I’ve felt for years that teenagers and young adults with Asperger’s Syndrome or with High Functioning Autism really need help understanding and negotiating romantic and sexual relationships. Moving from Social Skills or even Social Thinking curriculums (there’s a difference) to dating, sex, love and adult relationships is no easy task when your primary difficulties are [...]
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Photo by Evgeni Dinev In his book “What the Dog Saw,” based on a collection of his essays and New Yorker articles, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the notion of Puzzles and Mysteries. Gladwell encouraged us to discern whether a problem or challenge to be solved was a puzzle or a mystery. What about kids with learning disabilities? [...]
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Too often we as educators and parents, get hyper-focused on the things our/your kids can’t do or struggle with. Even with the best of intentions, adults lose perspective. We run the risk of trying so hard, too hard, to squeeze children with learning disabilities into the mold of what we want for our kids in [...]
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Pretty amazing to see just how wrong an attempt at incentivizing success in student performance can go. From Good.is A couple of Orange County California schools came up with a poorly thought out concept to reward students who performed better on high stakes tests. “High-performing students received black cards, the ones in the middle got [...]
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Second Nature Wilderness Program (SNWP), with locations in central Oregon, northern and southern Utah, and Georgia, is one of the best Wilderness Therapy programs for struggling teens in the world. I’ve personally visited in an in-depth way all of their locations except Georgia (Footsteps program). Even though Second Nature is not specifically designed for kids [...]
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Let’s assume that you have a middle school or high school son or daughter who is struggling emotionally and behaviorally and thus far, despite trying different therapies and school supports, the situation is not getting better. Your family is most likely in a state of intermittent turmoil. If your acting out or acting in (depressed, [...]
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Jeremy Snyder and Julie Platt, students at Wesleyan University, are starting a university chapter of Project Eye-to-Eye, a national mentoring project for children with learning disabilities. In this article from the Wesleyan Argus, the students describe their start-up process this summer and the goals of Eye-to-Eye. They’re looking for about a dozen high caliber and [...]
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Yesterday I spoke with LA Talk Radio host Lon Woodbury on his show, “Parent Choices For Struggling Teens.” The show was called “Learning Disabilities or Therapy: You Shouldn’t Have to Choose”. Speaking to the integration of best practices between Learning Disabilities and Therapeutic Intervention, I’m advocating for all the kids in treatment centers, therapeutic boarding [...]
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Believe me, this article, “Dyslexia Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me” is not some fluffy, syrupy homage to “the gifts of dyslexia.” The author, an entrepreneur and business consultant, who also wrote a book about communicating in the workplace called, “Surviving Dreaded Conversations,” makes the case that schools must change their approach [...]
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This coming Monday, August 29th, at 12 noon Pacific Time, I’ll be on the internet radio show, “Parent Choices for Struggling Teens,” on L.A. Talk Radio. This interview show, hosted by Lon Woodbury, is on the subject of Learning Disabilities and Mental Health. Tune in this Monday at 12 noon PST to “Learning Disabilities or [...]
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I’ve been on the road a lot the past several months visiting all sorts and sizes of therapeutic boarding schools, residential treatment centers and therapeutic wilderness programs. Primarily, I’ve focused on ones that (by reputation) have some informed sensitivity to the impact of learning disabilities and developmental differences on therapeutic effectiveness issues. Concurrent to my [...]
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My friend Richard Wanderman, the founder of this LD site, who’s also dyslexic, once told me you have to help remediate difficulties in kids, but also “keep them in the game.” In this article, from the London Evening Standard about the youngest chef to earn the acclaimed 3 Michelin stars, chef Marco Pierre White talks [...]
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