Beware of labels such as 'learning disabled'

DEAR DR. FOURNIER: I am a patent agent and noticed early on that my creative clients tended to fit a profile: ADD, dyslexia, tending to be ambidextrous or left-handed, and sleep-disordered. So I studied up on these labels to find a correlation and realized that I was the poster child for all of the above.

From what I have gleaned, maybe 5 percent of the population, or more, is blessed with the above. That is the same segment of the population that comes up with music, books, poems, art and inventions. Once I made the connection, I am grateful to God for the ADD, dyslexia, left-handedness and sleep disorders. I have 17 patented inventions that have improved safety in the areas of jacks, brakes, clutches and hydraulic-driven machinery.

As Kate Kelly, co-author of "You Mean I'm Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?! The Classic Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder," writes, "If we could push a button and have it all go away ... we would not do it."

ASSESSMENT: I continuously meet with parents who have had a child diagnosed with a learning disability. I ask them the question that has haunted me for years: Why do they allow anyone to call their child "learning disabled"?

Of course, there are those who realize that without this label, schools have no legal obligation to help their children. Yet go to any educational conference in this country, and speaker after speaker prattles on and on about respecting and honoring our children's differences while the school system itself refuses to teach based on children's differences.

Instead, our education system teaches as if these children were all pressed out from one cookie-dough mix and with one design of cookie cutter! Since psychology has taken over the diagnosis of the educational problems of children, then the problem must always be found to be within the individual, thus the labeling of the child as "learning disabled." If sociologists were asked to be the ones to diagnose, they would look beyond the child to environmental influences before they victimize the victim.

WHAT TO DO: Let your child know that regardless of other people's labels, within your home your child is able -- able to do what your child passionately chooses to do. Adopt the fact that your child is like a secret cookie recipe that no one else has.

Get a date book with one page per day or get a notebook and put the dates in the book. Call the notebook "Mirror-Mirror." Consider each right side a mirror to which you will ask, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is fairest of them all?" Search for what your child has done each day and together record it in your book.

For example, let's say your child figured out that the character in a book is kind and takes care of people because he wants them to pay attention to him and like him.

The parent speaks for the mirror and says: "You are the fairest because you are insightful." Then the parent or the child writes to the left: "I am insightful." And below those words, the child will draw a picture of what "insightful" means to him or her.

As your child's ingredients become clearer, begin to think what your cookie could mean to the world. Your child will be whatever you believe he is. Decide what he will say to himself: I am able and will do what no other can. Or I am disabled -- can you do this for me?

(Write Dr. Yvonne Fournier, Fournier Learning Strategies Inc., 5900 Poplar, Memphis, Tenn. 38119. E-mail her at drfournier(at)hfhw.net)