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Hello and welcome to the questions and answers edition of Thriving Kids, a podcast from the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of children with mental health and learning disorders. I'm Dr. Dave Anderson, clinical psychologist and your host. Last week we had a very special conversation with actor Orlando Bloom about his personal journey with dyslexia. Orlando shared how he navigated school, the strategies that helped him succeed, and how he eventually learned to see his learning differences as a strength. That conversation sparked a lot of questions from our community about how to spot learning differences early, how to advocate for your child at school, and how to protect their confidence when they're struggling to keep up. Let's get into it. Our first question on this Thriving Kids podcast Q and A episode is a good one because it's one I hear a lot in the wild or with patients? This person asks, I always thought dyslexia meant flipping Bs and Ds or reading words backward. But my son doesn't do that. He just really struggles to sound out words. What actually is dyslexia is a letter flipping thing, even a real requirement. This is really great when people give us a chance to just kind of go after, like, some of those things they're like, in the populace, but really are like mental health myths. Like, for example, my favorite one is the one where people are like, oh, did you know that we only use 30% of our brains? And I'm like, listen, as much as I love brain facts, as much as the next person, the reality is we only use 30% of our brains or a percentage of our brains at any one time for efficiency. Otherwise you'd be experiencing every single memory you've ever had all the same time. Every sensation you could experience, every kind of sensory input you could experience, every emotion you could experience if you were using all of your brain cells at once. The whole point is that you're using the part of the brain that's kind of, like, relevant to certain tests. But all of this is to say this is another one that we hear a lot, which is this notion of like, well, I don't flip the letters or I don't, like, read things backwards. So isn't that what this is supposed to be? Dyslexia is one of three major academically focused learning disorders. One is associated with reading, another one's associated with writing, and the last one's associated with math and working with numbers. And the way that we diagnose these things within the field is through testing. We can do testing in school as part of say, a 504 or IEP evaluation or as part of a neuropsychological examination outside of school, or sometimes even in school. And what we do is we give people two kinds of tests to diagnose a learning disorder. The first kind of test is about assessing their cognitive potential, or it's often referred to as an IQ test. What we're looking at is a number of different indexes of ways that people think and what their kind of potential for fast thinking and reasoning, doing things quickly, holding things in memory, or processing visual information might look like. So what we do is we take that number that signifies that person's cognitive potential, and then we give them achievement testing. We give them tests that are at their grade level or their level of education in reading, writing and math. And what we do is we compare their performance on those academic tests to their actual intellectual potential. And if there's this big discrepancy in any one of these areas, we say, okay, this might be a learning disorder. Now, sometimes there can be other factors that cause that. Like for example, if a kid wasn't attending school for a period of time, or perhaps, you know, there was another mental health issue that prevented that kid from accessing their curriculum and learning the material at kind of a grade appropriate level. That might be the reason why we'd see some of these delays in learning. But if we see this result and we see it as something that's reliable and it kind of holds over time, or where the kid's cognitive potential is really not matching up with their progress on a skill like reading. That's how we diagnose dyslexia. And once we diagnose that, the whole focus is targeted interventions where we take science based approaches like phonics based instruction. And you know, if the child's classroom is already using that for instruction and reading, then all we really need to do as intervention is boost the kind of intensity and, and frequency of the amount of support that a kid is getting around learning to read to make sure that they catch up to the rest of their class and that they hold those skills going forward. But if they're not getting a science informed approach to teaching reading in their school, which unfortunately, as I referenced in a previous Q and A, is not so much the case across, you know, uniformly across national school districts, then we may need to really focus on phonics based instruction and figure out how to titrate the right kind of frequency and intensity. So all this is to say dyslexia is not something that can be Diagnosed based off of a single phenomenon that's happening when someone's reading. It's about how someone reads, how that skill can be delayed in its development, and how we then attack that with supportive interventions to help a kid to close that gap. Our second question on this thriving kids podcast, Q and A. In your last podcast, Orlando Bloom talked about his dyslexia and how writing things out by hand helped him learn. Are there other strategies like that we should be trying at home? And this is a really good question for us to answer because Orlando was talking about strategies that work for him. And this is, this is something where we as mental health practitioners, we really want to differentiate sometime between stories of techniques that work for all or globally and techniques that we'd put in the category of like, individual differences. Like, one example of this is working with music. Music doesn't have the same effect on everyone in terms of focus. For some people, certain types of music might help them focus. For some people, music in general, almost any music that they like can help them focus. And for