When you’re pregnant, people are filled with unsolicited advice for you: What you should eat. What you shouldn’t eat. How to sleep, how to exercise, how to tell what gender the baby is, how to do everything. And it doesn’t stop once the baby arrives. People love to offer their two cents, but I don’t recall receiving much advice that was actually helpful. In the least.
Jill Smokler, AKA Scary Mommy shares her tips for moms-to-be and new moms. Take a look at her 10 Tips
It is so important for your child to start correctly. Since our children begin handling crayons and colored pens from preschool years, you should know how to help your child.
Lauren Stern, a pediatric occupational therapist and handwriting expert, has a series of short videos to help you teach your child to grip the pencil correctly and how to write the upper and lower case letter. Be sure to go to the last few videos that show fun ways to practice with play dough and shaving cream!
Learning Differences are often called by other names: Learning Disabilities or Dyslexia. Whatever name is used, children with LD have trouble learning with the traditional education methods.
The symptoms are often difficult to clearly diagnose until about 8 years of age, as many children ‘grow out of’ these during their first few years of school. Many of the LD symptoms are also symptoms of other conditions like AD(H)D or autism spectrum.
But if your child does not seem to be maturing at a similar rate to other children their age, please consider early intervention. The earlier these differences are recognized and appropriate therapy is started, the more likely there will be fewer long-lasting difficulties.
For a descriptive list of symptoms of LD see: Learning Differences: Signs and Symptoms
Preschool Signs of Learning Difficulties – an interview with Steven E. Curtis, author of Understanding Your Child’s Puzzling Behavior (Greenleaf, 2008)
There is an increasing frequency of ADHD diagnosis. The New York Times has reported data collected from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which suggest that 11% of youth (between 4 and 17 years of age) have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point in their lifetime.
This is troubling – primarily because the data came from phone surveys of parents. This means that parents are receiving this diagnosis at unprecedented rates – not that kids are being properly diagnosed with ADHD at higher rates than before. It is too easy for kids to get labeled ADHD and not go through the comprehensive screening that should take place as administered by a multidisciplinary team of professionals.
It’s becoming clear that ADHD is being used as a label to try to provide a quick handle on behavior that may – or even may not – be somewhat troublesome. ADHD involves much more than not sitting still and not paying attention. All kids exhibit “ADHD” like behaviors now and then. It’s a difficult condition to diagnose because it is based on increased frequencies of a number of behaviors across a number of contexts (home and school) for a sustained period of time which cause impairment for the child. Without a detailed diagnostic process, it can be too easy to misread normative behaviors as symptoms of ADHD.
For a good over-all understanding of ADHD, causes, diagnosis, treatments, and therapies, please check the PsyCom.net information.
Great Schools interviewed Steven E. Curtis, author of the book Understanding Your Child’s Puzzling Behavior (Greenleaf, 2008) and a licensed child clinical psychologist specializing in the assessment and treatment of children with emotional, behavioral, developmental, and learning difficulties. He offered to walk through the first signs and symptoms of a learning disability for kids in preschool through high school.
GreatSchools: Preschoolers’ normal behavior ranges from very civilized to utterly silly to something akin to wild animals. How can you observe such complicated little creatures — who don’t usually read or do math — and know which of them will have learning issues in the future?
Steven Curtis: One of the first things you want to look at is whether a kid can listen to stories and comprehend language. Most learning disabilities are language-related, so this is the best place to start.
Another early indicator is the lack of ability to distinguish phonemes — the basic sounds that make up words. If kids have trouble understanding these differences, then they’re at risk.
A lisp is one of those things that is common but is also a red flag. If kids have lisps, it might be because they’ve had frequent ear infections — so they literally can’t hear. If it goes on for too long, they can have trouble differentiating sounds. So when kids have speech issues, you should always have their ears checked. It could be the tip of the iceberg. It could be a motor issue, or it could be a cognitive problem— due to not understanding certain sounds.
Read the whole interview at: Great Schools