It occurred to me, as I was preparing for my talk at the Homeschooling Children with Special Needs Summit, that parenting a child with learning differences is like riding a seesaw. It’s all about maintaining balance. When you push on the right side, you need to make sure to push on the left side, to get the seesaw back to the middle.
What are the two sides in parenting a child with learning differences? On the one side is acceptance – unconditional acceptance of your child, just the way he or she is, without trying to change them. On the other side is remediation – providing your child with all the help they need to learn and grow and reach their full potential.
As you might have noticed, there is a bit of a contradiction there. You are not trying to change your child, yet you are extending much effort and energy to help them overcome their challenges and, in effect, be able to function in the world just as well as people without learning differences.
Well, life is full of contradictions… Much of life doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. Our children certainly don’t.
More to the point, when we help our children learn, we do exactly that – we help them. We are not trying to fit them into a mold and force them to be someone they are not. To the contrary, we are helping our children emerge from their cocoons and reveal to the world, and to themselves, who they already are and were always meant to be.
This might sound like a play on words, but this distinction is actually very important. Our goal is not to fundamentally change our children. We are not working against them. Rather, we are on the same team as our kids, and we are working together with them.
Children have an innate desire to learn. A struggling reader wants to be able to read and enjoy books in the same way as their siblings or friends. However, they need to learn in a different way – a way that works for them.
This is not to say that it’s going to be easy. Another contradiction in life is that children might need something desperately yet resist it and complain about it to no end. And we as parents need to understand that something that might seem easy to us is really really hard for them. They need our empathy. They need us to be on their side and to support them through their challenges.
Which brings us back to acceptance. None of us know our children’s potential. Their areas of struggle might eventually turn into their greatest strengths. There is no reason to place artificial limits on their dreams and aspirations.
At the same time, we as parents need to recognize and accept our children’s current limitations. Perhaps they will eventually outgrow them. Perhaps not. Life would be boring if we could predict the future. But what we do know is that right now, at this stage in their lives, our children need accommodations that will enable them to do anything they would like to do.
These accommodations may include audiobooks, video-based curriculum, speech-to-text software, or simply you, the parent, reading aloud to your child or serving as their scribe. Do whatever it takes to help your child pursue their interests, learn, and grow.
And that brings us back to the seesaw. We need to maintain balance between helping our children through their areas of struggle in a consistent and effective way and, at the same time, providing them with accommodations so that they can circumvent their areas of struggle and follow their dreams.
For more on seesaw parenting, check out my talk, Parenting Children with Learning Differences, at the Homeschooling Children with Special Needs Summit at Digital Homeschool Convention. Even though the summit is over, all the recordings are available now, to watch at your convenience.
