and so being in school feels very comfortable to me and i'm also a parent as well so i have been situation before so i want to do two things today one is i want to give you an overview of what the types of learning  attention issues are that we typically see in kids with these sorts of problems and then i want to talk to you about the role of resiliency in general and then also particularly when we're talking about kids with learning and attention issues and want to talk specifically about some of these issues and i hope it's it's interesting to all of you but also going to talk a little bit more broadly about some issues that aren't specific aren't specific to reading or math or written expression so let me let me first talk about what our learning disabilities and i'm assuming most of you are here because you might have some questions about why your child isn't performing well in school or maybe just some questions about how they could even be performing to the best of their abilities and learning disabilities are something that they can they can be defined in a number of different ways we could define them in a practical terms like how well is this child doing in school how well are they doing in reading or in math we could define them in a medical way and if someone comes to see me and i i evaluate kids as a neural psychologist so my clinical practice relates to evaluating kids with learning and attention issues autism spectrum dyslexia so if you can see someone like me you're going to get sort of a medical issue diagnosis or a medical sort of flavor to the report or we could look at a learning disability a legal issue is something that has rights attached  meaning that if you have dyslexia you have and you are in need of services you have certain rights under the law but all of these things kind of intersect in a lot of ways we're talking about the same sort of thing when we're talking about a learning disability and what we're talking about is there's a specific area that is impacted in this and it's reading math or written expression and it doesn't have to be one or the other it can be two or even three of the first three of those things so and i apologize i've been getting over this terrible cold and every once in while i may just need to have a cough drop or some water so i want to start by in terms of learning disabilities i want to start by talking about dyslexia because dyslexia is the learning disability that we know the most about and a lot of times i hear it probably at least once a week i'll hear from someone well we don't really know what dyslexia is and it's completely we probably have more than twenty thousand studies done on the topic of dyslexia but this oxy is more of a medical term remember when i said we can think about these things in medical practical or legal terms dyslexia is more of a medical term and  around the little bit i can get this sort of affects one in five work cry or this is where this is where my learning issue show up so it affects one in five children and it counts for all the kids with learning disabilities out of all of them eighty percent will have dyslexia so it's by far our most common learning issue and while some professionals may define reading disability include kids whose primary deficit is in reading comprehension when we're talking about dyslexia we're really talking about something very very specific and what we're talking about is problems with will mimic awareness of phonological processing so phonological processing is our billet he to look at a word and be able to sound it out to know that cat for example is made up of three different sounds could at if you take the a out of that word and substitute a you in there it makes a different word cut and basically at the very simplest form dyslexia is having it people with dyslexia difficulty in that simple ability and so it's partly a verbal task and it's partly a visual task but it has its roots in verbal so a lot of times people think well dyslexia is reading backwards or looking at things and having the words jumble up on the page that does sometimes happen because if you can't decode those words it's all going to look like a jumbled mess to you and also very often kids with dyslexia will transpose b s and that's not because they're seeing backwards but because a be an adult be an idiot but they're still trying to figure out how does how does that sound match with that symbol and are those even to those sounds those sounds they sound so much the same are they the same sound or are they different so that's what that's what the issue is we're talking about dyslexia so just to kind of map this out reading as two parts to it one part is decoding and that is your ability to word identification your ability to decode a word and the other is to make meaning out of what you for add and so when we're talking about dyslexia we're really talking about the language system and language can be you know our discourse our ability its syntax our understanding our but it also includes phonology and so that's where the issue comes in with dyslexia is that there's a faulty ability to sort of decode what you hear now there are other issues with reading that can pack impact learning the way people like i think about them is that it's under the umbrella of a language based learning disability meaning that the primary deficit is in language it's not in that phonological processing but it's in language meaning it's about the meaning of words it's about being able to bring those words off the page and make sense of what you've read now kids can have both they can have a issue in language they can have an issue with phonological processing which would fall under dyslexia and either one of those could be diagnosed and then treated in school and they have different sorts of treatments along with them and i'm not going to go into all those today but i will take questions of people are curious about that so when we assess these kinds of issues we assess reading issues what we're looking at are can the child be cold how fluently can they read how well can they comprehend spelling problems are very common writing problems are very common and of course that what i was saying before photo logical processing is a big issue now along with math there is something long with reading there's something else that we never term that we use that sounds a lot like dyslexia which is dyscalculia and basically that is a specific learning disability in math and what happens with a map disability it's complicated it's much rarer to have a math disability and especially a math disability that is not in the context of something else and it affects our ability to understand numbers to learn math facts and we don't know what causes a m disability it might be partly genetic it might depend a lot on the quality of the instruction and i should mention too dyslexia we know has a very strong genetic component to it so in some areas of the world where there hasn't been a lot of intermingling there around england for example where there's still a lot of people of the same genetic make up the rates of dyslexia can be as high as like fifty percent to it's very interesting to think about and what do we see in kids with math disorders what's much much more complicated because math is a lot more complicated and things can break down for kids in a lot of different areas so we see you know problems with quantitative issues money time we see also in our behavioral observations and watching how kids learn and how kids perform in math we see them trying problems that are too hard because they have no idea what the answer is a little jump in try anything we see them having  wildly incorrect answers because they don't know what a reasonable answer is we see them misusing computational algorithms and making errors that just don't even make any sense so it's not just a poor understanding of math or just a little bit of a difficulty it's significant difficulties with math and then the disorder of written expression the word the name for that is discraft yes so so the three areas of functioning that imp kids learning dyscalculia all refer to different areas of academic functioning and written expression it can be problems with putting words on the page it can include problems with hand brake problems organizing your work and what we see a lot of times in kids with a disorder of written expression is they tend to be older when they come to clinical attention and a lot of times they've been struggling with writing for a very long time and then they get those sixth grade seventh grade and all of a sudden they're just not turning in their work they're just having general problems so it's a much trickier disorder because a lot of times it winds up looking like something else than a specific learning disability and then we have eighty h t and h t is not a specific learning disability it's a more general one i consider it a learning disability that affects areas of functioning it can come impact anything because attention focus hyperactivity