No, not from me. But this is something that really moved me and I felt it was worth sharing.

A co-worker today attended the Westchester County Women’s Hall of Fame Awards luncheon, at which his daughter was receiving the Merrill Lynch Westchester Leadership Award.

I think her words best relay why she was worthy of the honor and the scholarship it brings. These are excerpts from the essay she submitted as part of her application for the award:

“I have always been different. In books and movies, being different is always good. The hero and heroine are never ordinary people, they are special and gifted.
“But being different in real life is not always a good thing; most of the time it’s painful, lonely, and just plain hard. I have cerebral palsy and other learning disabilities including difficulty reading and writing.
“I would have to say that my disability, and more importantly people’s reaction to it, has had a big impact on my life and made me who I am today.
“It’s amazing how being different can be like holding a magnifying glass up to reveal those who are kind as well as those who are cruel. While I consider many of my ‘disabilities’ to be ‘abilities,’ I have had to spend much of my life learning how to be like others so I will be accepted.
“I hope to become a teacher, a special education teacher or maybe a social worker or an advocate for people with disabilities. I’d like to help other people like me get the help they deserve. Maybe I’ll even get a PhD.”

Wow. That’s some young lady.

In an early post on this blog, I talked about my family’s experience with dyslexia, specfically our first son’s reading troubles. Dyslexia is frustrating thing for child and parent, but we found an excellent tutor through a wonderful organization, the International Dyslexia Society. We saw the tutor every Saturday at her home and practiced specific skills in our home five days a week.

My son hated this most of the time. Since much of the practice involved writing with a marker on one of those wipeable boards, my son frequently wielded a marker, a dangerous thing in the hands of an easily frustrated kid. Helpful hint: Though these markers are described as erasable, they are difficult wipe from skin or clothing after your child uses one as a weapon against you.

However, I never did talk here in Parents Place about our second son and his experience with dyslexia. So hear goes. A couple of years after the first son finished with his dyslexia tutor, our youngest son was diagnosed with dyslexia. For a family that makes its living reading and writing – and that’s most of us these days – the double dyslexia was a downer.

We were now experienced parents of dyslexic children, however, something that led us to pick up on the problem sooner, somewhere around the end of first grade-begining of second. We tried a different dyslexia tuto one who said she who already taught in our neighborhood and would be available to come to our house after school, freeing up more than two hour spent every Saturday visiting the earlier tutor. The rest of the drill remained the same, though: We practiced the skills five days a week and read together every night.

The results were disappointing, however; My second son was making little progress and we were quite troubled. I’ll pick up this story in another post soon.

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”:http://www.naccrra.org.

The truth is parenting takes work, and some kids may need reinforcement in one area or another. “This article”:http://www.childcareaware.org/en/subscriptions/dailyparent/volume.php?id=52 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 Dyslexiaâ€?”:http://www.dyslexia.com 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€?”:http://www.interdys.org. 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)