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4 Videos That Put You in Your Child’s Shoes
You know your child is having difficulties, but are you sure you understand just how much of your child’s day is impacted?
I thought I did, but I was wrong. At my son’s first IEP meeting, a teacher recommended I watch the F.A.T. City video. F.A.T. stands for Frustration, Anxiety, and Tension.
The video showed Rick Lavoie vividly what struggling students go through in class. It was shocking. I really had no idea.
I saw right away that we weren’t doing nearly enough to help our son. It’s not just about catching up eventually. It also has to be about his quality of life today. The sooner we can help our child have an easier day, the better.
Until that video, we had been supporting our child at home with tutors and speech therapists, but basically were relying on the school and nature – hopefully, he would grow out of it. That video changed our mindset. It led to a search for interventions.
Since founding Gemm Learning, other videos have come to my attention, each adding to the overall picture.
Here are those videos.
F.A.T. City (Frustration, Anxiety, Tension)
This is possibly the most compelling video ever made on learning. It explains why parents need to be aware of their children’s difficulties and take action.
It shows how miserable it is for anyone, including my child, to process at 30mph in a world that is moving at 60mph. Rick Lavoie runs a classroom of teachers and shows them what it’s like to be half a step behind the class all day long.
The moderator of this class, Rick Lavoie, has since created a series of videos and books on various aspects of life affected by a learning difficulty. This includes a second video workshop, “The Last One Picked … First One Picked On, Learning Disabilities and Social Skills,” and a book called “It’s So Much Work to Be Your Friend: Helping the Child with Learning Disabilities Find Social Success.”
Here is the first workshop called “How Difficult Can This Be?” While APD and dyslexia are not named in this video, they are the main culprits.
Reading Shame (6 minute video)
This is a video about the embarrassment many children (and adults) feel about their inability to read and the extreme lengths they will go to just to avoid reading. The Children of the Code Project is a not-for-profit formed in 2008 to draw attention to the challenges involved in learning to read and unscrambling the “code.”
The website has a wealth of short learning videos explaining why reading is challenging. It then describes the avoidance behaviors and shame often felt by children who are struggling to learn to read or who feel they are figuring out the “code” quickly enough to please their parents and teachers.
This video uses anecdotes from well-known learning specialists and scientists to describe that shame.
Why Reading Is So Difficult (6-minute video)
Here is a video by a group of cognitive researchers and learning specialists that describes why reading is so difficult.
My takeaways are that reading is a seriously challenging task that requires, at a minimum, mature language processing and the capacity to navigate the complexities of English rules and conventions.
In Finland and other countries that rank ahead of the US on international reading tables, children start reading at age 7. This video doesn’t mention this, but it makes a compelling case for delaying learning to read until later in life—a forced early start, which unfortunately is becoming more common in the US, risks a lifetime hate affair with reading.
Think About The Brain As A Muscle (3 minute video)
After the F.A.T. City workshop video I started looking for cycle-breaking interventions.
I saw there were many ways to spend thousands of dollars on an evaluation and plentiful choices for tutoring or special schools that help people deal with the consequences of learning disabilities.
However, most of them are ways to add more of the same – added instruction on the theory that the problem with the instruction is that it’s not repeated enough. That struck me as wishful thinking, and it wasn’t helping my son.
Eventually, I learned about the world of brain-training programs that rely on brain plasticity. They treat the brain like a muscle. Exercises can activate new neural pathways to fill in learning gaps just as physical therapy can nurse a sore shoulder back to health. In this world of interventions, Fast ForWord – provided by Gemm Learning – is respected as the program that proves the case of brain plasticity. It is actually the most researched reading software program in the world.
This video by Dr. Don Elger uses physical skill anecdotes to explain how the brain changes. He compares how to build biological skills and shows how the same process can support cognitive and learning skills. Among other things, it shows how practical and real brain change can be.
It backs up the results seen by Fast ForWord and other brain-based software that have consistently shown dramatic gains in a short period of time.
Next Steps
These videos, especially the F.A.T. City Workshop, are a lot to handle for parents of struggling learners, especially if you had no learning difficulties as a child.
If any of the behaviors in these videos resonate, think about what you can do. If you have a diagnosis that relates to auditory processing or reading delays, including dyslexia, Fast ForWord by Gemm Learning is worth checking out.
If your child has ADHD, it’s more complicated depending on the source of the attention issues. Here is a rundown of ADHD programs without meds.
If your child is unhappy at school or is struggling and you are not sure why, identifying the source of difficulty could be your starting point. Take our free 4-minute learning screening of behavioral symptoms and risk factors – we will send our findings.