the whole of these things can impact every area functioning learning disability affects three to five percent of school age children it may seem like it's much much higher than that i mean there are people say doesn't everybody sort of have a d h t no they really don't and over half of the kids with a ph d will qualify for a co morbid diagnosis meaning they'll have something else are reading disability anxiety a disorder of written expression now moving on to more general things we're thinking about kids who are at risk we also want to include kids who have sort of just general kinds of issues and the biggest category or it is the area of executive functioning is that a term that everybody is kind of familiar with here so executive functioning includes things that allow us to use our intellect fluently and efficiently and so it includes things like our ability to focus our attention in code information get organized get started and finish what we started now one of the things that is very interesting to me is this this issue of executive functioning is not the what of knowledge it's the how of knowledge it's how we do something how we're able to do something and there are very common in every disorder that we have a d h t it's one of the most common issues that we see in kids with but it's also very common in kids with anxiety and learning disabilities were for the kids with anxiety of a lot of problems with executive function and it might be a bi directional sort of thing where kids with anxiety already come to the you know come into the classroom with problems getting organized and what happens when you aren't organized or you're not being efficient in your work you're going to get anxious and so there's a bi directionality there and the reason for those problems may differ now i mentioned before i want to show you here that there are a lot of different areas of the executive functioning one of the area that's really interesting to me and that i've researched a lot is the area of processing speed and so i want to talk about that because i find that in any sort of group of parents many of them struggle with their child struggles with issues related to processing speed so let me talk about that because i think this really does relate when i start talking about resiliency and character processing speed is one of those things it's a very difficult thing to quantify and it's a difficult thing to treat so i kind of think of processing speed as how long it takes a child to get something done it's how well they can actually see something integrate it process it and put out a response so it's relationship to executive functioning it's always been one in which people have thought well it's just another executive function scale and i don't think of it that way i think of processing speed as being the engine that allows the car to function so if the executive functioning is the car the processing speed is the engine it's how it powers us to get from one place to the next so i do see kids with very poor processing speed who might have pretty good executive function skills but because they're processing speed is is slower week a lot of things are very difficult for them that should or seem like they should be very easy for them so there's a big cost to having slower processing speed and i've just put a few of these up here it can range from being able to process what someone is seeing as they say it it can  affect your reading fluency skills not because you have a problem with phonological processing but because you have a problem and that quickness that quick ability i can think of processing speed is the thing that i don't know despite this doesn't even date because this was before my time but lucille ball that remember when she's in the candy factory and having seen that one she's in the candy factory and the candy is coming really really fast down the conveyor belt and what does she do if she watching it come down she pops the candy in her mouth she puts it in our pockets well that's kind of what how i think about processing speed it's information coming and how do you deal with that information that's coming out of kids with poor processing speed deal with it in inefficient ways just like lucille ball did in that clip but they deal with it by crumbling up the not completed homework and putting into the bottom of their bag or not showing up for class on time because they don't have things pull together those sorts of things so these are some of the issues that we see in kids with slower processing speed and this can be verbal it can be visual it can be motor and kids usually struggle with not just one of these aspects but with more than one of them so visual processing poor visual processing can be linked to things like more car accidents difficulty looking up phone numbers making change finding something on a shelf those sorts of things a lot of what we know about processing speed has been studied in older adults who are losing their ability to do things very quickly now at different ages we might see kids react differently when they have slower processing speed a lot of this relates just poor executive functioning so things like in the early grades what we see are kids who don't seem to listen to others they made not follow instructions they mean may need more time to answer questions is the child in preschool or kindergarten and so i say what and they progress into the child in middle school or elementary school where they're having trouble staying focused where they're not really participating in class discussions and then often they develop into the high school student who can't keep up with the pace of the lectures now we've got some maybe discipline problems those sorts of things so that's how it often  can sort of progress verbal way in visual processing it's kind of similar in the early grades we see kids who look like they're staring off into space like they have trouble paying attention when there's too much going on in the classroom they might make careless errors in the middle school years and in high school years they may just have trouble with subjects that really rely a lot on visual processing like geometry geology biology a lot of that has a big visual component and kids who are slow at processing will have trouble with that and then there's multiple work processing and a lot of times people call this sort of processing kind of sluggish cognitive tempo and it's those kinds of kids who just have trouble kind of moving and shaking and getting going in the morning and moving around they look like they don't care oftentimes they look like they're a motivated that they don't want to do what they have to do but these kids and i didn't bring any slides about this but i but it really is a brain based issue just like all of these other things that i've talked about are very brain based and then we can also have academic slow academic processing and these are the kids that just sort of have that kind of eye difficulties kind of just finishing what it is that they have to do or doing the minute math in class or being fast at the geography bee or the spelling bee as they get older they have difficulty with things like taking notes in class or taking down things from the board those sorts of things and then the processing speed as kids get older and and are more general they tend to just avoid tasks altogether or oftentimes the kids that i see sometimes rush through tasks because they don't want to be the last one done so it's complicated and when we're thinking about all these kids with learning and attention issues we want to keep in the back of our minds that these kids are coming to very varied kind of presentation some might have problems with reading some might have problems with math when we're talking about kids with these sort of just milder harder to quantify issues they might look confused or appear absent minded because they're able to process the information that's coming in some of the kids that i see have trouble just doing the task for me just avoid them altogether and that's a one way that i see kids avoiding the pressures that are out there they'd rather just be thought of as not really very competent or very bright or that brother be thought of as a bad person and a bad student they won't get started on new tasks because there where they can't get the job done in the amount of time they have to do it and they feel defeated and the mike i mentioned before some of the kids that i see and one of the more common things that we tell kids are  we want kids to have if they have trouble finishing things and time is to have more time to take tests for example that's a very common recommendation for kids who are qualified for that recommendation and sometimes they don't want it they would just rather get it done and get it over with and just they'd rather be halfway done then be the one who is the last one but may get it all right so that kind of gives you some of the ideas about the kids  see the kids that i see who are struggling and the range of problems