<p>Cardinal Fang, I am sorry that your son had such a bad experience recently. You did step back, though, and let your son try. While it didn’t work out, you did give it a chance. That’s a good thing. I realize, though, that there it’s a bit of a tightrope walk … sometimes the consequences can be devastating. I don’t know the answer. My gut says that it’s good to step back, just the same. But every parent knows his/her kid best. It’s just that we all need to be reminded once in awhile that it is good to give our kids as much room to grow up as we reasonably can provide.</p>
<p>Cardinal, I have someone who works for me who has some LD’s. She was shocked to discover that I don’t offer “extra time”. We work in a corporate environment; when she tells our team that she’ll have something done by Friday we all assume that she’s figured out how much time the project will take and that she’s committing to Friday. If something changes (she can’t get the information; our Chicago office is closed due to a blizzard and therefore something is delayed) then it’s her job to alert the team to the delay. Or if she needs more time, she commits to next Tuesday, not this Friday.</p>
<p>But we can’t be expected to know that when she says “this Friday” she actually means, “whenever I can get it done”. Her parents have been managing her calendar and deadlines for so many years that she’s just at a loss to figure out how much time stuff takes. And the LD office at her college was forever intervening to get her extensions, incompletes, letters to professors, etc.</p>
<p>But now she’s a big girl. And we are all trying to get her to build extra time into her calendar because “stuff happens”… which has NOTHING to due with LD’s- it’s just the way the world works. But she never had to learn that “stuff happens” and therefore you need to build time into your calculations because Mommy did it for her.</p>
<p>But Mommy doesn’t work here. And Mommy can’t know that blizzards and a co-workers illness and and a poor cellphone connection and a Bank Holiday in the UK and a flight delay and all the other stuff which can torpedo a timeline is just par for the course. But if a college kid never has to learn how to manage a calendar, what happens afterwards??? And how many times can co-workers beg and plead, “Don’t commit to a premature deadline unless you can really meet it, since when you’re late it now messes up the rest of the team?”</p>
<p>So that’s why I say the continuing focus on neurological deficits for a kid who somehow made it into college doesn’t do the kid a favor. Unless the career path is an hourly job stuffing envelopes or working a cash register (nothing wrong with that). The parents can’t micromanage the work day, and to be honest, even kids with executive functioning disorders will have to file their taxes and pay their electric bill and renew their driver’s license etc. So using the medical jargon of gray matter/white matter and allowing the LD to swamp the kid’s intellectual ability or excuse a lack of maturity does not do the kid any favors. Even if it means flunking a class in college. And even if it means eventually switching majors to something that plays to the kids strengths and not weaknesses.</p>
<p>I think that talk talk talk is the key to the situation. Maybe OP’s son isn’t a big talker, maybe it will be difficult, but an honest conversation, where he sees that his parents aren’t angry or critical but only concerned with his future and his ability to have a fulfilled life, should really help. That plus conversations between parents and academic advisors might help him turn a corner-- much more than cutting off financial help or any such thing. How does he plan to get a job at Genentech with this gpa? Have him walk you through his own scenario, and talk about possible stumbling blocks and how he might handle them. Get him to say what he imagines his work might entail. Imagine it happily with him, and as you do, you can very gently help him toward something more fruitful. You’ve been truly supportive and he knows that, so you can support him as he backs away from something that really doesn’t fit. (Meanwhile, I’d start showing him how much you admire…tech writers…or whatever might fit him better.)</p>
<p>P.S. My D had a project in 6th grade that changed her life. It was essentially a report on an animal, but it had to be written as if for Nat’l Geographic, and each child had to explain what steps he/she had taken to become a reporter for NG-- what college, what major, etc. Also the child had to plan the trip exactly, what airline would go to…Chile or wherever…what supplies would be needed…how to get to the area where the animal was to be observed… it was a lifelong lesson in the steps between a dream and reality and it has helped her plan her high school life and work toward the future. (Even though her interests are in entirely different areas.)</p>
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<p>I don’t have a kid with LDs (but I have a much younger brother that does have a major LD) so I have been hesitant to say anything but Blossom said what I’ve been thinking…what happens when the student does finally graduate and needs to get a job? If it requires this much parental involvement and help from other adults to get through college, how will the child fare in a real world job, where people aren’t always keen on making accommodations? In the real world, people aren’t going to be happy if one employee gets a lot of accommodations not afforded to all employees. </p>
