Empowering Parents: A Premature Arrival

Edited by Mindprint Staff

In this story, Beth, mother of 8 year old Talya, describes why she used Mindprint Learning to calm her lingering concerns about her daughter who was born prematurely.

 (Editor’s note: To protect the privacy of the child, Beth and Talya are not their real names.)

Talya is very bright, but moves notoriously slowly in many ways. She was born very early so I was concerned that there might be learning disabilities that we hadn’t seen show up yet, or the school hadn’t noticed, but lingered beneath her sweet exterior.

Talya had a range of services provided when she was little, including occupational therapy, physical therapy, and speech therapy. She worked so hard and was placed out of everything by the time she was five. She started kindergarten on time with her classmates and her pre-school and regular school teachers always reassured me that she was very capable and I had nothing to worry about. Still, I worried. What mother wouldn’t?

Talya had no problem at all taking the Mindprint assessment. Still, I think I held my breath for those 3 or 4 days while I awaited the results.

I would say the results were more confirmatory than surprising, but a relief all the same. Talya was described as having very good reasoning skills. What more could a mom hope for?! Still, her processing speed is slow. While she’s very capable, we learned we really do need to give her more time. Reading about how this could affect her socially as she hits middle school was very eye-opening.  We are not there yet, but hopefully we’ll be a little more prepared when she might “miss a beat” with other girls her own age.

Mindprint has already helped us with homework time. It was so valuable to understand how we could support her with better habits recommended by experts on the Mindprint website for learners like her. For example, last night she was frustrated and upset with the assignment. Normally, I would have gotten frustrated, too, and it would have led to more tears. But instead, I was able to look at what she was working on, and say, “You’ve got this. You know how to do this and this is where you shine.” I knew that she could do the work, but she was so upset that she was not really even processing the instructions. We broke the assignment into chunks, and she calmed down. In smaller steps of instruction, she was able to write a beautiful summary of the story she had read. All on her own. The Mindprint Learning strategies really helped us come up with the right way to help her (and me).

Choosing to do the Mindprint Learning Profile was a great decision for us. I now have the targeted tools to help Talya when she struggles, and, at the same time, grow her many strengths. I imagine I will always have that lingering worry from her premature arrival. But at least now I know I have an easy way to check in on her.

Ask your questions about processing speed in the comments below. Or learn more about processing speed here.

Other posts in this series: Empowering Parents: Sibling Surprises, Empowering Parents: Our Founder’s Story

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