that they can have now i'm going to talk now about so what are some of the other pressures that kids are under and word general pressures that we're seeing because the is and then i'm going to bring it back to how this relates to kids with learning and attention issues so one of the first things i want to talk about is what's happened in the last twenty to thirty years in our world and one of the things that's happened in this is not going to come as a surprise to anybody here is that kids are under more pressure than they used to be there is a lot of data that shows that kindergarten is the new first grade so what used to be first grade two generations ago are used to be kindergarten for in two generations ago is now really first grade meaning that there it's there's no ramp up anymore when a child comes into kindergarten they are really required to do a lot of things that many of them are not quite able to do but that is just how our world has sort of evolved it's very common now in kindergarten to for them to have journals for them to have to keep a journal cubby and then they're supposed to be writing every day and they're journal now i have had a couple of kids say to me who are not doing well in one particular launched into college and came back to me because it was it was not doing very well in school and he said you know i was taking this english class i was required to do a journal he said i've been doing a journal since i was five i'm really tired of doing this sort of stuff and i think that's one of the things that we have to think about as kids are under a lot of pressure they're under a lot of pressure to have to do stuff to produce things and when we think about kids with learning and attention issues those sort of requirements are even tougher for them and what suffers when we have these sorts of standards that you know states and governments put on us and all sorts of parents put on school districts is that we're all we're all to be guilty of this what happens is that something has to give and what's been giving over the last few generations is less time for play more time on academic outcomes being able to measure progress that's got its validity too and then less time to just sort of explore and to be more social so the other thing that's happened along with this so the pressure has gone up our requirements that we place on kids have gone up but then we've become much more of a society that's been really more focused on praise as opposed to encourage mint and i think this is something to really think about is how do we talk to our kids what is it that we are praising them for so praise sounds great doesn't it don't we all love to hear oh my gosh you did such a great job with that you are terrific you are the best you're wonderful and for some of us it does feel good and when we've done a good job that does make us feel very good the problem is that there's there's some problems with praise that i have them up here so praise communicates x terminal approval so it's sort of like i have this information that i'm be stowing on you but it's my external approval that this relates to it also focuses on the parents thoughts the teacher's thoughts and our opinions of the child so for example if x terminal it's my opinion that i think you did a good job or not it's also judge mental in some way in a good way sometimes but it is very judge mental and it's only given when somebody performs well generally i'll talk about that in a couple minutes though so when somebody performs well it's like great job good boy that's wonderful you're the best at that oh my gosh i've never seen anybody do as well as well as you did on that it sounds like that would be a really good thing for kids to hear now encouragement is different encouragement give somebody specific feedback about what they've dug positive feedback it focuses on what the child is doing on their thoughts and their opinions it's nine evaluative it's not judge mental it really focuses on them and it can be given any time so it's things like you must be so proud of yourself when you see when you see a child who's done something really well are i see you're not giving up right now or that's what i call  responsible or you picked up your clothes and tidy droom all by yourself so that's you can tell the difference between those two things it does make a difference for kids and i'll show you some studies in a minute where this can give us problems with the site the issue of praise can be problematic for us so what happens though what's the outcome of praise versus encouragement and i put some of these here so praise stimulates rivalry it stimulates competition so if you're in a classroom setting or you're a parent you've got more than one child you like that is the best thing you've ever done well what does it make the other child feel like you didn't do that it makes them feel like well they did something and i didn't and they're getting rewarded for that in a way that makes me feel like there's nothing i can do to to match that encouragement simulates cooperation it stimulates the contribution of everybody like i like the way you guys are getting along that sort of big praise focuses on the quality of performance whereas encouragement focuses on the effort on the joy we know that kids with for example kids to keep there was a study that looked at a library program where kids got rewarded for reading books and what they found was i'm simplifying the study is that it took away the joy of reading and replaced it with the joy of getting those stickers or being the number one person to read the books that there's some intrinsic value in just doing something and a job well done and that's what encouragement gets at so praise again it can feel like it's more judge mental whereas encouragement can feel like you know if you're just accepted for what you are for what you're feeling for what you're doing and praising it i could says here it fosters a few year of failure it can create quitters it can foster dependence and even in  older generations of kids i hear from a lot of people who have people who or working for them or managed apartments or have a group of for instance the young research assistants in the program where i'm at my hospital for example and people say bly the new generation of people really needs a lot of praise to keep going well that's because they've had a lot of praise all along you've got the a you got the a plus i read a statistic today that eighty percent of college grades are eighty's and b s now and it's only going up so that's a praise centered kind of greeting system and if there are going up because it's sort of like what people are demanding to be honest and then encouragement though on the other hand creates try or is it creates a sense of being accepted even if you're not perfect and the crew foster along with that i think that we have to kind of think about specialness and what that means in our in our society and i i see i've seen over the last few decades that there is this idea that everyone is special and everyone is unique and that is true for every parent we all think that our child is the most special most unique person that's ever created and that's exactly how we're supposed to feel the problem is that we have trouble i think when our child enters school and we realize that everybody's kind of special and one way that we've dealt with this historically over the last ten or twenty years is a kind of make sure everybody knows they're special and so that can be and again that sort of like praise centered kind of thinking is that overpraising everybody everyone is special therefore what happens though is that under that over valuing someone's talents can actually undermine their motivation meaning that they can feel like oh well you know like i'm so special but it's the specialness sets important it's not that you know it's that i do so great in piano or in la crosse or whatever it is it's the fact that i won it's not the fact that i was playing to begin with and we can really lose sight of that i also mentioned here that parents need to understand how intelligence is measured that every parent thinks their child is smart and when i wrote a book called bright kids who can't keep up and it's about kids with floor processing speed and when my editor was saying well we have to come up with a good title for this and people were arguing about the title because it's sort of like bright kids are going to maybe some of you know this book smart but scattered too is that a book that you're familiar with i have the same editor as the person who wrote smart but scattered and i thought well it's a little but funny to say bright kids who can't keep up because prey kind of implies that you're in like the top five percent of the top ten percent but no nobody wants a bright by a kid you know your average child who can't keep up because we all think our children are bright we're  all in that situation however i want when we're thinking about brightness in the classroom setting and when we're thinking