<p>I think the problem the OP is having is her son is focusing on majors (and by extension, careers) that aren’t well suited for a person with his particular set of LDs. Although it appears she and her husband have gone to great lengths to get their son the help and support he needs, there’s really no point in pursuing a career field in which he is unlikely to do well in because of his learning/processing issues.</p>
<p>The OP has said she has tried again and again to get son to see that the realities of his LDs make it unlikely that he will be successful in a science or math based career - even if he does manage to graduate.</p>
<p>I don’t advocate just cutting him off but I don’t think there is anything wrong with giving him a set amount of time to graduate or a set amount of money to finish his education and then tell him at that point he is on his own. He will need to learn to navigate the real world on his own (including making good choices about his future). College is a great place to learn those skills.</p>
<p>A lot of us with kids without LDs have had to let our kids ‘sink or swim’ also, because failure is often the only way to learn important life lessons. It’s important to learn to pick yourself up and move on after a major setback. Life is never a smooth ride. There’s lots of ups and down for most people.</p>
<p>I am going through something similar with my son right now. He is making some poor choices about how he is handling the college application process. We have talked to him ad nauseum about this. He is one stubborn kid. At this point, all I can do is shrug and let him deal with the consequences of his choices. I hate that for him but it will be an important life lesson.</p>
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<p>It pains me to mention this, because I don’t like to think about it, but people on the autism spectrum (and I’ll include NVLD folks here) often don’t and can’t learn from experience. And they can’t learn from failure, in many cases, because they can’t generalize in the right way. Imagine this: I put on my favorite red shirt and a pair of jeans. I walk outside. Without looking, I cross the street. I get knocked down by a car. Dayum, shouldn’t have put on that red shirt! </p>
<p>Blossom, I quite agree that you should not be doing your job for your employee. You have a business, not a treatment center. You have the right to hire employees who can do the job. </p>
<p>But you make a huge logical jump in assuming that your employee is the way she is because her mother coddled her. And when you fire her, if it comes to that, that failure probably will not teach her to be better at scheduling.</p>
<p>All of us are way better at parenting our hypothetical children than our real ones. We’re sure that if only the incompetent parents of that frustrating person we have to deal with had done it our way, the person wouldn’t have been so annoying. We’re rarely right.</p>
<p>Fang, in no way am I demonizing my employees mom, nor am I saying that I’d have handled it better were I to walk in those shoes. So forgive me if that’s how my comments came off- absolutely not my intent. We all do the best we can with the hand we are dealt.</p>
<p>My point (however ineptly I made it) is that a kid who has had so much handholding in college and at no time was forced to handle the consequences of their deficits is a kid who emerges into the real world poorly prepared to compensate for their own issues–and expecting other people to do the compensating. This woman’s resume didn’t say “I have an LD”. She is a graduate of a respectable college with a respectable GPA which is not asterisked “extra time” or “can memorize by rote but has trouble with visual spacialization” or “auditory processing disorder” or whatever the diagnostic code.</p>
<p>It is not unreasonable for an employee to expect that a kid who can graduate from college understands what “this is due next week” means. We hire people with developmental delays and other handicaps for our mail room and cafeteria. The mail room manager understands how to chop complex tasks up into smaller bites until employees get good at performing these tasks… and then she knows that she can assign more abstract responsibilities. But these are kids who graduate from HS or from special schools and are brought to our company by agencies who place young people with mental retardation. So the handholding and the accomodations are part of the hiring process.</p>
<p>A kid who graduates from a four year college? How am I supposed to know that in all those semesters of college the kid never once had to hand a paper in on time or take a timed test with everyone else? Or that her parents were lurking in the shadows making up her schedule, making sure that if she had a class that began at 10 am they called her at 8 to make sure she woke up on time?</p>
<p>So unless the parents want to steer the kid into a program where they get support akin to that given to the employees with retardation, at some point, they need to allow the kid to figure out what their limitations are- without extra time, without extra help, without mom and dad.</p>
<p>My employee emerged into the work world at age 22 assuming that everyone would love her, warts and all, just like her parents, and would want to make her successful by giving her lots of leeway because of her LD’s. She’s good at some things, bad at others, just like everyone else on the planet. So why did her parents assume that by making other people accomodate her disabilities she could succeed in an environment where a certain level of executive functioning is required?</p>
<p>My brother is color blind. He knew from an early age that he would never be an air traffic controller, an interior decorator, a diamond- grader, an art restorer, etc. Just the way the world works. His wife has MS and she is neither a ballet dancer nor a neurosurgeon. Isn’t this Life’s Lessons 101?</p>
