My friend Cindy says that if she found this book in a bookshop or library this is the section she’d be turning to first: ‘Forget everything else, I want answers!’ She also says that I need to tell you straightaway that this isn’t the only part of the book that gives those answers. This part of the book is particularly for parents of school-aged children who are having difficulties. You might like to keep on reading through the appendices sequentially. Of, if your child has a particular learning issue you might like to turn straight to Appendices V and VI.
So far we’ve gone forward ‘through time’ to tell the story of how children develop. But when a child has difficulty we can hit rewind and go back to see where that difficulty has begun. That’s what this part of the book is all about.
There are many reasons why a child might have a problem. Let’s take ‘attention’ as an example here. There are a great many reasons why a child might have or develop difficulties in attending intensely enough to engage with learning material. For example, a recent event may have distressed her. It could be a relationship problem with the teacher. She might not be having enough sleep. She might have developed a cluster of food intolerances. She might have a sensory issue that so dominates her attention she can’t focus on anything else. She might be bored. Her visual perceptual skills might suddenly have fallen beneath the requirements of school. Going further back in time, she might have unintegrated primitive reflexes. Going further back still, she might not have fully developed her right brain due to the absence of a secure, organised attachment. And despite listing all these possibilities I have probably left something out!
It is by asking and answering questions that parents and therapists work together to discover the reasons why a child has a problem. In these appendices you will find the questions Mum and I ask on the way to pinpointing why a child is having difficulties — matched up with the strategies we employ to help missing skills develop.