about that in terms of intelligence and measuring that i think we can get ourselves in trouble and by that i mean that i've had many parents come into my office and say oh my gosh i thought my child's i q was much higher than one fifteen and i said well one fifteen is the at the eighty fourth percentile that's really good that your child is really smart better you know  than eighty five percent of the population but we're really geared to thinking that everybody is in the top two percent or everybody but only two percent of kids can be in that top two percent and that doesn't mean that those other kids don't have as much of you but i think we think about being at the top of the heat awat we also i think have an aversion to seeing our kids struggle i think we all know parent wants to see their child struggle so again that's how we kind of get ourselves into this idea about praise versus encouragement because we don't we don't you know we don't we think every one of our kids are special we think that we don't want to see our kids struggling and we don't and we tend to overvalue the product as opposed to the process and by we i'm not really saying just us in this room i'm saying more as a society i mentioned before that being rewarded for something that should be intrinsically satisfying isn't good what we also found it find is that being called incredibly good is actually pretty bad for kids so the more that we say to somebody oh my gosh you're fantastic you're the best you're great you're off everything the less they really buy into that what this study has found that i mentioned here is that as adults we tend to give more praise to the kids who are having the most difficulties meaning the kids who are really really struggling we tend to heap praise more on them they also get more bored the other things that go along with it so you know you think about the hyperactive child in the classroom they're hearing a lot of negative things but they're also when they hear praise what they're interpreted it as is that someone is going overboard that they're not seeing them accurately and so too much praise they found really needs to lower self esteem this is not a positive thing for kids and it goes against our grain i even find myself when i'm evaluating a child the child who's having the most trouble is the one that i'm saying no no you keep going and i'm trying to i'm trying to encourage and not praise but it's very easy when you see someone struggling to heap praise on them it's not a positive thing it's that really isn't so is especially when we use words like perfect that's a perfect job in the child can see like that's not perfect i can see it's not perfect what are you thinking and so it's better to use things like you're incredibly good at that or you know i mean excuse me nice job as opposed to your incredibly good at that now the kinds of issues that i was talking about before that relate to our ability to do well in the kinds of very high pressured environments that we live in there not just an upper class problem then not just here  belmont unconquered in lexington and all those school districts that are are very very good we're finding that these sorts of issues that bubble up in these kinds of communities actually are bad for other communities as well so the aspiration for success force kids to do everything at this peak level performance and this mad rush to achieve starts the cycle of a it's a mad rush to achieve and then it's a mad rush to do things that aren't so great like new substances find ways of calming down that aren't very appropriate which then really leads to this man rush to achieve so the kids in particular in high school are stuck in this sort of cycle that's really difficult for them to break out of because they're feeling so much pressure and the pressure to perform pools and in these affluent neighborhoods but it really doesn't stop there what we find is that because there's so much fierce competition a lot of times i think this is really starting from from way up high with college admissions and that's where a lot of this is trickling down all the way down into kindergarten age but that there's there's so much competition for getting into the right college that that bar is raised for all students so it's raised for those students in iowa it's ways for the students in the inner city it's raised for students who really have trouble getting up to that bar so research has indicated like i said here that although extra all circumstances may differ that most kids whether they're suburban kids inner city kids rural kids that one thing that is consistent across cultures and  different sorts of situations is that students are feeling unsupported they're feeling stressed they're feeling inundated with what makes success and what makes success it's a lot of stuff it's a big house it's the right kind of car it's the right kind of sneakers it's the right kind of college it's the amazing job and it all starts with a p classes and getting the right grades and all of that so it's really you know when you think about the pressures that kids are under and it leads to a lot of things that that kind of get that that kind of go against things like character and resilience and so i want to talk a little bit then about two kids under a lot of pressure but what can we do then to change this dialogue so we want to one of the things that we like to do it when we're thinking about how to help kids as we look first at adults what are the characteristics that make adults successful so that we can trickle down these positive things to the way we rear our children so characteristics of successful people so there are five things that have been found to be the most characteristic one is they're passionate about something too as they like to try new things three they avoid the bandwagon they're kind of an independent thinker for they're always learning and five they don't worry about what others think about them now just think about the process that we have in order to get kids into college and think about these characteristics a lot of the the things that kids have to do in order to be successful in the world to get into the right college to get into  graduate program whenever they kind of go against this a lot of times you know they're the relict and to try new things because tech i've got to do my extracurricular and i've got to do you know i've got to have a lot of things on my college application and i've got to do all of these things and it sort of weeds out the passion in their life the i'm often times don't avoid the bandwagon they're on the bandwagon they're all talking about what is it that where you know where are you going what did you do what grade did you get so we kind of foster this in this culture of where you know always thinking about where we're getting one of the things that is happening these days is that they we're finding that there are kids who are having trouble getting launched into life there's a sort of an epidemic particularly with boys who are in their early twenty's that they're either not successfully negotiating college or they're not successfully launching after college and one reason for this could be the fact that they have not developed some of these these characteristics and i'm going to show you some other ones here too that really allow us to independently be in the world so some of these characteristics that really help us in the world are things like grit self control zest for life social intelligence gratitude optimism and curiosity so when we look back at some of these things these are the characteristics of successful people these are the things that allow them to develop those characteristics and not everybody has all of these you know some people and what yourself as well some people who really have that grit who really have that self control who are very socially intelligent they can work a room so no one has all of these things but we all need some of these things to be a healthy adult who launches well into society now one of the important things that we can learn i comes from some studies that were done by martin seligman who was a very famous psychologist and some of the studies in psychology are things that would never be done anymore because i'm going to tell you the study you're going to be like oh this i was just terrible but seligmann did was he took two dogs and he wired them together and they both got a shock not a huge shock just a little shock but an irritating one and one of the dogs they were wired together they had the same amount of shock the same time same everything but one of the dogs had a lever and as soon as he felt the shock he could press this lever and it would go away it went away for him and it went away for the other dog so they got the same amount of shocks right now when they stop the experiment what they found was the dog where the lever was fine the dog was just as normal as you ever was the dog who got shocked the exact same amount of time but had no control over the fact that he was being