some people, they need complete quiet in order to focus. And that's where we get in the realm of individual differences. We can't just uniformly apply music, a type of music or no music to help people focus. We have to kind of consider it on a case by case basis and say, does this work? What Orlando talked about in using writing, there is something universal about that in the sense that studies of memory and retention show that when people kind of reprocess information themselves, either verbally or through writing, they may retain more of the information, or if they rewrite certain things by hand, making sense of it themselves. That's one way of fostering kind of longer memory retention or helping you make sense of things. What I think we also got into in that conversation with Orlando is that when you talk to people with learning disorders, frequently we hear about workarounds that they've developed, whether it's a learning issue or even like, you know, another example is people with ADHD where frequently people develop rules for themselves or rituals that really help them to learn and help them to be able to access the curriculum in kind of non traditional ways. And this is always the type of kind of creative solutions where we want to like crowdsource these things and listen to folks with lived experience because they may not be captured by say, a global intervention approach where we have to judge intervention by whether or not it works for the majority of people, you know, with that condition. So with that, well, say to this question about, are there other strategies we should be trying at home. The answer is, if you've got a kid who is struggling with learning, there are evidence based interventions for each of those things that teach, you know, systematic approaches to writing that can help a kid to be able to do and produce, you know, writing even when they have a learning disorder in that area. There are systematic approaches teaching reading that help a kid to engage in faunus based instruction and be able to, you know, get their ability to read commensurate with, you know, kind of their intellectual ability. There are interventions for math learning disorders, for non verbal issues, for attentional issues, all of which help us to bring these skills to a level that might be commensurate with that child's peers. That said, if your child says, listen, I want to try this cool creative thing that I just came up with, my answer is, try to figure out a metric by which you can test it out where you can say, well, let's look, let's look and see if this makes it so you finish tasks faster. Let's look and see if this makes it so that you feel like you retain more information or do better on the next test. You know, let's try to find some way of assessing whether or not this could be a strategy that works much better for you. Our third question on this podcast, Q and A. My son is starting to call himself stupid and doesn't want to go to school anymore. He's working twice as hard as everyone else just to keep up. How do we protect his self esteem through all of this? So what I'm assuming is that the premise of this question is they've listened to our episode on learning disorders or some of the most recent episodes where we've really talked about learning challenges and school based difficulties and they're saying that their son knows this and then is also seeing themselves as incapable. And we'll often differentiate this for parents by saying we want kids to be aware of their profile of strengths and weaknesses, but we don't want their self esteem to be defined by that thing that is the biggest challenge for them. So whenever I hear a kid calling themselves stupid or talking about where the fact that they don't want to go to school, my immediate reaction is to try to validate first where they feel unsuccessful. You know, where they feel like they're getting negative feedback, where they feel like they don't have sort of a growth mindset approach, where they believe that somehow hard work and applying themselves in and developing kind of new habits might get them to where they want to Be that's the first piece is kind of just validating how hard this is and also trying to understand kind of what their mindset is and where this is. But part of that approach also involves decreasing all or nothing thinking, saying, where are the pockets that make you feel this way? Okay, I know it's hard and I also want to take a kind of active solutions approach to those pockets. But also let's really assess other pockets where we might be overlooking how well you're doing, whether it's a school club, a certain subject, an extracurricular activity, a teacher who's really in your corner, a way of connecting with peers while at school. Because for some kids, and I'll say this frequently in my office to patients, school might not be your thing. We might just be trying to get you through school. We might not want to like kind of try to look at this with like rosy colored glasses and be like, look, you know, I'm going to make it so school's enjoyable for you and fun and you're going to love it forever. School is school. And for some kids, all we're saying to them is I'm going to try to help you find the pockets where you've got supporters, the people who are in your corner, the subjects that you might like, the activities that you might actually enjoy, the peers you like connecting with. And we're going to try to anchor ourselves on those things and then also assess ourselves realistically for our own self esteem based off of the effort that we put in in those activities, talents that we cultivate, habits that we get into, ways that we kind of focus on improving ourselves, connections that we make with peers or people in our sports system. Those are all the different ways we're going to diversify these anchors for your self esteem. And the more we take that approach over time, the more we can help a kid to not label either the school experience or themselves in a global way as school is terrible or I am stupid or any number of other kind of all or nothing thinking patterns. Our fourth question on this thriving kids podcast Q and A episode is on your podcast with Orlando Bloom, he mentioned how physical movement helped him focus on my