Joe:
We would like to welcome Lenore Colacion Hayes to our forum here on the Homeschoolzone. She is the author of Homeschooling the Child with ADD (Or Other Special Needs): Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the Child with Learning Differences. She is also the director of BayShore School and is also the coordinator for the annual Southern CA Homeschool Conference. She is a counselor who has worked with students in a public school and at the university level. Her area of applied and research interest lies in working with learning disabilities and families of color. Her graduate degree is in community/clinical psychology, with an emphasis in educational psychology.

Helen Hegener, senior editor, Home Education Magazine says that, "Lenore C. Hayes hold the reader's hand through determining whether symptoms actually constitute a disorder or are simply a normal childhood trait, right on through negotiating with medical and educational bureaucracies (this advice alone may be worth the price of the book!). A valuable addition to the homeschooling bookshelf, highly recommended for anyone homeschooling a child with special needs."

In this interview and FREE excerpt from her book, Lenore shares with us how she became interested in special needs kids and how to deal with the special challenges that homeschooling can present. In her essay from her book, "What's Wrong with My Child?" she explores how to deal with the realization that your child is different and why homeschooling is a viable alternative. Don't forget to ask your questions at the bottom of the page!

Joe:
Lenore, thanks for stopping by. You book is specifically focused on special needs kids. How did you get involved with special needs homeschooling?

Lenore:
I am the parent of a child who would have been labeled "special needs" had he gone to a traditional school. Instead, my husband and I have always homeschooled our now 18-year old son. Aside from part-time attendance at the local university preschool, our son has never stepped foot in a formal classroom. Actually ... he did step foot in a classroom a few times when he came to visit me when I worked as a counselor in a public elementary school and he wasn't much impressed.

Joe:
Homeschooling a special needs child can have special challenges. Despite these challenges, why do you think that homeschooling is growing so rapidly especially for special needs kids.

Lenore:
More and more parents are realizing that homeschooling is a great option for children with ADD, ADHD, and other special needs. Homeschooling parents can tailor the learning experience to precisely fit their child's requirements, a critical necessity in the development of special-needs children. I wrote my book to shine a spotlight on the challenges and joys of homeschooling special-needs children—children with challenges ranging from autism and ADD to other learning disabilities or children who simply march to the beat of a different drummer. My book is a guide that will help your readers to:

• Create a flexible learning pace
• Assist your child to develop individual strengths
• Tailor a homeschooling experience for special-needs children of all ages
• Develop strong family bonds with a challenging child
• Get help from both public and private sources
• And much more!

Joe:
Thank you for spending time with us today. If parents have questions, they can can ask them on our special forum for add kids. We will now move on  to a FREE excerpt from you book, which  I hope will keep many parents.

"What’s Wrong with My Child?"

"What’s Wrong with My Child?" by Lenore Colacion Hayes is excerpted from ""Homeschooling the Child with ADD" (Or Other Special Needs): Your Complete Guide to Successfully Homeschooling the Child with Learning Differences" with permission of the author  ©2002 All rights reserved and may not be reproduced without the expressed written permission of the author.

There’s something wrong with your child.

These dreaded words strike anguish in countless parents. For many families, the knowledge that something is not "normal" about their child comes shortly after birth when the doctors detect some type of abnormality. Other families will assume normal development until the child enters school and experiences difficulties learning within a classroom setting. Still other families realize that their child is somehow "different," yet a concrete diagnosis eludes them.

All share a common bond:
Once a medical, mental health, or educational professional utters those words, life as the family once knew it will never be the same.

At this point, the family of the "different" child will begin a fact-finding odyssey. What exactly is wrong with my child? What caused this condition? Was this brought on by something we did or did not do as parents? Is there a cure? How will our child learn in school? Parents will pose these questions (and many, many others) to their children’s teachers and pediatricians, who in turn, will provide referrals to more specialized practitioners, such as psychologists, family therapists, speech and occupational therapists.

From that point on, the families have entered the world of what can be referred to as the "differently abled." The term is one intended to counter the negative connotations of "disabled," which implies that because a person is different, he or she is inferior. The use of the term "different;y abled" represents a plea to society to discard longstanding negative notions regarding individual abilities.