shocked or that he could end the shock he showed signs of what they called learned helplessness he showed signs of like no matter what i do nothing's going to change he looked like what you would say a depressed dog would look like showed lack of efficacy in his environment so when you think about you playing this to actual human beings we all have tiny little shocks at different times we all have bumps in the road when we're talking about kids with learning and attention issues they have those things every day usually every hour of every day and what they have to have is not the ability just move of a magic wand and make it all better and make them read what they have to have is that lever that ability to say wait a minute i can stop this right now i have some control over my environment and that's what learned optimism is it's that ability to recover from things like a bad grade to be able to bounce back from things like a bad break  up or fights with your parents or fights with a student another student so but they have to have those things built into their environment that ability to say well i'm struggling right now i'm feeling sort of  shock right now but i know i can ask a teacher i know i can talk to my parents i know that i have somebody in my court who's really pulling for me and that also it fosters inability to kind of learn we think of resiliency very much like we think of optimism like people are either born resilient or they're not and there's been lots of studies that have shown that that's actually not true some of us might have a more strong predisposition to being a little bit more resilient and a little bit flexible and if any of you parents have more than one child probably that one of your children was much more flexible then than another one was and so but that doesn't mean that kids who are born sort of inflexible can't be more flexible it resiliency is the ability of an individual to maintain personal and social stability despite adversity it's our ability to bounce back when things are tough it's a process it's not a trait and so the key elements i did mention biology it's a piece of that but it's also our family it's also our social environment and so key features of developing resiliency is our attachment to others and it's our awareness of ourselves or believe me to self reflect kids with learning disabilities have a lot of challenges and there have been books written about the gift of a ph d the gift of dyslexia in a way it is a gift because what it provides a student is the ability to develop resiliency as long as they have the tools to develop that learned optimism so today's youth too regardless of a learning disability are not a face a lot of challenges there are lots of family constellations i don't have to tell you about the news that goes on seems like every week school violence school shootings these think the kids are really struggling with these things they're thinking about them even if they're safe and they're you know we can tell them that they're going to be safe they're struggling with these bigger bigger broader issues there's more social media that they have to deal with it's complicated the world is much much much more complicated than it's ever been and those risks are even more debilitating for kids with learning disabilities so what are risk factors they're the things that are associated with an increased likelihood that we're not going to be that we are going to develop some kind of a challenge some kind of emotional disorder behavioral disorder risk factors can be individual or they can be societal they can be family so they can come from anywhere so i mentioned before that having a learning disability is a risk factor in and of itself it can also be a resiliency factor too so what are protective factors though so risk factors are the things that put us at risk for having problems protective factors are things that put us at risk for developing strategies that are going to make life much more successful so it's that ability again to spring back from adversity so child factors again i mentioned can be that positive temperament it can be social competence you know how some kids just even at age two can walk through a grocery store and be is happy as can be and talk to everybody and other kids just aren't so that's something again that we're born with but it can also be family factors families that have consistent rule settings do better in terms of building resiliency in their children that's a factor that's really been associated with resiliency supportive parents in general similarly supportive school environment supportive community environments and positive relationships with significant dulled is one of the most important things that can develop resiliency in a child so the thing about family though is families can provide risks and they can provide protection so if you grow up in a family that has a lot of discord where there's a lot of arguing where there's a lot of difficulty in the family versus one where there's a very supportive relationship within the family supportive extended family cohesive family you're going to develop more protective mechanisms in terms of your personality functioning now again having a learning disability may add to a family stress and i probably shouldn't even put may add it does add to a family stress it's tough there are problems with information processing think about some of those things where i was talking about processing speed we're living with a child who takes forever to get something done or isn't doing their homework that stressful as a parent it's stressful to have the teacher kong say you know what billy still didn't finishes whatever assignment for math or is misbehaving at that stressful and families have to then interact more with school personnel and if you're a parent of a child who's having difficulties when the school principal calls it's usually not a good side so it's stressful and what happens is it leads to more anxiety in the parents so some other things that can happen to presence of hyperactivity or problems with inattention and in children the family parents have these expectations and they're disappointed they think well why isn't this child giving me what i thought he was going to be why isn't he you know exactly who i thought he would be and then especially families who we have in flexibility are having trouble sort of adjusting to some of those issues that their child is having and then an other risk factors include a measurement when parents are overly unmatched with their children so there's problems with not being protective enough that there's problems with being too protective as well all of those things place a child at risk so too much too much smothering actually places your child at risk for further problems not the other way around and rigidity is is a very tough thing in families when a parent or a family is really has trouble adjusting to a child's normal temperament so family protective factors though and these kind of easy these are these are things that are easily done one of the best things that parents can do if they have a child with learning issue and even if they don't have a child or to get to is to understand their child a lot of times i talk to groups of parents about different specific topics and they want to a list of things what do i do if my child is struggling in math and i can give them a list of things but the passing you can you can do as a parent is to understand your child it's you know a checklist don't work very well the similarly with teachers the best thing a teacher can do is to understand the individual students in their own classroom so understanding the child's disability and not over generalizing it that that's who they are so the child with a d h d should be my age the child but my child who sometimes has trouble paying attention that's a different sort of way of viewing your child and you want to accept their limitations and there are a lot of times when i do evaluations many times actually when i do evaluations i give the parent the information the parent said so i just need to expect that it's going to take them longer to get something done or i just like memory is hard for him so i should just expect that he's not going to be always remembering when i tell him these things of like yes that's correct it's like oh well that's easy i can do that or sometimes parents say oh i feel like the worst period in the world i wish i would have known that you know when he forgot his lunchbox this morning i told him so that sort of thing can happen to the other person kind of protective pact factors include strong parenting skills and also the parents  emotional stability it's not too much to say that taking care of yourself is actually the best thing you can do to take care of your child and we usually put ourselves last as parents and then use lies utilizing coping skills at home and in your interactions with schools that it's it's good to you know work collaboratively collaboratively have rudely with the school