kid is the same way he can't sit still. How do I talk to his teacher about that without it sounding like I'm making excuses? And this is a great question, particularly for kids who already might be high activity or kids for whom that high activity is actually part of the kind of inattentive, hyperactive, impulsive symptom cluster. Sorry, the hyperactive impulsive symptom cluster of adhd. One thing that's really important is what research has shown is that exercise doesn't necessarily treat ADHD or affect kids with ADHD more so than other kids. But when you do examinations of the effect of exercise, exercise helps everyone to focus better. It doesn't differentially help kids with ADHD to focus better, but it's something that we need and that also helps our bodies to settle and to focus. So what we're seeing across lots and lots of school environments is especially in schools and school settings across the United States where recess and kind of movement breaks have become less and less frequent and of shorter and shorter duration. Many of the accommodations that might be recommended for kids who are struggling with, say, ADHD or struggling with high activity, you know, tend to be like movement breaks or telling a kid that they can run through stairwells or take a walk with a teacher or go and kind of move their body in certain ways, even in the classroom. I always take a data driven approach to this though, because sometimes the movement breaks are functioning as escape from things the kid really doesn't want to do. Sometimes movement breaks are functioning as a way of getting peers attention by kind of hamming it up during the movement breaks. And sometimes they're leading to increased focus. And what I always want to do in schools is take a more applied behavioral focus on any accommodation and saying, like, look, whether it's, you know, a fidget or whether it's something that we think is, you know, helping to be regulating from kind of a sensory perspective, whether it's a movement break. Let's look at what happens before and after we engage in this accommodation. Does the child actually work more efficiently on math? Can we collect data on that over time? Can we see that movement break affecting, you know, a kid? So I want to advocate globally for movement and play and making space for it, especially in schools for younger age kids across our country, we're not doing enough of that. And then I want to advocate specifically for kids to get movement breaks, but with a really practiced eye towards seeing that they're having its effect. And sometimes teachers will say, look, I did gather that data. And it's actually the movement breaks tend to function as escape or as a way to get peer attention. And that moment I say, well, look, it's at your discretion when you give them movement breaks. You may be needing to give them because they're part of an accommodation package for this kid, but you can give them an appropriate class breaks when it's okay to get peer Attention or to escape something. And maybe you tell the kid and the parents, I really want to give the movement breaks, but not in the middle of the math assignment in a way that might make, you know, this kid, for example, miss some, some important instruction or important work. Okay, our fifth question of I believe nine on this podcast Q and A is we keep hearing about AI tools that can help kids with learning differences like summarizing books or reading text aloud. Where's the line between helpful support and a crutch? This is a great question for like the zeitgeist right now and these kinds of questions. You know, the first thing I'll say about these tools is that they are just that, tools. We want kids to understand that they can use AI and all kinds of other screen based resources, you know, within their education as a tool, but not as a substitute and not as something that makes it so they don't have to get through the actual hard work of learning things or kind of producing the academic assignment. So when we look at AI, I'm frequently saying to myself, you know, whether a kid has a learning disorder or not, how can they use this as a tool that helps them to gain information, gain expertise, you know, enhance their learning, reinforce their learning, or perhaps address an accommodation that would help them to learn in a way that is more appropriate to them? And this goes back to like, you know, for kids who might be, you know, experiencing difficulties due to dyslexia or due to attentional focus, say with like a reading assignment, the option to be able to listen to that text read aloud might be really fantastic in terms of their ability to kind of focus on that, be able to listen to the text, be able to kind of make notations and follow along instead of just doing it, you know, in a quiet space and trying to kind of move through a large amount of reading. And again, and I've emphasized this, of course, in a number of previous answers, what I'm always looking at is as we look at these tools, I want kids and parents to be practiced in thinking about whether or not this helps. If we've got a kid who says, look, I focus better when I'm listening to heavy metal music a la me. I've got a kid who says, I focus better when you let me also work alone in my room. And I also focus better when I have chatgpt next to me, where when I finish a chapter, it provides an extra chapter summary of, you know, what's going on, I would say to that kid, how can I help you? First of all to be accountable to using those things in exactly the way that you intend, which is if you really believe the heavy metal music helps you focus, let's make sure we set it and forget it and then focus in on our task. How do we manage that and be accountable to that? If you say you need to work in your room, how can we measure whether or not you really are more efficient when you're in private space? Or if that's not just some excuse you have for not wanting you to do your homework in a public place so you can be distracted by chatting with your friends on your school computer? And then lastly, if you're saying that it works to do a chapter summary at the end of the chapter, how can we hold ourselves accountable for making sure we actually read that chapter and engage the academic material? And