturned too!

And not just cuz you’re chiming in to agree, either, LOL!

Linda F said: “You know it is easy to see in others what is in your own little world and for that reason I try not to see visual motor deficits in every child I meet.”

THIS is SO TRUE — and we all should guard against it. I think the trick for ‘us parents’ is to present a post as Linda does — ‘In my child’s case…’, going on to describe your child, their problems and experiences, but NOT to give advice or opinions on the child of OTHERS.

It is a thin line, but very important — I present my experience to let the OTHER parent analyse and make judgements — my judgement about someone else’s kid is NOT valid.

As much as the schools sometimes try to convince us otherwise, we are in the end the true experts when it comes to OUR children.