environment and to interact with them in a way that really joins together in what's best for your for the child self awareness is a very big protective factor i mentioned it on the other slide as well self protection our self awareness helps protect us because think about it we spend a lifetime really understanding who we are as people you know like one of my good at what am i not good at when you know you're not good at something just makes everything better for you when you're able to say oh yeah i'm just you know what i just don't understand directions i'm not good at that so i'll just use my g p s that doesn't make you feel worse set up as a person it just it actually lifts the load the same thing happens for kids especially those who are at risk for learning and attention issues and that is because they're more likely to seek assistance when when it's needed they err more likely to avail themselves of educational opportunities employment opportunities that builds on their strength and not their weaknesses i often hear from parents that they don't want to share any of the information that they get an evaluation with a person like me that say their child is dyslexic i don't want them to know that i just don't want them to know that because that's labeling them and they're going to feel worse about themselves the research which oh that's that's actually the opposite of the case first of all if a child isn't reading very well they're wondering why aren't i reading like everybody else in the classroom and that is going to bother them it's not going to make them feel better telling them that they're reading issue has a name to it and that we know exactly how to treat that and here's how you can talk to other people about that actually is empowering and leads to more resilience that being said i can understand labels are tough bad labels are very bad and labels are only as good as the treatment that follows from them so you want to make sure that if your child has an issue it's the appropriate label for appropriate term so one of the best things we can do if we're worried about our kids are worried that there's an issue is to get them evaluated it doesn't have to be a formal evaluation it can be evaluation by the teacher it can be having somebody do an observation there are lots of different ways that we can evaluate kids but getting data on what is going on with your child is one of the best things we can do because it can affect their self esteem and their self concept and particularly the earlier the better and then i also mention the one of the best times to do an evaluation is i said as early as possible but then also to use the evaluation process to use what you know about your child to make effective transition plans in high school as well so i mentioned before one of the ways of developing resiliency is your relationship with others the number one thing that can develop resiliency particularly in kids with learning disabilities is the impact of one single adult so when peeps successful people have been studied and when people with who are successful with learning disabilities have been studied the number one thing the attribute their success to is the impact of one adult just one adult somewhere in their life who really believed in them whether it's richard branson or right tom cruise they all say that that's is that's the number one thing that they typically say  one of the things that you can do as adults is to make sure that person in that child's life but also the way you talk to them is very important you know for instance if you only tried harder and put in more effort you would do better as opposed to i know you're trying really hard we really need to think a little bit more about what would make this easier for you to do and then the other thing next to that that helps develop resiliency in kids is finding an area of competence so finding that area that makes a child really shine and that can be a sport it can be anything being good at video games or something as long as it's not something that's over the top but something that really allows them to feel very good about themselves and brings them solace when things are not going well so providing those opportunities for a child to develop those sorts of skills providing them me opportunities to assume responsibility a lot of times kids with learning and attention issues are always the last ones done they're never the ones called on to go to the office with the attendance slip and that sort of thing so that fostering that ability to mentor others is really important particularly in kids who are struggling it provides concrete proof to them like it says here that they can also be successful and then providing them opportunities to learn good decision making skills and i know that there's a lot infused in the curriculum in school that allows them to do that so the essential ingredient in high self esteem is the belief that we have control over ourselves or our lives and i'm going to come back to that in a minute one of the most interesting findings of kids with learning disabilities over the course of development is what happens to them when they get into college so it's hard to get kids with learning issues into college or harder than it would be if they didn't have it but what we find is that once they're in there they have better resiliency than kids who don't have learning disabilities so if you read these studies you think i want my target learning disability because they're going to do so much better in college if we can get them to college and that's the key so what happens is that college students with learning disabilities report higher levels of an issue to him than in every day problem solving the report a higher need for achievement as compared to kids without learning issues college students or more with learning disabilities are more motivated to achieve and if course that's a factor that may have motivated them to apply for college in the first place but it's still an interesting interesting study kids who don't have learning disabilities who are in college report experiencing greater feelings of stress than the learning disabled kids and think about that with learning disabilities they've been stressed every day you know getting a c and i test that's nothing when you've been in all the a p classes and your grades have always been you know you get a four point six on your grade point average and you get into college and you get a b plus that's the end of that could be the end of the world or feel like the end of the world it's not that way for kids with learning disabilities who have successfully negotiated that because they've built up that resiliency and they felt they actually found ways of coping with their issues so i want to just i want to leave some time for questions i want to just leave you with a few thoughts one is that we have given away this idea of boredom in our society and i can speak even for myself if i sat down and here was a by myself i get out my phone i would like we're never bored in our culture ever and boredom is such a gift it's such a you know like to just sort of be there and have nothing to do no phone to look at no twitter to check no e mail to check we need to do that for ourselves but also it's a gift that we can give our kids and the another thing to think about too and we're thinking about building this resiliency is the idea of anticipation we live in a very much a immediate culture if i kind of think you know i'd really like that book i get on amazon i order it it's there within two days sometimes even quicker on how they do it but it's it's really the idea of anticipation is is really a part of our culture as much as it used to be and it's a wonderful thing to have to intice a paid something to have to really want something to work toward it is something that we need to infuse in our parenting also you know it along with that to appreciate the ordinary is an extraordinary gift that we can give our kids and we really are living in this culture where it's really everything needs to be over the top and i also say too that every good parent is a guilty parent that every year i see so many parents and they say oh if i only knew this before or oh i wish i hadn't done it that way that's a friend of a good parent you know for kind of thinking like have i could have done this so much better well everybody could have but the fact that you're thinking about that makes you think about how you could be doing it better which means you probably are so and the other thing too i mentioned before is children do learn from our emotions they do learn from us of taking care of us seeing the resilience in us actually builds the resilience in them so one of the last things i just wanted to leave you with because self esteem is one of those things that we really all want to build self esteem in our kids and the thing they want to remember is that essential ingredient of self esteem is the ability for us to believe that we have some control over our environment like the studies