By Brock Eide, MD, MA, and Fernette Eide, MD; 510 pages. Subtitle: How Understanding Your Child's Unique Learning Style Can Open the Door to Success.
The authors, founders of the Eide Neurolearning Clinic, have seen plenty of children who have received diagnoses of ADHD, autism, and mental illness -- and discovered that in some cases, the real problem was a learning or language disability. They share their expertise here with parents, at great length and maybe excessive detail. But if you've worried that professionals just don't quite get your kid, this could be a lifeline.
- Offers extensive information on a variety of learning and language challenges
- Shows how learning and language problems can be misdiagnosed and inappropriately medicated
- Gives parents suggestions on ways to improve processing and memory skills
- Looks at specific learning challenges in ADHD, autism, and sensory integration dysfunction
- Provides lots of good online resources for helping kids learn better
- So packed with information that it can be hard to get through
- May have worked better as two books, one on general issues, one on specific disabilities
- At more than 500 pages, it's a lengthy book, and a heavy one, too
- Chapter 1: The Mislabeled Child
Chapter 2: How to Get the Most From This Book - Chapter 3: Gone in Sixty Seconds: Memory Strengths and Weaknesses
- Chapter 4: Overlooking the Obvious: Visual Problems in Children
Chapter 5: What? Huh? Auditory Problems in Children - Chapter 6: The Communication Gap: Language Problems in Children
- Chapter 7: Getting It All Together: Attention Problems in Children
- Chapter 8: Making the Right Connections: Autism and Autism-Like Disorders
- Chapter 9: Mixed Messages: Sensory Processing Disorder
Chapter 10: It's as Easy as ABC ... or as Hard: Dyslexia in Children - Chapter 11: Handwriting and Hand-Wringing: Dysgraphia in Children
- Chapter 12: When the Numbers Won't Add Up: Math Problems in Children
- Chapter 13: The Midas Tough: How Giftedness Can Cause Learning Challenges in Children
Is it possible for a book to have too much information?
I'd like to say not. Information is what parents need, and better to have too much than not enough. Like other fact-seeking parents, I've carved my way through tough professional books looking for details I can grasp onto. The Mislabeled Child is certainly easier to read, and more parent-friendly, than those.
And yet, there is so much information here that I sometimes felt that it was meant to show us how it feels to be a learning or language disabled child, surrounded by important material to remember yet not able to grasp and hold onto it. I'd read one section and think, "Wow, that's interesting!" And then the next section, "That's so interesting!" And then, two or three more "That's interesting's" in, I'd have completely lost a sense of what the earlier sections were about.
I can't complain about how the material is organized -- each chapter has the same structure, and it's explained in the second chapter. The authors explain the conditions they discuss in good detail, with respect for parents and children, and offer lots of suggestions for what moms and dads can do to help.
One complication may be that some kids -- my kids, certainly -- have such a neurological soup of problems that a lot of the learning and language challenges mentioned sound kinda like but not entirely like, so it can be hard to know what strategies to get gung-ho for. That can lead to a certain amount of confusion and enthusiasm fatigue.
Maybe the biggest complication here, though, is that this is a book that needs to be read and re-read and studied, with notes taken and stickies applied to pages. That's not something it's easy to find the time and mental energy to do. I'll be going back over this book, and I know I'll find ways to help my kids. But it's going to feel like homework.
