Learning the 9s

Anytime in my life that I’ve been asked if I’m a “glass half full,” or “glass half empty” kind of person, I haven’t really known how to answer.  I don’t identify as an optimist or a pessimist, yet I refer to myself as a “pessimistic realist,” which to me means I look at things in a way that is realistic and based on the fact that life can be good at times but it isn’t always perfect and that if you’re mentally prepared when crappy things happen, they might be a little easier to deal with. So, in regards to my glass, I guess I’m a “that glass has liquid in it and it could totally spill at some point, so you better be careful” kind of person. 

It’s no secret that our personality types impact our parenting. This is no different for special needs parenting, and actually might even be more apparent.   We had an event over the weekend that has me questioning the way I look out on things and reminds me that as parents, we can analyze how we handle things and make changes as we move toward being our best selves.

My daughter, Iris, is 9 and she has been struggling with math for a long time. Iris is diagnosed with a genetic condition that affects her development on multiple levels and, as a result, her motor skills are so impaired that it has affected her ability to benefit from common hands-on supports to learning, like using manipulatives, Touch Math and other methods that often help kids make sense of otherwise confusing concepts. As the expectations get harder by grade, she falls more and more behind as her acquisition of basic skills and facts is math is extremely slow. Yet, we press on.  Our biggest math goal right now is for her to learn her basic addition and subtraction facts as these are foundational to many life skills.  Her progress has been slow, but she does continue to increase the number of facts in her “known” pile.  Last weekend, we were going through cards and the 9s were especially hard for her. She hadn’t learned them and no matter how many times I repeated the facts and she said them back to me, many of them didn’t stick in her memory. Our older daughter, Charlotte, who is 10, trying to be helpful, started explaining to her that since she knows her 10s, her 9s should be easy. “Just think of what you would get if you added 10 to that number and then subtract 1, Iris.” Though I found it nice that Charlotte was trying to help, I shut her down. “That is too confusing for her Charlotte. I think explaining it like that is going to make it harder for her.”  In the moment, I couldn’t comprehend that she would be able to understand that rule or way of looking at her math facts.

Fast forward to this past weekend. We had gone through the cards multiple times and she still wasn’t remembering many of the 9s. I decided to give it a shot and repeated the rule that Charlotte had the week before, walked her through two examples and then started again. She stared at the first card, said the rule out loud, and gave the correct answer.  Same for the second, and the third and the forth, until she had gotten the whole stack of 9s. I mixed them up and she did it again, the second time, not saying the rule, just looking at the card, thinking for a second and knowing the answer.  Then, tonight, two days later, I pulled out the cards and she still knew them.

I have sat next to parents countless times and encouraged them to push their children to do more. I have reminded them to be positive and to teach their kids to be independent.  I have taught them not to sell their kids short and to believe that anything is possible.  But, in my own life, I guess I’m not so good at that.  I will whole heartedly admit that when my own child was diagnosed with a disability, I became a different kind of teacher. I faded on pushing families to do more, because I had learned that it isn’t always possible to do more and that feeling like you should always be doing more is really, really hard. And that it can also be really, really dangerous in regards to your own well-being.  I shifted in the direction of praising families for what they were doing, even if I thought they could do more and started helping them come up with ways that they could push their kids harder or believe in them more in a way that worked for their family and helped them maintain their sanity as caregivers.

Parenting a child with a disability is a role like no other.  We are surrounded by people and situations that constantly remind us how much harder the world is for our kids.  Many of us tend to focus on the REAL, because you can manage potential disappointment by lowering expectations.  This weekend, I decided that I want to be more aware of when my opinions may potentially limit my child, just because I think something will be too hard or too confusing. She should NEVER hear me say that she can’t do something or that something is too hard. And, I need to model for my ten-year-old that her sister is capable and though she may need accommodations, with support she can do a lot more things that people think she can. While I think there is value in setting realistic and achievable goals, I want to believe that my child is going to accomplish whatever she wants, and if we believe in her, I think she will. Because she learned her 9s this weekend and no drinks were spilled in the process and that’s pretty special.