Learning and attention issues can leave students, educators, and parents frustrated. It can seem a constant struggle to reassure your child of his or her individual worth outside of classroom performance. However, it’s important to guide your child in having a balanced view of his or her strengths as well as weaknesses. Doing so will help prepare your child more fully for the challenges of more advanced education, as well as adulthood.
Developing Self-Awareness as a Strength
Students with learning and attention issues can be assisted in social and classroom skills by transforming their self-esteem and self-awareness capabilities into strengths. Encouraging your child to have a realistic view of his or her learning differences means preparing him or her well in and out of the classroom.
Ongoing attention to developing self-awareness is a process best begun when the child becomes socially aware. Many parents might wonder how to take on this issue without quashing their child’s personality or expressiveness. However, children with learning differences, when instructed to understand social cues and practice self-reflection, can become more empathetic and recognize how others might perceive him or her.
Strong self-awareness skills also enable attention-challenged children to understand more fully what might be expected of them in a structured classroom environment. Since good self-awareness is an underpinning of self-advocacy, children with these skills are more apt to catch errors, monitor themselves, respond to setbacks appropriately, properly and efficiently ask for assistance, and understand how their choices, actions, and words might affect other people.
Developing Self-Esteem as a Strength
The fostering of strong self-esteem is also an area of critical concern for parents of children with learning and attention differences. Since self-esteem is encouraged by a pattern of successful task completion, it may be difficult to establish for these students, especially while in structured classrooms with average or gifted peers.
However, self-esteem is not built with meaningless trophies, equally showered compliments, or insincere flattery: Children are more apt to feel proud of actual accomplishments which they undertook themselves and completed with some struggle. Rather than an inflated sense of ego, self-esteem is tied to a concept of intrinsic worth and value. Encouraging the placement of self-esteem entirely on external accomplishments can easily backfire.
Self-esteem, especially at certain stages of childhood, is most valued from one’s peers. This means that students with learning differences who experience bullying and a feeling of inadequacy can result in detrimental behavior, anger, giving up too quickly, avoiding unpleasantness, or an easy collapse in the face of peer pressure.
Supporting a strong self-esteem in children is possible with an ongoing exertion to realistically praise honest effort, finding role models who encourage the child similarly, and a peer group with which a child can related. Finally, as a significant building block of developing a healthy self-esteem is truthful assessment of strengths and weaknesses, it can help to ensure the child is aware of what these abilities are.
Working With His/Her Interests
Students with attention differences are just like those who don’t face these challenges: They have passions, dreams, preferences, and favorite subjects. However, sometimes they are so preoccupied with and exhausted from the effort of working with their learning differences in structured school environments that their interests may not receive much time or attention.
If your child has skills and abilities in such areas as music, sports, or computer programming, it’s important to allow space for him or her to develop them. Not only will this prepare the child well for the classroom with the abilities these activities will foster (for example, spatial relationship skills usually develop along with the solving of puzzles), it can help boost self-esteem. This sense of accomplishment can spill over into other areas of the child’s life.
It is important, however, to establish a sense of balance between the requirements of schooling, chores, and other responsibilities along with the interests of the student. Once your child has found an interest, either in school or out of it, her or she can use it as a springboard into other tasks. The confidence boost a student receives from hobbies, extracurriculars, and enrichment activities is priceless, but it is self-defeating for it to come at the expense of less enjoyable tasks and the development of other skills.
Be on the watch for abilities which might not translate to the classroom, the playing field, or even the arts. While some students might display strong abilities in areas such as dance or drawing, others can show competencies at less measurable skills. These can include leadership abilities, a strong aptitude for persuasion, a sense of humor, or the capacity to comfort others easily. Occasionally known as “soft skills,” such attributes are also important and should be recognized and encouraged.
Paving the Path to Strength Discovery
Sometimes a student’s strengths are not yet apparent. Working with a child’s interests are easier when they are manifest, but sometimes a student with attention issues needs space, reassurance, and opportunity to try new activities and find new skills.
Volunteering is one way to discover such interests and strengths. Not only does taking time for the community have the potential to increase a child’s tendency to care for others and experience gratitude for what he or she has, it can also provide a platform for learning how to organize time, constructively express opinions, and experience a feeling of connectedness outside of a traditional school environment.
Parents and children can also thrive outside of expected environments. Trying activities which siblings or peers have not can be a new way to uncover skills. Taking short courses in cooking, martial arts, robotics, chess, or new sports such as bowling can all invite time together as a family and create new roads to affirming activities. When students with attention learning differences feel they have autonomy, the ability to choose, and thrive in various areas of their lives, they can tackle other challenges more easily.
