This time it’s for parents who may wonder if their children have special needs or developmental problems. It’s from a recent issue of the Child Care Aware online newsletter, which is sponsored by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.

The truth is parenting takes work, and some kids may need reinforcement in one area or another. This article gives parents some things to look for and some things to think about. Personally, I think these are areas we should all be assessing and looking at as parents, not only to evaluate our children’s needs, but to ensure that we are staying on top of their development.

With my own son, we’ve always had an eye out for anything out of the ordinary — perhaps to a fault. At one point my ex even worried that some of my son’s mannerisms were in fact “tics” that can be consistent with disorders like Tourettes Syndrome. So we brought it up with his doctor, and spoke to a specialist. As it turns out, he is simply hampered by bad sinuses (regrettably, it’s one of my genetic contributions to him, it would seem). But we were on it just the same.

The point is we checked it out with the pros. Which brings me back to my earlier point: It’s good to think about this stuff.

My oldest son, a junior in high school, is checking out college options these days. Actually his parents are. He is not particularly interested in reading college brochures. He can read, though. That seems unremarkable, but there was a time when we wondered if he ever would read. He had trouble reading in first grade, the second grade and the third grade, when we finally had him evaluated.

I brought him to a town house down the block from Central Park for what’s called a psycho-educational evaluation – a battery of tests that required two visits to complete. On the third visit, my wife and I got the diagnosis: Our son had dyslexia. Now dyslexia is not the worst thing to be diagnosed with. It certainly beats cancer and a whole list of other ailments. But for parents who make their living by reading and writing, it was disconcerting.

The specialist went down a list of scary-sounding findings that are common to dyslexia: auditory attention and processing difficulties; bad rote memory, and poor sequencing skills. The evaluation contained some good things, such as creativity and excellent visual-motor coordination, but I already knew that from living with my son for nearly nine years. The specialist said my son might need to go to a special school and in any case needed a multi-sensory approach to learning.

I asked hopefully if my son had a border-line case of dyslexia. She said no. I felt pretty bad when we left her office.

As we soon learned, dyslexia is an odd condition. All sorts of brilliant, creative people such as da Vinci, Edison and Einstein had dyslexia. Dyslexia is not reading words backwards, though that sometimes happens. People with dyslexia have trouble processing written words. Their brains seem to be wired a little differently. The same unusual brain connections that make reading difficult seem to be responsible for making many of these folks creative. A book called “The Gift of Dyslexia� published several years ago explored this condition.

Our oldest son certainly seemed to be creative. He amazed us with his drawing and was constantly building toys out of scraps from around the house. But then again, we are his parents and parents are supposed to be amazed by their offspring.

After we assured my son that he was OK – and that he had something in common with some very smart people – we got in touch with “The International Dyslexia Associationâ€?. From there we found a good tutor. I wish I could say it was a smooth, straight road. It wasn’t, but we managed.

(My family’s encounters with dyslexia will appear in Parents’ Place periodically)