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<p>That is a good point. I know that the range of austism is very broad and some people with autism/NVLD just aren’t ever going to be able to operate independently. That’s just the way it is and the best parents can do is help them to learn coping mechanisms that will enable them to live as independently as their disability allows.</p>
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<p>That is true because by the time someone becomes an employee it really doesn’t matter why they can’t meet the expectations of their employee. I think what Blossom was trying to say is from the employer’s perspective, you are being paid to do a job and perform to a certain level. Doesn’t matter if mommy bailed you out so many times that you failed to learn to meet deadlines on your own. Doesn’t matter if you will ‘learn’ something from the experience of being fired. Doesn’t matter if you have a LD. All that really matters is whether you can do your job or not. If not, the person runs the risk of being fired from multiple jobs. </p>
<p>One of the hardest parts of being a parent (and. Lord knows, I have lost many hours of sleep over this) is knowing when to assist your child and when to step back and allow them to sink or swim. There’s a very, very fine line between helping someone and enabling them. Every situation is different and it’s hard to apply one rule of thumb across the board. Certainly kids with disabilities need more parental assistance than kids without those types of issues. I imagine that guilt and fear would tend to make it even harder for a parent of a child with LDs to know when to step in and when to step back. I feel for those parents. I struggle with it all the time and I don’t even have a kid with LDs.</p>
<p>I believe all parents do the best they are capable of at any given time. No one is going to end up with the perfect kid. The best we can do is isolate and teach those values and skills we feel are important for someone to have in order to have a decent life. Skills and values important for working, parenting, marriage, relationships and being a part of a community. At a certain age, most young adults have to take responsibility for their own actions, regardless of what their parents did or did not do in raising them.</p>
<p>I understand your frustration, Blossom. You thought that a graduate of Random College would have organization skills. You thought going to Random would have involved handing in papers on time and getting up on time, without parental scheduling and parental alarm clocks. Now you have hired this person, and she doesn’t have the skills you need her to have.</p>
<p>But what are we to conclude? Your employee would not have graduated from Random without the accommodations. Are you saying she didn’t belong at Random? Random shouldn’t accept students with her kind of learning disability? Random should accept students with her kind of disability, but should not provide accommodations, and her parents shouldn’t have helped her, so she should have flunked out? Random should have taught her better organizations skills? (But you’re trying to teach her better organization skills-- how’s that working for you?)</p>
<p>I hear that you wish she had better organization skills, but I don’t hear how she should have gotten them. (And believe me, any suggestions on this front are eagerly accepted here! This is the problem we are now having to face, yet again, with Fang Jr.)</p>
<p>And while I’m posting, you mention your brother, and how he has to face up to the fact that he cannot be a professional paint-chip-matcher because he’s colorblind. But that’s just the lesson the original poster wants to impart to her son-- that some careers are closed to him-- and despite her best efforts and the heavy hand of experience, he isn’t learning it. What would you have expected your parents to do if your brother <em>did not</em> realize that his dream of a paint-matching career was impossible?</p>
<p>[NYIT</a> - VIP - Academics](<a href=“404 | Vocational Independence Program | New York Tech”>404 | Vocational Independence Program | New York Tech)</p>
<p>There are wonderful programs that do indeed teach the skills that many Asperger’s/LD students do not have the capacity to naturally pick up and absorb. As I’ve mentioned previously on CC, my friend’s Aspie son is in his second year at the above program. It’s wonderful and he’s on his path to an independent and productive life. Because he has the academic aptitude to do so, he has been placed in the track that also include college classes at the SUNY located near the NYIT campus. He’s also been working a few hours a week at the college’s library and loves it. The wonderful thing about the program is that it address ALL of the deficits as well as the strengths. Once completing the 3-year program, the student is much better equipped to handle adult living. Some of the kids go on to 4-year colleges, some attend community college, and some immediately enter the working world.</p>
<p>IMO–the great thing about this program is that it helps to place a few cuts into the cord between the parents and the LD child. While parents mean well and try extremely hard to teach the necessary skills to their child, the emotional bond often times hinders the learning process and clouds the reality of realistic expectations. Living away from the parents in a supportive and well tuned program fitted for the student helps to gently push the student out of the nest and into the real world.</p>
