|
For more information: |
Influencing a Family Ecology- an excerpt from the book Some years ago I worked with a boy who was labeled with severe dyslexia (described to me as "the worst case of dyslexia in the history of the school system"). His mother and father continually tried to find specialists who could help their son, and his behavior had become so negative that he was kicked out of every school he attended. He obviously found it easier to cope with adults thrown off by his misbehavior than by adults and children aware of the fact that he couldn’t read. When he came to Wondertree he was thirteen years old. Because his loud and disruptive behavior met his need for anonymity as a non-reader, he refused to cooperate with staff and peer requests for peace and quiet in the classroom. After a couple of months the two learning consultants working with him realized they were unable to change this young man’s behavior. Since he was disrupting the program for others, they asked for my help. Due to their lack of success, they felt he might need to leave Wondertree. The boy, on the other hand, was happy in our program and his parents also wanted him to stay. I called a family meeting to search for a solution that could work for everyone. In order to meet the learning consultants’ needs, I proposed that the boy needed to leave Wondertree. To meet the parents’ needs, I suggested that their son stay out of the program for two months and then return. I added that for those two months I wanted them to meet with me one night a week to work on shifting the family dynamics. By this time the young boy was crying. Being asked to leave the program felt like a punishment to him. I assured him that Wondertree did not use punishment for behavior change. Instead, we believed in negotiating win/win situations to meet everyone’s needs. Because his needs were as important as anyone else’s, I asked him, “If you could do anything you wanted each day, what would you most like to do?” His sobbing stopped and his answer came without hesitation. “Snowboarding!” he exclaimed. I replied, “All right, hit the slopes!” His parents agreed to let him go snowboarding every day for two months on his season's pass. He was delighted at this possibility and all thought of punishment vanished from his mind. From my perspective, I believed that if the boy was doing something totally enjoyable, he would be creating a resource state necessary for taking on learning challenges. Hopefully he would be able to access this resource state, an emotional condition of feeling good, when we were ready to begin working on his reading. His parents agreed to work with me each week and we had a win/win/win situation. The consultants were hopeful a shift could happen in the next two months, the parents knew their son could return, and the boy was delighted. For my part, I knew that ninety-five percent of my energy would go into unloading the emotional baggage the boy had accumulated from his parents and the educational experts they had previously consulted. It would only take five percent of my time to actually share strategies for reading with him. My past experiences with children had shown me that if a child could not shift behaviors and handle an issue with initial support and suggestion from our staff, the problem likely lay with the parents. It was often their anger and frustration that the child was reflecting through his actions. If I could help the parents become resourceful, their child would naturally model this state. During my weekly sessions with these parents I probed them about their fears and I discerned the patterns of language and behavior they used to compensate for their son’s so-called learning disability. Their son’s biggest handicap, I showed them, was their own limiting beliefs about his abilities, as well as their belief that his learning problems were real. I suggested that the boy was likely fulfilling his parents’ fears more than dealing with an actual disability. For the two months I engaged in this kind of conversation with the parents, and I coached them to be both positive and firm with their son. We practiced using specific language techniques to shift from un-resourceful states to empowered ones. For example, I encouraged the mother to change how she behaved every time the family went out to dinner. Assuming her child had a real disability and couldn’t read, she would take the menu and read it to him. This simply reinforced the boy’s belief that he couldn’t read and prevented him from practicing the skill. I suggested that she invite him to read the menu if he wanted anything to eat, and not to respond to his whining. Gradually the parents re-designed the quality of their relationship with their son, assuming he was capable and being firm about the positive actions he needed to take. My direct work with the boy amounted to one hour during these two months. In that hour I showed him how reading worked and emphasized that reading is “quite simple, really, if you know the trick.” Of course I had no idea what to do, because I didn’t specifically know what he did when he tried to read. However, I offered a belief in his success and then watched closely to discover his reading strategy. He told me that he didn’t like reading because, unlike television, there were no pictures. As I watched him read, I could see that his total absorption with struggling to sound out letters prevented him from creating pictures in his imagination for each word. When he finally sounded out a whole word he experienced it only as the sound of the joined letters, and then he went on to struggle with the next word. He agreed to try a different way. I asked him to stop at the end of each word and make a mental picture of what that word meant. Talking to someone like me about what was going on inside his head was obviously a totally new experience for him. We had a great time turning the meaning of the each word into a picture. We strung the pictures together into a “movie” – the meaning of the sentence. We practiced this sentence over and over, linking the pictures and movie to the words and sentence. At the end of the hour his huge smile told me he had discovered the secret to reading. When two months were over, the boy was in a resourceful state because he had had a wonderful time snowboarding each day. His relationship with his parents was already transforming, and he was starting to sense that he was okay and could be more responsible for himself. When he came back to Wondertree, we still had to deal with some of his old patterns, but the boy had made significant personal shifts and felt supported in his learning both in the center and at home. The family moved at the end of the year but kept contact with us. They reported that their son was doing well in school and eventually they wrote that he had graduated from high school and was going to a university. Through this example and many others like it, it has become clear to me why experts focusing on things like the reversal of letters are not getting significant results for kids with learning problems. Reading difficulties are often just symptoms of the complex situations arising within family and school relationships. Once they become an embedded belief in a child’s self-perception, through the power of the labels we give them, the challenge becomes one of peeling back layers to find the original issue. Only then can we effect true and lasting change. As an overview, I believe that schools frequently require that children take on intellectual tasks before they are developmentally and emotionally ready for them. I have yet to see a child develop a learning disability when he is truly and enthusiastically learning what he or she wants to learn. I think we need to be more accountable for what we are assuming are the children’s developmental problems.
|
||
