Parenting Children with Learning Disabilities

Subjects:

• Education » Special Education
• Family Resources » Child Care & Parenting
• Education » Guidance & Counseling

Reviews:

• [p]rovides a useful starting point for those in need of basic information and support.
  —Disability Resources Monthly March 2002

• Endorsement From Jane Holmes Bernstein
  Director, Neuropsychology Program, Department of Psychiatry
  Children's Hospital, Boston/Harvard Medical School: This is a book for parents. It is a book about the child with learning problems. It is, importantly, a book about balance in an arena fraught with anguish, anger, and accusation. It is about the balance between recognizing a real problem, but appreciating the whole child; between watching, but also listening; between using your own educated common sense, but also seeking specialist assistance; between promoting academic success, but also fostering emotional well-being; between helping, but also not helping so your child enjoys mastery and learns independence. The authors encourage self-advocacy but make it clear how good professionals can help. They address abstract topics but make them vividly and often poignantly alive in all too real examples. This is an intensely real, wonderfully balanced book full of empathy, wisdom and downright practical help. I recommend it highly to parents and to the professionals whose assistance they seek.
• Endorsement From Dorothy Ungerleider
  Founding President, Association of Educational Therapists
  author, Reading Writing, and Rage: Bravo to Drs. Adelizzi and Goss for giving us a book, at last, that we can recommend to parents without qualification! Only the experienced clinician's eye could have given us such a wide-angle view of the puzzles faced by help-seeking parents of individuals with learning disabilities. This sound, honest, comprehensive and comprehendible approach addresses the entire range of parents' questions: from diagnosis, to intervention techniques on all affected academic, language, and organizational issues, and finally to the emotional and social ramifications. In a positive, compassionate tone, the uncluttered text interweaves soundly researched information with examples of clients' personal stories. If you have only one book on your shelf as a reference, a support system, and a literary 'friend,' this should be the one. My only wish is that I had written it myself!

Table of Contents:

• Saturday's Child
• Are You Saturday's Child?
• Pieces of the Puzzle: Learning Deficits and Disabilities
• Diagnosis of Learning Disabilities
• Our Great Brain: Learning and Functioning
• The Socio-emotional Impact of Learning Disabilities on the Child
• The Helping Hand: What You Can Do to Help Your Child Learn
• The Spoken Word: Listening, Talking, and Silence
• The Written Word: Reading and Writing
• The Language of Math
• Tools of the Trade: Using Technology to Enhance Learning
• Navigating the System
• The Holistic Approach: Crunchy Granola and Wisdom for the Family
• Appendix