<p>The program in the above link is just one of many. My friend also looked into Landmark College but it wasn’t a good fit. To her, it seemed too isolated and rural. I think she also looked at a program in Connecticut.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.gershexperience.org/index.php/schools/the-gersh-experience[/url]”>http://www.gershexperience.org/index.php/schools/the-gersh-experience</a>
^I don’t have any personal knowledge of the program in this link but I found it when googling “colleges with support services for students with aspergers”.</p>
<p>Good link, nysmile, and it makes the point that I was so ineptly circling around. Aspies/NVLD people can’t learn some skills by repeatedly failing at them, even though everyone else does learn those particular skills by experience. But that doesn’t mean the Aspies/NVLD can’t learn the skills at all in any way-- they can learn from explicit teaching.</p>
<p>So, to take a typical example, NVLD/Aspies have a tendency to monologue on their favorite obscure topics. Neurotypicals would see the rolled eyes, the gradual edging away, the yawns, the bored faces, and realize it’s time to shut up. Aspies don’t, even after years of social failure. But they can be explicitly taught the rules of conversation, with patient repetition and practice. Neurotypicals don’t need that kind of instruction. But NVLD/Aspies do.</p>
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<p>THIS attitude terrifies me! I have a physical disability that will require some type of accommodation (probably just a computer/accessible office), and this attitude of “we don’t want people who we might have to accommodate” terrifies me! I’ve had a productive college career (publications, internships, leadership, good grades, etc.) with very minimal accommodations (e.g., accessible classrooms, typed v. hand-written tests), and the idea that employers will disregard all my accomplishments simply due to my disability (and their assumptions thereof) frightens me to no end.</p>
<p>Cardinal, you’re absolutely correct. I hope my post didn’t imply that parents aren’t capable of teaching their Aspie kids. What I was trying to say is that they can learn some of the skills that they’re lacking, but not necessarily by cause and effect methods such as failure. And sometimes, it’s just very hard for any kids to listen and learn from parents and it’s sometimes best to have someone not so emotionally tied do the teaching.
The programs specific to Aspie post-HS students are composed of professionals and techniques that work around the learning deficiencies. This technique helps the Aspie to “get it” if you know what I mean.</p>
<p>Cardinal, I don’t have an Aspie child but I do understand the frustrations. I worked in the public school system at the elementary level for about 10 years and been around Aspie kids that fall all over the place on the spectrum. My very good friend has an Aspie son (he’s now 19) and I’ve watched the struggles and frustrations. I’ve also watched her son blossom in his VIP program. She has a great sense of humor. She has mastered the art of replacing frustrations with wickedly funny responses to such situations.</p>
<p>You and I are in complete agreement, nysmile.</p>
<p>To return to the original poster: She is asking whether to intervene, seeing that her college son who has NVLD is choosing an unrealistic major. Some posters are saying, step back, let him fail, in the real world people don’t have parental support, he’ll learn from his failure. And I say, I don’t think he will learn from this particular failure. He hasn’t in the past, and I don’t think he will now. I say, either step in, or let some professional experienced with NVLD/autism step in. Let him learn using some other method than failure, because the failure teaching system won’t work for him.</p>
<p>Psych’s post 72 interprets blossoms’ post 67 far differently than I do.<br>
Psych says: “THIS attitude terrifies me! I have a physical disability that will require some type of accommodation (probably just a computer/accessible office), and this attitude of “we don’t want people who we might have to accommodate” terrifies me!”
I don’t see Blossom saying what psych has quoted at all. I would interpret Blossom’s comments as Blossom’s disappointment in an employee that cannot meet deadlines on a frequent basis. An employee that she had higher expectations of based on available info from her school. Blossom had every right to expect better performance based on info given- and no reason to believe she’d have to adjust to the employees sub-par performance. I don’t see that Blossom says she wants- or doesn’t want to give this employee special accommodations in her workplace. As I get it, valuable info was withheld from Blossom in the hiring process that has led to hiring of an employee that apparently frequently misses deadlines that she sets, disrupting the workforce. Blossom may be ABLE to give more time, but we see no indication that this employee asks for it. She gets the time she requests, but then often cannot deliver.</p>
<p>I can strongly agree those with extra challenges should get what is possible to help them succeed- that is a “level playing field”; but in no way do I say that they must be guaranteed a spot because they are challenged. That would be giving them far more than a level playing field. It’s not Little League baseball- where there is a rule that everybody gets to play. Continuing with that analogy, the real-life business world Everybody gets to try out; some make the team; not all that make the team get much playing time. A color blind young man cannot be a good interior decorator, no matter how much he wants it. I’m not built for pro basketball no matter how much I may want it.
