Dyspraxia. The Clumsy Child…

Yep, sometimes it’s embarrassing. Things get broken, lost, mislaid. It’s hard to join in sports. It’s often hard to make friends. Perhaps as a family you’d rather be very active, but your child just can’t fit in, even if they try hard.

People with dyspraxia can learn motor skills through endless practice. Practicing and learning any single skill takes a surprising amount of effort and often they still have to think about it to achieve it.

With handwriting, if you have to spend too much attention on the act of writing, you can’t think about the content.

If it’s your teenager trying to drive, needing to think about it since it’s not automatic, that’s real trouble.

But there’s more than that. There’s the confusion. And often falling behind with schoolwork.

Even young children are often depressed or despondent.

Other parents often criticize. They really don’t understand what you’re dealing with.

Your child is probably just as frustrated as you are.

Often children just give up. They lose the belief in the possibility of success. Nobody seems to understand them. They tire easily and often get accused of being lazy. At school, when they know the answer they often get accused of guessing because people don’t understand how their intuitive thinking works.

It’s hard to see any positive in a situation like this.

You’ve probably already followed the traditional, well-intentioned advice. Checklists, doing it with them, doing it for them.

It’s not your fault – you’ve been doing all you can to help them. The effort you put in gets you from day to day but it’s often hard to imagine a time when they are completely independent.

Here’s the reality…

There’s an alternative, a more efficient, kind way to go about it. It’s time to make a change.

It’s a mistake to think that they are “just learning disabled”. Often they think and learn differently. Once they understand how their intuitive thinking works, they can even learn how to explain their thought process effectively and then to critically analyse their thoughts.

It is important to show your child how to leverage the thinking processes that are natural to them instead of focusing on what they can’t do. They need help to become lifelong independent learners who can eventually thrive in the workplace.

For those with Dyspraxia, there are specific secrets to succeeding in school… and in life.

Here are some of them:

They need to develop automaticity of learned motors skills by first working with the underlying body-brain connections.
They do better when sitting on the floor, or any other surface they can’t fall off of, so that they don’t worry about their stability when they focus on their work.
Improve stability through their neurodevelopmental program to make it easier to focus and concentrate, and to reduce anxiety (being off-balance can and often does cause anxiety).
They need to capitalize on the ability to think intuitively by addressing learning from the big picture inwards instead of chunking it into meaningless little portions that are hard to remember in sequence.

If what you’ve been working with hasn’t given you the results you wanted, it’s time to try something different.

We suggest you use these four steps to achieve success with your dyspraxic child:

Investigate with us what’s really going on.
Develop your child’s true learning potential through an individualized neurodevelopmental home program.
Work with a specialist dyspraxia tutor who actually understands what dyspraxia is, to develop strategies for effective learning
Apply what you’ve learned to help your child become an effective, independent lifelong learner.

If you would like to talk with one of our experts to discuss what would be the best approach to support your dyspraxic child, book a free consultation today.

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