When your teen was a child, he or she may have listened wide-eyed as you yammered on with the neighbor about his or her ADHD medication or the latest PPT meeting at school. Enthralled by your words and interested in understanding more about him or herself, as a child your teen didn’t mind being talked about. However, now as a teen, it is a whole different story. Not only is your teen well-versed in his or her own “disabilities,” after all, he or she lives with them every single day, but your teen is more than aware of the negative stigma attached to those who have disabilities. Your teen doesn’t need to be reminded in front of friends to “Ask the teacher for extra time on the test” nor does your teen want you to say in front of his girlfriend “Did you take your Ritalin today?”
Though our society has grown increasingly supportive and tolerant of people who learn differently or who are learning disabled, it is still not an easy row to hoe for the child who has been diagnostic as such. (I use that term “disability” loosely, as I feel most “learning disabilities” are really just learning differences.) There are numerous examples of people who have had disabilities as children but who have gone on to accomplish incredible intellectual achievements. (I count myself among those ranks.) Nonetheless, those individuals are held up as exceptional role models who have achieved extraordinary heights that not every teen in the midst of struggle with disabilities can imagine reaching. Now let’s add to that that a teen’s primary job is to go to school to learn. Your teen is not working fulltime yet. Your teen is not playing sports all day. Your teen’s job is to learn, to prepare for adulthood by gaining an education. But for this child, the one with disabilities, learning is sometimes, if not always, a huge challenge. So now your child spends the majority of his or her day (seven hours at school and then even more hours on homework) having to do something that he or she is not good at, something that is challenging if not painful, something that your child has been told is “disabled” at doing. Imagine what you would feel like? So when talking casually about your teen’s disability, please proceed with caution. This is a highly sensitive topic to your teen.
Let me give you an example of what not to do when talking about your teen’s disability: Diane had contacted me to work with her son, Troy, on college admissions. She was looking for a whole host of services from SAT preparation to college admissions counseling. Upon our initial phone consultation, Diane shared that Troy had only recently been diagnosed with a learning disability – a processing disorder, as she described it, which meant it took him longer to read than most teens his age. Certainly, it was appropriate for Diane to share Troy’s disability with me; this was important information for me to know, as it directly related to my work with him. But where Diane took a wrong turn is when during almost every group discussion we had over the next two years about Troy’s progress or performance, she would somehow manage to say something like, “Well, and then there is the disability to consider” or “That’s before we knew he had the learning disability.” Every time Diane made such a statement, Troy would visibly shrink further and further into his seat. I literally watched the young man shrink in front of my eyes. It was heart wrenching for me to witness this, because not only was the teen feeling smaller and smaller about himself, but his poor mother had no idea that she was humiliating her son in the worst way possible – pointing out his “disability” over and over and over again.
So what could Diane have done? She could have said nothing about the learning disability! I heard her the first time when she told me he had a disability. It didn’t need repeating over and over again right in front of Troy. If she and I needed to talk about something that pertained to the disability, she could have waited until Troy was out of the room to discuss it with me. If Troy needed to be part of the conversation, the best way for a parent to proceed is to let the teen initiate the conversation. Of course, many teens are reluctant to self advocate, so it is perfectly acceptable for mom to give her teen a little prompt like: “Troy, do you want to ask Dr. Donna about the procedures for taking the test un-timed, because you may qualify for that accommodation?” She provides the social prompt, provides the opportunity for the topic to be discussed, but Troy becomes the leader of the conversation – he is the one asking the question of me – he is not the topic of the conversation, as in our previous version, where Diane is talking about Troy as if he were not even there.
So when it comes to talking about your teen's learning disabilities, the same rules apply when talking about your teen’s grades SAT scores and the like: do not talk about your teen’s disability in front of other people or without your teen’s permission. For more on how to build rapport and trust with your teenager, check out Teen Talk: Dr. Donna’s Guide to Building Rapport and Trust with Your Teenager, which will be released this spring, and follow Dr. Donna Risolo on Facebook and Twitter.