Parents with Learning Disabilities

There is a lot of popular attention to help children with attention deficit/hyperactivity or other learning problems, but adults may suffer from the same difficulties. The limitations that trouble such individuals are not merely school-related. Some of the symptoms of learning disabilities are particularly worrisome if the sufferers are parents who have problems managing their children's social and intellectual development. Some parents are, shall we say, underachievers.

Many children improve or heal from learning problems as they grow older, but others continue to suffer from impulsiveness or an impaired ability to focus, plan and organize throughout their lives. There is evidence that learning problems are more prevalent in some families and some geographical areas, and learning problems may be increasing in frequency today due to causes not yet identified.

In the past before electronic multi-media, people commonly had to read long and complicated printed articles or books exclusively to get in-depth information. But with the advent of broadcast and web media, some people now expect to find out everything they need to know in brief, simple formats or even one-sentence comments. We don't yet know if the web is a cause or effect of decreasing attention spans.

Ideally, parents are models of happy learners, but some secondary effects of learning problems are anxiety or depression that may impair a caregiver's enthusiasm for learning, or the ability to express positive emotions that inspire children's desire to learn. Hands-on social interaction in-person is essential for kids to learn interpersonal skills, so parents who have difficulty or are unable to organize peer interaction groups for isolated children – should get help from other adult caregivers who don't have that problem.

I don't mean to suggest that parents who have no learning disabilities are likely to be good parents. Quite the contrary, from personal experience I know that some of the very worst parents are actually excellent scholars and even teachers by profession. One of my students was the son of two university professors, and although nobody in his family had any learning problems, his parents were neglectful of his needs so he absolutely dreaded the thought of becoming a scholar himself someday.

My view is that we should never assume being a good parent is so easy anybody can do it, practically with your eyes closed. We don't allow anybody to drive a vehicle on public roads without being tested to demonstrate some minimum competence, and the high rate of crashes nonetheless indicates that such qualifying tests are hardly adequate. Some individuals who are good test-takers are bad drivers, while other people who are poor test-takers may actually be safe drivers. The same might be true of parents, who are potentially as dangerous as bad drivers.

Rather than granting selfish and incompetent governments the privilege of licensing drivers or parents, an alternative would be to offer voluntary instruction and testing to qualify parents as a sign or signal to other potential parents about who you are dealing with. Such independent qualifications would be imperfect but better than nothing, especially if several competing services became available to offer better and better instruction and testing over time, along with the opportunity for potential parents to boast multiple qualifications.

Humility is usually a good thing, but not always. Parents used to be more humble when confronting the educational establishment, but possibly due to the greater quantity of information available nowadays thanks to the web, parents are questioning the authority of government schools and the supposed expertise of trained teachers. Conventional education is largely based on outdated philosophy and guesswork, rather than experimental science. But that doesn't mean any kind of parent-managed education is good enough. I think we need to cultivate a culture of high standards for parenting, at least as rigorous as we traditionally do for testing and qualifying children.