that i was talking about weren't helplessness good self esteem is not believing that you're the best at something that's not that's that's narcissism so if i you know like oh my gosh i'm so good at this i'm so good at that that is not what good self esteem is that's again it's narcissism so what we really want to instill in our kids is this ability that they can make changes in their environment that they are not helpless and that's that's the and sensual ingredient to successful adulthood as well one of the main successful agreement gradients and i just put this here because i like this little cartoon it says here for a fair selection everybody has to say the same exam so please climb that tree and we do kind of think of kids in our society is all sort of being able to climb that tree but they're not all the same some are goldfish some are birds and some are monkeys who can easily climb that tree so it's just something you think about just i mentioned that i had written a book about break kids who can't keep up but i also wanted to just before a end i'm happy like i said to take some questions is that i also work at mass general with an organization called the clay center for young healthy minds and we have a lot of really good material on there about a lot of issues that are related to parents and issues related to development to learning disabilities to you know what or where all these school shootings what it what should we tell our kids at this age at that age that we have a lot of information on there that hopefully is helpful to parents so i think i'm going to stop right there and just see if i can take some questions and so so you're saying if i don't have everything here but if you're worried that your child might have some processing issues what's a good age to look at that so it's i would say that in terms of formal testing i probably wait til about first grade to be honest unless it's really muster really seems like there's an attention issue along with that but i would say that that's a better age the older a child is the more tests we have to give them much before age six it's really it's hard to determine what's sort of normal development because some kids just have a normal development where they're kind of slower to get with the program in a way so i would say you know waiting till are six or seven is probably a good time unless you're seeing other issues major social issues significant hyperactivity those sorts of things does that make sense yes so one of the things i didn't talk about that you can there are a couple of things that you can do if you're worried about if your child has any kind of one of these issues one is you're entitled to a free educate evaluation through your public school system and i usually say that's a good place to start but you're also a lot of times this is covered by insurance not always but if it's a neurological issue or an attention issue there are some insurance companies that will cover that and you can go to a private practitioner as well so it you have some options and there are pros and cons to both of them so the question was if you have a child with an a d h d n a mood disorder how do you approach those separately medically what if you're thinking about medicine for either one of those the standard of care right now is to fix the mood issue first and then fix the attention issue and a lot of times you might find in i don't know if you're experience but a lot of times if a child's hyperactive that's the first thing people want to to control because it's you know they're making a lot of it is you know problems for other people but the research has shown that it's better to kind of fix of a child's depressed and hyperactive what you want to do is fix the depression first even if the hyperactivity isn't going anywhere and so that's what i would that's what i would say and that's true medically and then also from a more therapeutic standpoint as well you want to make sure that you've sort of had it because if a child is not feeling good about himself anything you put into yeah no i think so what she asks if you have a child still processing speed well first of all what do you do and then how do you get other people on the bandwagon for that and so i think that in tackling the first part of that i think if you're really concerned about that data really helps because kids with so processing speed can look like they're just not trying that they're lazy that they did so and getting a good evaluation either through the school or outside of the school is the best thing that you can do to convince somebody because otherwise all you're doing is it looks like you know a feeling the other reason why that's important too is because it could be something else and sometimes kids who look kind of slow and sluggish may have only an attention issue that can be fixed or they may be depressed or they may be active there are other issues that can come into play in terms of so good evaluation isn't is important in terms of what to do i could give like a whole like three hours on that but i'll give you a couple of different things one of course is extra time another thing that i'm finding is very important is the issue of time and not just time management but the issue of time some of our more recent studies have shown that kids with a particularly kids with a t t who also have slow processing speed that they tend to have work a poor concept of time meaning they don't really know how time feels so think about that if you really don't know what ten minutes feels like versus thirty minutes and you're asking your child to put together a calendar or to map out their homework time if they don't really know what the how time the how time is perceived they're going to have trouble with that so i really recommend doing a lot with time they really like having they really need to learn the analog clock so i think part of this might be the fact that none of us tell time that way anymore so because you can literally see the passing of time you can relate it to mathematical concepts it really does help that issue and the more they understand the perception of time the better they can sort of map their slower processing speed onto how long it's going to take them the other thing just to keep in mind is any way you can make your life more a patient is important so it's just like think just think of fish and see how do i make this whatever it is getting to school in the morning the pick up at my the homework time how do i make it more efficient and and then in some cases when it's significant even asking for a reduction in homework assignments so it's more quality versus quantity the hard thing is that you want to make sure they're still getting enough of the curriculum so that it becomes automatic for them and that's one last thing i could say to is anything that could become more automatic that's shown to be effective it kind of getting you to be faster at even if you have slower processing speed to begin with that's a really good question i just didn't have time to cover all the save it yes about the relationship of working memory and processing speed so there is a big overlap what we're finding is that  o it's hard to know if there's a chicken and egg so very often kids who have an issue in one have an issue in the other but not always so there are some kids with very good working memory skills with poor processing speed and vice versa but they're often together and one of the things that we're thinking about is that working memory relies on quick processing of information and by working memory for those of you might not know it working memory is kind of like our brain scratchpad it's not long term memory it's our ability to remember they go in go get your refrigerator out of the loop out of your out of the you know i mean go get your lunch out of the refrigerator put it in your backpack and meet me at the car and don't forget to lock the door i think that's working memory and so what we find is that kids would slow or processing speed their working memory might be impacted because it's decaying faster meaning it's taking them longer to to literally process that information and so we can only remember one reason why phone numbers are only seven digits long is because that's kind of the average amount of information that we can remember so that capacity is lower if you're if it's taking you a longer time to get that in so that's one of our  thoughts but it's definitely something that we're looking at working memory has been one of those things that's been studied a lot because it's sort of a kind of it at first an easier topic to study and by that i mean like with brain imaging and all the sorts of things that we're doing these days to look at these sort of neuropsychological constructs but there's more of an interest in processing speed now and i think we'll see a lot more at the relationship between those two things you know that's such a good question and i think what age of kids to teach eight and nine year olds so you know if it were if it were