My son's learning disability profile: help me understand him

By the way, he is 20 years old.

Visualization is an important part of many life skills that you mention that might be responsible for some of your son’s difficulties. On the reading bb there is a discussion about two different programs that help with this.

Attention, of course, could be an alternative cause or a contributing cause.

Beth

You mention sequencing. We had excellent results for my son’s sequencing problem with a program called interactive metronome.

It also helps with attention.

Your son is very gifted, I wonder if his anxiety prevents him from being able to attend. I see this with my son sometimes. If he feels pressured he just shuts down and can’t function at all.

You might want to search under gifted/ld or gifted/add.

People with gifts such as your son have very specific needs.

I have to tell you he is probably solving some very complex problem in his head rather than remembering where his car is.

He is also probably lost in thought on something very interesting when he meets people and can’t remember their name.

My IQ is high and this happens to me all the time. I would much rather sit and read a medical text or something challenging and avoid the mundane such as doing the dishes. I always forget little things. Sometimes I think I truely am add other times I just don’t know. I can remember very specific details on things that fascinate me but struggle to remember things that do not strike me as important.

If something interests me I can hyperfocus on it. When something grabs my attention I have to know everything there is to know about it.

It is very important for people like this to work in a field that is interesting to them. You can not put this square peg in a round hole. Help him find his passion.

Also pray that he marries an organized person. I did, and it has helped.

How is this impacting his life? Education?

My 13 yr old has the inattentive ADD dx and I definitely question it at times. Without a blood test for the disorder, how can a reasonable person not wonder at times??

But he is also LD and meds help him-for me, thats whats important. ADD is just the label that gets him what he needs

I drive past where I am supposed to turn on a regular basis and lose my car regularly. My mind is constantly running a scenario of some kind and, for some reason, getting in the car turns it on high.(yeah, scary, I know)
Age is definitely making it worse-LOL

Learning to visualize can help with memory but his digit span is awesome-I would expect that to be lower if he had memory and sequencing difficulties. It DOES point to attention

Writing down directions or learning to use a map more would help(my teens are terrible with maps-wish schools would spend less time on the climate in Kenya and more on geography life skills)

A gifted kid tends to think they should excel at EVERYTHING. They had that experience in the early years and its hard to now accept that they remember faces less than their roommate or have to ask twice about how to get to the stadium. They ASSUME there is something WRONG with them instead of just shrugging and going “oh, well, my strength is X and Eds strength is Y” What can I do to shore up my weaknesses?”

If hes in a strong college, he may also be shocked at no longer being the big fish in a small pond

My 19 yr old dropped out of a top engineering college after 3 months. Worked at a factory for 6 mo and decided THAT wasnt good either. Back to school at the community college and now THAT isnt working so he will be moving out next month and working full time. DH and I decided he needs to see just how far 6.50/hr goes :(

Its a rough age, especially for boys. Although it sure seems every other 19/20 year old out there is in college, getting straight As, and meeting their fiance(my son doesnt date yet)

Are meds helping(if hes on them)? Have you tried other dosages or types? I know there are some out there that would double duty with anxiety and ADD although the anxiety could be secondary, KWIM?

Can you elaborate more on social difficulties?

You write:

My son is an above average intelligence student that complains of difficulties in life outside of school and with general rote memory. The majority of his complaints seem to revolve around remembering real life events like where his car is parked, the plotline of movies and other things that happen sequentially such as driving directions.

This is me!

I *never* know where my car is parked. Yesterday I was tutoring a student in linear algebra; we went to a mall cafe and I carefully explained all the 3-D and higher dimension geometry, lines and planes in space, parallel and perpendicular in 3 and higher dimensions, all the diagrams — and then we got up to leave and he had to lead me to the door and I had to ask him if my car was in fact outside this particular door. I am not making this up. I have great spatial visualization, very flexible, able to see things from every angle — and it’s too flexible for real-world work; I have a hard time nailing down any one direction as preferable to another.
One person I know commented that he used to think he had the world’s worst sense of direction — until he met me.
Computer people have a saying “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature”. While this is a bit ironic, there is a point here. You can see it as a handicap and be depressed and angry about it; or you can see it as a skill and study 3-D geometry. You can be an angry depressed person with a spatial disability, or you can be an eccentric scientist with a weird but creative way of looking at space. I go for the second.

