My child is struggling 
Now that my child has 
NCLD: There's a part in the book where you describe watching Charlotte dancing along with other children in a nursery school performance, and seeing that her movements were almost exactly the opposite of the other children. Was that the big revelatory moment for you regarding Charlotte's learning differences?
DB: The real revelatory moments for me came earlier, actually. All the parenting magazines said, “A child should be doing X at a certain age, and Y at another age,” but Charlotte was getting to be around a year old, and she hadn't begun crawling. Everything we'd read about child development said kids should be crawling at around eight months. And when Charlotte would have play dates with other children, we'd see how far along they were in their development and that Charlotte was lagging behind. She wasn't crawling, then she wasn't walking at age one when the other kids were, and her speech wasn't quite as clear as [that of] the other children.
As a new parent, I had nothing to compare [her development] with and our friends would just say, “She's just developing at her own pace,” which children will do. But as each milestone came along, and we could compare her to her playmates, that’s when we started to think that something was wrong.
So when she was five years old, we had her tested. That diagnosis, I'd say, was the turning point. Her dentist recommended a speech therapist, because her speech wasn't clear, and the speech therapist recommended that we have her tested for LD. We took her up to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and she was given a whole battery of tests covering a number of different things, including learning disabilities (LD).
Finally, the doctor brought us into her office and told us that Charlotte had learning disabilities. But this was really only the beginning and it was very frustrating for us. On the one hand, we finally had a concrete, black-and-white diagnosis from a doctor at a major medical institution. But on the other hand, there was a lot of frustration because when I asked [the doctor], ”Well, what does that mean?” and “What are we going to do?” it all became much more vague. The next steps were not at all clear.
One thing the doctor did tell us was that she might need a special school. When I heard that, I just fell apart. I had gone to a big sprawling public high school in Memphis, Tenn., and hearing “special school” sounded like my daughter was being sentenced to Siberia. Of course, it would later turn out to be the best thing that could have happened to her.
NCLD: What happened next after the diagnosis?
DB: Well, I picked myself up and put my fix-it hat on and felt better because now I had a mission. The way my personality works if there's a problem, I go out and fix it. We were told she might need speech therapy and occupational therapy, along with a special school, so I started investigating the options. We were lucky, because there are terrific resources in New York City [where we lived]. We talked with a family friend who's a child psychologist, and she listed special schools in New York and helped us get the process started.