like first and second graders i'd say just let them sort of being even nine it's actually probably i'd be remiss to not say that it's probably time to get them evaluated so that you actually know the answer to that question because it's so hard to know otherwise  and and if by eight they haven't really kind of sort of you know they're really really lagging behind and you really need to get some data on why that is and and good teachers kind of sort of know when they're struggling but still it's hard to know too and there can be another reason too that you just didn't even know about didn't even think about  yeah can't be bored without destroying things oh oh yeah so she asked how do we get get like how do you get kids just ok with being bored because they display the destroy things you know it's it's so funny because when i was a kid it was the ensor was you just lock them out of the house and told them to be back at five think that was it and then it was just like it worked kind of for sort of and so it's hard and i think it's a for that kind of child you may have to actually put some limits on what constitutes boredom and yet i don't think we have the platform or the playground anymore  talking about physical player but that the the arena for them to be able to do that you you really you know has a good parent you don't feel comfortable just leaving your child in the backyard or in the front yard and just you know you can't really do that as much as you used to so i would say in that case you're still going to probably have to put some parameters around what constitutes y so that's a very good question because boys are more active than girls so it could everybody hear that it's like what to do and how do you tell the difference so the one thing you want to really look at is is that hyperactivity interfering with his ability to function so that means is it a bill is his ability to do socialize with others his ability to gauge academically his ability to be a family member without you feeling like you need to tear your hair out so it's it's an it's an issue of how significant it is and how it impacts him so if you sort of the child in class that the teacher is like oh he's just full of life and vigor and even though you know you're like oh my gosh i can barely handle this heat that's that's you know it but he's not causing trouble for anybody that's more of a he's just a exuberant hyperactive kid if it's really causing trouble for other people and causing trouble in his relationships that's when you need to be worried and you know can vary depending upon the teacher like some you know upon the age upon what the other kids in the class are like and if a child is sort of in that gray area it can shift a little bit you know when you're you're like saying oh everything's fine in the next year  say like oh i you know so but it but look at how much it's impacting the world around them a good parenting school for so it's called think kids at mass general and i'm trying to think of the name of the book that ross green wrote the explosive child which sounds terrible but it's and you'll read this book in your said like my child is nothing like that which will make you feel like oh few they cry but the the issues that are in the way problems are attacked in that book and think kids has that website as well at mass general that has a lot of parenting ideas with that and it's really about how to collaborate as a as a parent with your child to solve problems and it sounds mushy and and you know it's not even though it kind of sounds that way like oh you know every guy i've got a given it's not that way at all actually yes that's rate yeah and i do think like he wrote these books for kids who have at the extremes but the books are what's in the books are really applicable to if you've read them yeah i would say that's probably my go to way if there's  we have to just think about sort of every time i pick that up i learn something again because it's very intuitive in some ways but then it's also like yeah it's hard to do y inattention versus low processing speed you know the funny thing is that the the assessment instruments we have right now are actually not very good at figuring that out almost none of them have questions that relate to processing speed you know i do have in my book which you actually can download on the website if you buy the book you can i don't know get a code or something and there is a processing speed checklist that we have in there so you can use that as a kind of a tool sort of you know at least getting an idea of that we're actually developing formally that's sort of like an informal checklist we're actually developing formally that which would help in those sort of cases or it's are like a winner have time for a full a valuation it's going to take them six months anyway is going to be out of my class by that time so that's one way that you could look at it but the formal evaluations that we have right now the checklist that are most widely used are do not include that believe it or not well you know that's where i would get an evaluation through the school if you haven't already done it and a lot of times the best evaluations at age four are speech and language evaluations and occupational therapy evaluations and that's that's i would use those as a way of figuring out how best to make her environment better you don't necessarily need to i mean unless you are much more significant issues you don't really need to see somebody like me or neurologists the school system does a really good job of sort of figuring that out and that's where i would use there because a lot of it when you're thinking about if it's slow processing speed which you want to develop in those early years is the ability to communicate and speech and language therapy can be very helpful and in helping you be a more efficient listener and speaker and then also your fine motor skills which allow you to to be more fluent in that are not that's a really easy question for me but if somebody figures that out they will have they will make a lot of money i think and i didn't talk about this because it wasn't all about processing speed but the problem with processing speed is that it's probably due to a more global thing in the brain which is a lot harder to figure out like some of the programs for working memory for example are showing some some fairly good profit you know like fairly good i don't know what results but processing speed is probably due more to how the brain is chemically wired or how the brain is actually wired in general it's going to be harder to figure something like that out but i wish there was you had a question to write so this is a tough one so what the question was is your child a slow process in speed everything else is fine and ok and ok and how well did you see it again eight ok so it's very hard processing speed processing speed deficit doesn't necessarily it doesn't in and of itself fit under one of the categories that under idea that would allow a child to access services i would recommend in that case maybe getting some more information because it could be that they don't qualify for services and somebody like me would find that out or it could be that there's something more subtle that actually would qualify them for services but that just wasn't you know something just the more subtle that might you know a private evaluation that's what i would recommend in that case is what i know i know psyche value add that's what i would probably recommend if it's really and you can even just have somebody review the evaluation so that you could understand it better too and it may be that they come out with the same exact recommendation that it just it's the you know but the other thing that often happens is eight years old it's not affecting academic skills yet but by the time they're ten they may qualify for services because they're kind of hanging in there and then the issues start to affect academic skills in a way that they could qualify for services to show they wrap it up ok so so if a child with a high intellectual ability is also having emotional problems and has been evaluated for those usually and it's hard for me to like know in particular but usually what we would recommend is probably some therapy outside of school that would allow them to develop some strategies or coping skills and it can be inside of school too but oftentimes if it's an issue like anxiety or depression that's not something that you know schools can accommodate that but they're not going to treat those symptoms per se that the that the issue would be  so if it's if you're really talking about emotional functioning probably your first step would be a psychiatrist who could do a more clinical evaluation and really get to know what child that's what i would recommend they probably do some there is there we can also do like a psychologist can do psychological testing to look more at their underlying psychological issues but i would probably start with the psychiatrist  all right thanks so much