Over time and with a lot of effort I have trained myself to be quite good at dealing with driving directions. I probably expend ten times the mental energy that the average person does, but I’m now very good and it’s a matter of personal pride. I use a combination of visualization and memorization of landmarks, visualization and memorization of maps, writing down and memorizing the outline directions and visualizing them too in written form as well as reciting them verbally.
You can tell a person is doing advanced visualization because every time the hesitate to think their eyes roll up to the ceiling — be careful about this in driving, visualize in bits quickly.
I know I’m doing it right because when I give directions everybody (except the guy with the world’s second-worst sense of direction) finds where they are going.
This can all be taught. It takes time and concentration but a bright young person can do well — you just have to help bring the important things to the surface of the consciousness, point out what is important and what is not, and help develop some internal programs to deal with the issue (OK, I’m going to a new place — what do I have to remember about the street names, the landmarks, the turns? What are the connections to places I already know?) By the way, many people in giving directions give far too much detail and irrelevant detail — keep it simple, just the rough distances and turns, not every single building on the mile straightaway.

Movie plots — often lose me. I often don’t care, to be honest, and my mind goes somewhere else. Worse, I find people/faces/names hard to recognize or remember in general and I often can’t keep track of movies without a score card; if you’re supposed to recognize a character in disguise or a long-lost twin, I have no clue what is going on. If it’s a really good movie and you’re honestly interested, watch it two or three times until you see the connections.

Remembering faces — one of my weakest points. I am doing better with years and years of work on visualizing people (FAR more difficult than multi-dimensional geometry, pesky humans won’t stay in one place or shape), better as in one degree above totally hopeless. Find a career that doesn’t involve extensive social dealings with a lot of new people (clearly not a politician or insurance salesman). Learn to swallow your pride and say “I am so sorry, I have a terrible memory for names and faces, your name has slipped my mind”. The great majority of people will be pleased that you bother to ask, and the ensuing conversation will help the name stay in your mind better. I find that I remember people well when I have some sort of involvement with them. Memory tricks are a big fat zero, just another layer of confusion.

It is definitely important to accept your weaknesses and deal with them. Know you have strengths and use that to support your self-image, and then you can deal with the weaknesses without losing faith in yourself.

PS — marycas asked about social difficulties.

Well, imagine that you have a terrible flu that has disoriented you. You have no idea what time it is, you forget your own name, you forget where you are, your voice isn’t working right, and the slightest sound or light makes you jump. Now imagine that this goes on not for a week but for years and years.
People think you are ignoring them because you just don’t see them in the buzz of visual confusion in a public place. People get insulted because you don’t seem to remember them. People think you’re not interested in what they are saying because you lose track of a conversation. When you react naturally people say you’re too loud or inappropriate so you learn to keep it in; then the same people turn around and say you’re uncaring. You’re constantly being criticized for saying the wrong thing although everybody around you is saying the same or worse — you just seem to hit the wrong key. You find social groups exhausting so you don’t spend much time in groups. And there you have it, social misfit and withdrawal.

I don’t have any easy answers to this. For myself I live a very quiet life 360 days of the year and deal with people one at a time. My daughter I encouraged and led to get out more and to join in more, and she has a lot better social life than I ever did although she also is not a crowd person or outgoing with strangers.

I was also going to say that parking cars is a big problem for me also. I have a grey camry which turns out to be the most popular color of the most popular car. I used to have a bright green honda wagon which was unusual and it was much easier. I just have had to make a point of mentally remembering where I am parked. And I must admit I have wondered parking lots more times than I’d like to admit.

I also try to park in the same area when I go to the same store, which helps.

As some have suggested, he may not have come to terms with the fact that we all have to work harder at some things than others.

Beth

Your son sounds a lot like me! Similarly to others here I deal with the car problem by trying to park in the same spots as much as possible. I’ve also trained myself to stop and make a “strong” visual picture when I have to park elsewhere. I’m a great visualizer, but even I have to stop and concentrate on memorizing some things.

I used to be absolutely horrible at memorizing names, but now I’m just bad. An improvement! :-) What I do is use memory techniques like for my son’s friend Tyler we imagined him as a shoe salesman tying shoes (my son also has memory issues so I’ve taught him to use these types of tricks as well). Then I practice over and over. And every so often (like when I’m early in picking my son up from school and just waiting in the car without a book to read), I’ll occassionally think of people, aquaintances, kids in class, people I work with, etc… and practice recalling their names quickly.

I think the difficult thing about being really bright or gifted, is that one expects their memory to be perfect or automatic and sometimes even very brillant people need to practice using memory.

By the way, my son last tested with a very good digit span, but he still has plenty of memory difficulties.

I’ve never had my digit span tested. I could probably do quite well in the short term by using verbal rote and recitation. Although, when I was severely ill it was incredibly annoying because I couldn’t remember a phone number long enough to go to the phone and dial it; better now. In the long term I know I’m disastrous, I have reversals and substitutions and all sorts of things. I’m not sure what digit span tests but there are many other aspects to memory, both short and long term.