that's where it can be so difficult with all these different tools and all these different things that people will tell us could help or hinder our focus or our learning to just make sure to take that practice approach that says, how do we really assess whether or not this works and be honest with ourselves about what it is that facilitates our learning? And this is what's so difficult a lot of times for our teenage patients to really, you know, tell ourselves, okay, as much as I wanted to do this because it at least was like a little bit more interesting or a little bit more, you know, distance from my parents who I find very annoying, maybe I got to be honest with myself that that isn't the best way to facilitate my learning and I might need to just bite the bullet and, you know, engage in certain practices that at least get the work done, even if I find them more annoying or there's more potential my parents could, you know, meddle in my affairs. That's what we're looking for. And I'll say the last thing just to this question, in talking about helpful support versus a crutch, parents get worried a lot of the time that an accommodation will actually become a crutch that a kid leans on, that, you know, then they can't necessarily function if that accommodation was taken away. And my answer to that is that we just want to be honest about that with the kid. You know, we want to give you this accommodation. We also want to make sure over time, if there are low stakes tasks, we can practice trying to complete that task without this accommodation, just to ensure that you understand your capabilities and understand you can maybe get this done at a certain level with and without this particular thing. It's just that the Accommodation itself, you know, allows you to really produce at the level most commensurate with your abilities, those kind of trials and that kind of approach to things as a learning experience and as a way of, like tinkering and learning more about our own learning process is those are some of the values we want parents to be thinking about with their kids. So our sixth question. I'll correct myself. We only have eight questions this podcast Q and A. So you're closer to the end of this episode than you even thought as you listen to me talk through these learning related questions. Our sixth question on this podcast Q and A is, I saw a social media post where the Chiaman Institute had clips of celebrities like Bill Hader and Zoe Saldana all basically saying they're learning challenges with their superpower. Is there actually something to that? Like a real link between dyslexia and strengths like creativity or big picture thinking? Or is it just something people say to make us feel better? I love this question, because what this question is asking is, I think, a wave of thought within our society around neurodiversity. Because so much of the research up to this point within the mental health field has been focused appropriately, especially for a young science like mental health is around highlighting the difficulties that people might be having when they are most impaired by mental health or learning disorders, and then making sure that we have effective interventions to target those things and to be sure that people feel like they can get support as long as we can kind of break through the stigma that often prevents folks from going to treatment. That's kind of like one of the major problems the mental health field has been trying to solve over the last few decades. What the neurodiversity movement is really focused on is this notion of like. But also, how do we fill out a more complete picture of what neurodiversity is in a less pathologizing way? And we say, what are some of the ways that people who are neurodiverse, yes. Might have certain things they need to work on that are particular challenges for them. But what are also some of the ways that are delightfully different about those who are neurodiverse? That might also entail new and, you know, innovative approaches to solving problems or solving challenges. And I'll admit this is an emerging field. I hesitate from, you know, kind of describing certain aspects of learning or ADHD as superpowers. You know, for example, we get this question a lot with ADHD where people will say, well, ADHD is often described as sort of focus, but really it's focus on things that are not novel, repetitive, mundane or boring. If we look at how people with ADHD tend to focus on things they find rewarding or interesting, there's often this kind of phenomenon of hyperfocus. And is that maybe like a real positive side of that neurodiversity, a superpower associated with adhd? And I kind of sit on the fence about this because at the end of the day, a lot of these things come with very real challenges. And I worry at some level that as a mental health professional, I am invalidating some of the struggles that people face by trying to kind of rosy colored glasses it and say, like, oh, yeah, but here's these kind of like superpowers. At the same time, they aren't necessarily uniform or matched through, you know, years and years of research in saying, yes, this is a characteristic kind of like, positive aspect of, you know, this particular mental health or learning disorder. All that said, I absolutely support these kinds of lived experience narratives where we ask people, like, what have been some unexpected, you know, insights or conclusions that have come from your experience with ADHD or learning disorder? What are the ways you've discovered your own strength or resilience? Where do you think certain of your talents or abilities might actually stem from the intersection of your personality or who you are with this particular diagnosis? Understanding this diagnosis, of course, does not comprise the whole of you. All of those are such interesting questions that I think exist in, like, this qualitative lived experience world right now and not so much in the kind of research world. And there are narratives that we at child mind, as this question asker noted, really want to promote and really want people thinking about as they think about their own resilience and their own way of kind of, you know, living with and also kind of being proud of everything that constitutes