The School Experience for "Differently Abled" Children

Learning Disabled and special needs children are generally educated in public schools or federally funded programs that provide remediation and speech, occupational, or other therapies. In 1975, the U.S. government passed the first public law mandating that all identified children will be provided with free appropriate public education (FAPE). This is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA).

Unfortunately, most schools do not receive full government funding for their special education or resource programs. Families with more discretionary income can bypass or augment the public services and turn to private professionals. But many simply do not have this choice. As a result, many children do not receive the assistance needed to facilitate learning. Many families pursue legal action to force school districts to provide all mandated services. Judges do order schools to make such services available, even if it means local districts must foot the bill for private therapists or tutors. But lawsuits are costly and time-consuming efforts that offer no guarantees and often take an emotional toll on already stressed families trying to cope with children in need,

Why is My Child Not Learning in School?

A prevalent thought as to why children experience learning difficulties is that they have some type of biochemical or genetic disorder that prevents normal cognitive, physical, and emotional development. Recently, however, a strong belief has emerged among a growing minority of medical and mental health professionals that an entirely different reason explains why there is a growing number of children with learning difficulties. It isn’t that children are unable to learn but that many are unnecessarily labels with learning disorders simply because they don’t perform academically at or above levels similar to peers of the same age.

In previous generations, parents, teachers, and doctors generally looked to child development guidelines as templates for gauging a child’s progress along a continuum of growth. If a child’s ability to read were a bit delayed, the adults in her life would take a wait-and-see approach. Educators and parents were willing to offer encouragement and and patiently await further maturation. Formal educational or medical intervention only took place after it was clear that "growing out" of the problem wasn’t working.

By current educational standards, however, if a child doesn’t read by a prescribed age, he’s examined for neurological faults, labeled with a disease, and assigned to a special classroom or service to await his academic doom. It seems that developmental guidelines have been extrapolated to standardized the process of learning.

Homeschooling as a Viable Alternative

Parents are growing weary of running around and getting nowhere (much like hamsters on a wheel) searching for the proper diagnosis and treatment, battling with school officials for services to meet the child’s needs, while witnessing the life and soul being squeezed out of their once-inquisitive child. Many parents now choose to bypass the public system of services by addressing the needs of their learning disabled and special need children within the context of home, family, and community.

Meeting Individual Needs

Homeschooling has may advantages in general, but is especially valuable for a child who is not a good "fit" with school. Parents can tailor learning experiences to address the needs of a child who reads at an eighth grade level, does math at a fourth grade level, and writes at a sixth grade level. Homeschoolers are not confined to grade levels because children freely learn at their own pace.

One-to-One Learning

One aspect of special education that professionals and parents agree on is that children experience more learning successes when interacting with teachers one-to-one (or close to it). Schools simply cannot accommodate such a low adult-to-child ratio, but parents can when they educate their own children.

Flexible Pace

Parenting a child with different abilities is almost always a difficult task in and of itself. Family life is strained further when daily homework assignments enter the mix. Many parents report that volatile outbursts, once common in their households, greatly diminish when the family and child take control of their studies. Homeschooling allows children the freedom to work at an individual pace and, in many cases, to provide input as to what they wish to learn and how they will approach the material. Tamara, a parent in California, experienced this with her always-homeschooled ten-year-old son: "My son can’t do long seat-work and needs frequent breaks.Because of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), there’s a need for a lot of compromise. He needs to feel a sense of victory over choosing what to read or what subject to do before another. Homeschooling provides that flexibility."

Different Styles, Intelligences, and Strengths

Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner theorized that schools traditionally teach to those children who have strong verbal and math skills. This neglects those children who draw on other abilities to learn. In his book, Frames of Mind, Gardner outlined his theory of seven intelligences (a few years later, he added an eighth intelligence) by which individuals are capable of learning. Chapter 5 examines the theory of multiple intelligences and how it pertains to home educators. It is a theory that many homeschoolers find useful in understanding and working with their children.

Social and Behavioral Benefits

Another advantage of homeschooling is that homeschooled children with slight to moderate learning difficulties are not subject to placement in special education classes where they frequently adopt the behaviors of students with more serious disorders. The homeschooled child can learn appropriate life skills from those with a vested interest in seeing him succeed – the family and the community at large.

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