For unknown reasons, adopted children seem to have a much greater incidence of learning disorders than the general population. The Mislabeled Child can be a wonderful help for parents in getting beyond a label to the root of a child’s problem. Unlike many other books, this one also offers specific ideas, games and resources parents can use at home to strengthen certain skills.
Spouses Brock and Fernette Eide, M.D.s, run the Eide Neurolearning Clinic in Washington State. They are researchers and clinicians in the field of learning disabilities. They also teach their own two children at home.
The Eides share case histories of children they see at their clinic. What I found most useful was that rather than relying on labels, they analyze a child’s specific problems. The Eides insist that not only are some children mislabeled, but that a label is not enough to determine a child’s specific learning needs. For example, I learned that some children with the reading disability dyslexia primarily have visual processing problems, for example letter reversals, problems discriminating letters or remembering sight words. Others with dyslexia have primarily auditory problems—for example in correlating the sounds in spoken words with the printed letters on the page. In the area of attention deficit disorder, the Eides discriminate between the skills of focusing attention, sustaining attention, filtering out distractions, working memory, and problem-solving.
The chapter on memory was very helpful to me, addressing a problem I have not seen dealt with in other books. There are tips on recognizing whether a child learns best by auditory, visual or kinesthetic memory, personal experience or story memory, and tips on improving all of these areas. There is also a discussion of children whose primary weakness is in working memory versus a weakness in encoding or retrieving information in long-term memory.
Chapters in the book include memory, visual problems, auditory problems (both undiagnosed ear problems and brain-based auditory processing disorders language comprehension and word-finding problems, autism spectrum and autism-like disorders, sensory integration disorder, attention, dysgraphia, math problems, and the special needs of gifted children and of “twice-exceptional” children—those who are both gifted and have a learning disability.
Each chapter begins with a description of the necessary functions the brain does in each area and the points at which they can break down. Most importantly, each chapter ends with ideas of simple games and tasks which can strengthen specific functions (including working memory, of which a prior clinician had told me “there’s nothing you can do about that”.) Books and software are also recommended. (I learned about the auditory processing software program that my daughter now uses from this book.)
This book can be useful for adoptive parents and for all parents who want to understand their children better.