Book Excerpt: "On Their Own" — So What is It?" - Página 2

I went into greater detail, this time talking about the really difficult challenges presented by social skills, and this time the man said, "You know, I have a friend whose daughter has all the things you said. She stands too close when she talks, she always talks in the same tone of voice, really loud...and even though she went to school, she just can't seem to get things. And I ask my friend all the time, 'So what is it?' and he doesn't know. But it sounds like what you're talking about."

"Yeah, I also have a friend," said the secretary. "Her son is, what, maybe twenty-three or four now, and he's the same way. Still lives at home, and he's lost job after job...but my friend never said he has dyslexia or anything. Maybe ADD." This added thought brought in a new twist to the story. "Is ADD the same as learning disabilities?"

"Not the same," I said, "though many people with LD also have ADD."

"So if he has ADD he doesn't have LD?"

"Not necessarily. He could have both. And there's also ADHD, which is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder."

"So...okay, so...," the man said, squinting behind his glasses in confusion. "So what's it all mean -- that they can't learn?"

"It's more than that. It affects everything in their lives, not only schoolwork."

"So it's not mental retardation, right? You're sure of that?"

"I am."

"I still don't get it," he said after a short pause. "If it's not mental retardation, then what is it?"

He could have asked me four or five hundred more times and I'm not sure I could have explained LD in a way that would have made him understand. I did not get frustrated by his inability to get it right away, because I have had years of exposure to all the best and brightest in the LD field and still, when someone asks me outright, "So what is it?" my reaction is to try as hard as I can not to say the first thing that comes into my mind, which is usually: "I have no idea."

It is so hard to define learning disabilities. Dyslexia is the one most often grasped by the general public, not as a term for a condition that covers all forms of reading disability (which it is), but as a way to describe the reversal of letters or numbers. We can all visualize someone doing that. We may have done it ourselves, while taking down a phone number, for instance, and writing 489 instead of 498. We may even look at that simple error and think, "I wonder if I have dyslexia?"

But what about cognitive learning disabilities? How do you explain an inability to understand an abstract concept without leading the listener to the inevitable, "So is it mental retardation?"

The problem is that there is no single definition of a learning disability. LD is not any one thing, but rather an umbrella term used to describe any number of behaviors that are unexpected in individuals who are accomplished in learning in other ways. The only way to accurately define it is to explain the full range of problems encompassed by the term, but even then the possibility of accurately describing every specific combination of learning disabilities is next to impossible as every learning disability is unique.

Here is a broad description: LD affects people's ability to interpret what they see and hear, or their ability to link information from different parts of the brain, because their brain is "wired" a little differently. These differences can show up as specific difficulties with spoken and written language, with coordination, with self-control, or with paying attention. People can have learning disabilities in reading, writing, and math, and in processing information (and they can have difficulties in one of these areas, two of them, or all of them). Most children and adults with LD can read words, but they may not always comprehend the meaning of the words. Learning disabilities can reach into personal relationships, since they often cause difficulty in common, everyday interactions with others.

Learning disabilities are not confined to childhood or to the classroom. They continue throughout people's lifetimes and touch upon every aspect of their lives, from school to jobs to relationships with family and friends. Even though they touch upon these aspects and influence them, however, they do not necessarily lead to failure in any of them.