The Future Is What YOU Make It

From the day you are born, you have the ability to see, hear, smell, touch and even relate to those who are around you. A newborn baby can even sense when his or her mother is near them. The baby also has the ability to detect his or her mother's emotions. Therefore, the learning process for a baby begins in the mother's womb.

If a child is raised by a mother who has bipolar depression, then the baby will use its mother as an example and act out irrationally as well. If the father is an alcoholic, then the child might learn to drink to calm emotions when they are threatened. A child might even resort to alcohol if he or she feels depressed. The child may even believe that happiness is punishable. All of these behaviors go back to how a child sees their parents and uses them as a role model in life.

What children hear and observe are examples of how the child will grow up. The child truly does adapt to his or her environment and they will adjust their behavior to survive. This does not always mean that a child that grew up in a dysfunctional family will have a learning ability, but it does put them at risk for disabilities in life.

People are not singled out in life o suffer more than others. Once a child reaches the age to attend preschool or Head Start the child will meet new people who will give them new rules for life. The rules may influence the child's life and teach them that it is good to be happy and that irrational behavior is bad. Every adult influence in a child's life will influence it - this influence can be either positive or negative. We hope that it is positive.

However, if the rules that the child learns at school conflicts with what they learn at home then there is cause for confusion. If mom acts irrational and has manic depressive attacks and dad drinks excessively when he is stressed, then the child sees the conflict in their life and they don't know what to believe. They don't know whether or not it is good to be happy and they don't know what is going on in life. The child may see that dad goes to the bottle to attain temporary stress relief and the child may then believe that happiness is only an illusion.

So what happens when the child goes back to school? The child sees the rules that the school teaches and compares them with what his or her parents show the child when they are at home. The child may see the school as a "make believe land" and home as a harsh reality.

But the child is then forced to compare the two sets of conflicting rules in his or her life. They see the happy school and the not so happy home. Where are the child's beliefs? Where do his beliefs fall into the picture?

The child's beliefs are rarely seen because everyone teaches the child something different. They are taught to believe in accordance with everyone else. The perfect example of the completely confused child is the one that grows up in a poverty stricken home and is as follows.

The child grows up in a home in which the mother is a paranoid schizophrenic and is "defeated" by the man she calls her husband. The mother teaches her child that boys are better than girls and the child is forced to believe this. The mother also tells the child that she is to be seen and never heard. The child is sometimes even seen as a waste of time to her parents.

The father teaches the child that talking, crying and even being overly happy are bad emotions and that she will get in trouble for any and all of them. The child fears the father and fears showing emotion to the child. If she angers him logically or illogically, she reaps the punishment of it.

The young child is then taught that education is worthless. She is taught that the only value education has is that it is a method used to control the lives of others. To this degree, the man was right as the National Education Association is constructed to rule rather than focus on helping a child learn.

Later, as the child grows, the child sees other children who hurt, mimic, criticize and hurt others. The child watches as teachers stand by and punish the child that was acting in defense against the bullies. The child observes the leaders and how they behave when complex problems are presented.

Now, the woman could learn to act out as the people around her acted. But, she had her own beliefs and decided to stand by them. As you can see, the now grown child has struggled through life and through the complexities in her life that hindered her learning ability. However, the woman learned that by observing, comparing, contrasting, analyzing, and investigating she has learned to find facts to prove her beliefs in life.

This is the type of life that many children lead who suffer from learning disabilities. Now, obviously every child's life is not going to be poverty stricken, but they are going to see the clash in family values and the clash in school values. They are either going to be overcome by confusion or they are going to fight their way through it.

Those children who succumb to confusion are more likely to develop some other sort of mental illness or defect. They may suffer from learning disabilities as a result. Other children may only suffer from one or another learning disability as well. Some children will resolve to fight against these disabilities while others will succumb.

What happens to you or your child is completely up to you. You can persevere, find more information, do the necessary research and fight through the disability. Or, you can succumb to the disability and do nothing about it. What you do is completely up to you, but it is important that you realize that it is possible to fight through these disabilities and to learn to whatever degree you desire.

For lots more helpful and informative content on learning disabilities, see our Topical Articles.