them, including anything that might be, you know, to do with their mental health. Our seventh our second to last question on this podcast Q and A episode is what are some signs that a child's struggle is with a learning disability is starting to affect their anxiety, mood or identity, not just their schoolwork? This is a great question about the downstream effects of learning disorders. One of the main reasons why we advocate for early intervention is both because there is a critical period, oftentimes with learning disorders around learning of reading or writing or math in the early elementary school grades, where we just don't learn as fast or as much if we wait till later grades to actually intervene. And then there's also the fact that the reason why we want to engage in early intervention is that the longer that a child is struggling, the more likely they are to globalize that struggle. They're not just saying, oh, I'm having difficulty in math, they're saying, I suck at math, then I must suck at school, then just I suck. We do not want that pathway to be one that they have to go through because either a learning disorder is undiagnosed or untreated. So some of the biggest things we tell parents, look out for are if your child is having some sort of difficulty, whether you know it's about learning or not, and you're seeing some struggles in school, let's get an evaluation either in school or outside of school as quickly as possible so that we don't see those downstream effects. Because more often than not the mediating factor is negative feedback from educators at school, then negative feedback from parents about their academic investment, then some level of academic failure that then leads to other negative mental health consequences that come from feeling rejected by those in your village and like, you're not capable of producing academic work at a level that you think, you know, you might be capable of. And that's where we might see downstream kids starting to feel depressed or feeling really low on themselves, or kids who start to feel like maybe they'll just start doing other stuff or not care about school as much or withdraw from it. And I'll also say that particularly for the overlap between anxiety and learning, we can see real exacerbations in anxiety if a kid has this biological based learning disorder, difficulty learning reading, writing or math, and nothing they're doing to try to solve it is working. And so they're just getting themselves more and more tied up in knots and anxious about the next assessment in that subject, how badly they're going to do, why they can't learn this, what might be wrong with them. Again, before we exacerbate that anxiety, let's keep a close eye on how kids are doing in school. And if a teacher raises concern about the kids pace of learning and reading or writing or math, or their ability to kind of keep up with academics in the classroom, or their ability to focus or maintain kind of, you know, their body and space. Always good to get an evaluation and to figure out if there might be some other support where we can surround that kid as their village and make sure that they don't code this as this is me, I'm broken, or there's something wrong with me, or you know, I have to disguise this from the people in my community because I don't want anyone to know how hard this is. All of that leads to more struggle than I would ever wish upon any particular kid. Our final question of this thriving Kids podcast Q and A How can parents talk about a learning disorder in a way that feels honest and empowering without making it sound scary or like a limitation? Easiest answer to this question. You can go back to the episode that we had just last week with Orlando Bloom and listen to somebody talk about, you know, taking on many different facets of identity and then thinking about how that all weaves together in a self compassionate way that is a collection of all kinds of different strengths and weaknesses so that we can then be honest with ourselves where our challenges lie and put our effort there and at the same time be appreciative of where our innate talents might be and, and kind of looking at ourselves as a whole and as a profile of all kinds of different strengths, weaknesses, places where we put effort, things we care about and values all. That's to say, that's not easy to build all of that all at once. But so much of making sure that people feel empowered and can be honest about, you know, a diagnosis like a learning disorder is helping them to see themselves as a whole and not just as a part. Because the learning disorder is just one facet of how their brain might work a little bit differently and where they might encounter challenges and where they might need some extra support. But they're represented by so many different things from the people they surround themselves with, the people who they connect with, the characteristics they have as part of their personality. Are they funny, are they warm, are they loving, are they kind, are they risk taking and adventurous, you know, any number of things, what values they hold, what kinds of things they engage in and what activities they're into, where are their talents and their hobbies, how much they invest in academics? There's so many things that make us who we are. And the more we help kids kind of take a step back from that, even in moments where they're feeling demoralized or as if like we're telling them about something that is, you know, really hard news or a big limitation or challenge for them, the more we can help make sure that they see themselves, their self. Talk is similar, centered around all the different things that make them who they are and make up their identity and not just a single thing that might need some extra support or intervention. With that, I want to thank you all for listening. That was a fantastic set of questions on this thriving Kids podcast Q and A episode. For more tools and support. I encourage you to visit childmind.org resources, home to our Family Resource center, where you can find expert guidance for supporting children with learning disorders. Thank you to everyone who wrote in. Thank you for being part of this community. I'll see you next week on the Thriving Kids Podcast.