Introduction, Part 2

Roadblocks to Learning: Understanding the Obstacles that Can Sabotage Your Child's Academic Success
by Lawrence J. Greene

(Page 2 of 2)

Most parents of children with learning difficulties are painfully aware of the academic, emotional, and vocational risks their children face. Profoundly apprehensive about the long-range implications, these parents crave incisive information, guidance, and solutions. They realize that without knowledge they are powerless and can only watch passively as their child falls further and further behind and becomes increasingly demoralized. They also realize that once they become informed, they can galvanize the available resources and become highly effective and proactive champions of their child's legitimate educational rights and needs.

Three critically important questions must be asked:

• Why are millions of academically deficient children being denied formal learning assistance in school?
• What are the consequences of allowing academic deficiencies to go untreated?
• What can parents do to make certain their child receives effective help before often-irreversible psychological damage occurs?

Why are millions of academically deficient children being denied help?

The answer to this question is simple and disturbing. The bottom line is that there are too many underachieving students and too little money to fund programs that could get them on track academically. Economics and the laws of supply and demand determine how precious remedial services are allocated. By necessity, hard-pressed schools prioritize the needs of the most seriously learning disabled and send the "walking wounded" - those whose learning difficulties do not conform to rigid and often arbitrary diagnostic criteria - back to the front lines without meaningful treatment. That the ostensibly "minor" wounds of these neglected children often become incapacitating is a reality that our educational system conveniently chooses to disregard.

What are the consequences of allowing academic deficiencies to go untreated?

When schools fail to provide learning assistance for marginally performing students, the effects are predictable: deficient academic skills, frustration, demoralization, resistance to learning, and behavior problems. Left to their own devices, some of these neglected youngsters continue to work diligently and valiantly.Most, however, choose the path of least resistance and shut down in school.

As the self-concept of poorly performing students unravels, they will begin to accept the inevitability of diminished achievement. Once they do, they are destined to arrive at the end of the school production line poorly educated, emotionally bruised, demoralized, and learning-phobic. These children are also likely to end up at the bottom of the food chain, with few, if any, marketable skills or vocational options.

What can parents do to make certain their child receives learning assistance?

The importance of effective parental advocacy cannot be overstated. Involved, knowledgeable, and empowered parents can play a critically important role in making certain that their child's legitimate educational needs are identified and addressed.

Having a child who is struggling with learning difficulties can be a nightmare. No sentient, responsible parent wants to stand on the sidelines and watch a child suffer. No parent wants to feel helpless as his or her child becomes increasingly discouraged and academically incapacitated.

Many factors can interfere with a child's capacity to learn efficiently. The impediments may involve deficits in perceptual processing (e.g., dyslexia), focusing, memory, reading comprehension, following directions, planning, organization, time management, test preparation, and written or spoken expressive language. Emotional and behavioral issues can also obviously undermine the efficiency with which children learn. Test anxiety, reading or math phobias, learned helplessness, resistance, procrastination, sloppiness, and diminished self-confidence can erect formidable barriers to efficient learning.

Being unknowledgeable about the educational issues that are undermining a child's academic performance can have disastrous implications. Soluble problems that might have been accurately identified in first grade, effectively addressed, and resolved by the time a child enters third grade may go untreated. By fourth grade, these problems may have become intractable and may pose monumental barriers to scholastic achievement and self-concept development. For example, parents may be acutely aware that their second-grader is struggling when reading aloud, but they may have no idea about what is causing the problem. If they are unfamiliar with the basic information about the dynamics of reading, they are unlikely to link their child's chronic reading inaccuracies with possible causative factors that may include deficits in the areas of auditory discrimination, visual memory, phonics, word attack, blending, or near-point focusing.

In an era in which the parents of children with learning problems and school personnel often find themselves in adversarial roles because of limited funding for special-education services, Roadblocks to Learning levels the playing field. It provides parents with the vital information they need to represent their child's interests competently.

Roadblocks to Learning is designed to provide the insight you need to help your child. To evaluate your child's educational needs intelligently, you must have critical information. Once you become knowledgeable about the issues, you can assume an effective, proactive, and if necessary, aggressive role in making certain your child's educational problems are addressed. Armed with key information, you will be able to:

• understand the dynamics, symptoms, and implications of your child's learning difficulties
• identify the causative factors
• comprehend the terminology
• make intelligent decisions about testing and treatment options
• interface effectively with school personnel
• make certain that your child's educational needs are being met

Copyright © 2002 by Lawrence J. Greene, All rights reserved.

About the Author

Lawrence Greene, a graduate of the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, is an educational diagnostician and therapist with over thirty years' experience in special education. The author of thirteen books, his study skills and strategic thinking programs have been used in thousands of schools in the United States and Canada.