An employer does not have to hire him anyway, only because he has an extra challenge to his job performance. If he cannot perform the job, he risks termination- handicap or not.</p>
<p>Nevertheless what severely LD people get or don’t get is way off the topic. The topic is the Op dilemma about never-ending funding for college courses the student repeatedly underperforms. Combining Blossom’s real-life example with the Op, we could say the Op’s parent have decided to continue funding are and decorator school for the color-blind kid, because the kid says he learned something in past classes. Good idea or bad is unknown and irrelevant; OP has made his decision.</p>
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<p>Psych - I think you are talking about something different. There are certain career fields where organizational skills and the ability to meet deadlines are very necessary. In fact, they are in my job description and I get ‘graded’ on those skills every year when I have my evaluation. There is no way they could ‘accommodate’ someone without those skills in my job - just isn’t possible, it’s a fundamental requirement of the job. So someone without the ability to meet deadlines or organize their work won’t be qualified for my job nor would I suggest they seek that type of career path. That is what the OP was saying - her son doesn’t have the aptitude for a science/math based career but she’s having trouble getting him to understand that. </p>
<p>Now you could easily do my job with a physical disability and we have several people in my area that are in wheelchairs or walk with braces. Those disabilities are accommodated because they don’t effect the person’s ability to do their job.</p>
<p>The point is not everyone is qualified to do every job. Even people without disabilities have to come to terms with their own limitations is so far that no one possesses every talent and skill imaginable. I’m sure my son would love to play football for a living. He’s not big enough nor good enough to do so. If he wanted to pursue a career in football, well, I would support him for a while in order to give him a chance but at a certain point, I would have to say, ‘Son, I know it’s disappointing but that dream is probably not going to happen. You need to find a realistic career choice.’ I would eventually stop supporting him financially because it wouldn’t be in his best interest for me to enable him to continue to pursue something that is not going to happen.</p>
<p>The OP is struggling with how long she should support her son in his endeavor to major in a field that he probably doesn’t have the ability to succeed. He won’t accept the advice of others nor the realities of his own limitations. While I’m not saying just walk away and let him fail, there certainly has to be a point where the best course of action might be to let him live with the consequences of his decision not to accept the good counsel of others. Perhaps he is unwilling to accept the fact that these are unrealistic majors precisely because, in his experience, his parents won’t allow him to fail. Who know?</p>
<p>Psych, we have a deaf employee in our work group who has tons of technology accessible to her which allows her not only to do her job, but to excel in it. We have employees in wheelchairs, employees who are amputees with prosthetics which allow for some motion (i.e. good gross motor) but poor in others (fine motor.)</p>
<p>But note than when UPS advertises for drivers it specifies, “must be able to lift 50 lbs. unassisted.” You can be the world’s greatest driver with a phenomenal record and able to guide a truck through a snowstorm but you can’t drive for UPS if you can’t lift the packages. It doesn’t negate your fine driving record- you’re not qualified for the job at hand.</p>
<p>Similarly, my employee just doesn’t get it that she’s not able to work in a team in a job that requires sequencing and project management. It’s not that we can’t accomodate her- or don’t want to-- and believe me, if there were a computer program or piece of technology that would help her we’d be all over it. It’s that all those years in HS and college she never figured out that she was ill suited to this kind of work. She thinks she met all of her deadlines in college- which in a certain sense, she did. But if someone is willing to keep moving the goalpost you’ll never know if you’re much of a football player.</p>
<p>So my advice to the OP was to step back. Her S might have a more realistic sense of what he’s good at when the support starts to wane. Or maybe not.</p>
<p>But so many college kids are immature, have an unrealistic sense of self, etc. that it’s hard to tease out how much of this kids problems are neurological and how much are just immaturity.</p>
<p>A kid who wants to go to med school but who has failed freshman bio, freshman chem and organic chemistry at some point gets pulled aside by the academic advisor and told, “You are a wonderful person destined to do great things in life. But it is unlikely that you will be a doctor. Let’s talk about all the other things you could be great at which will give you much less heartbreak.”</p>
<p>And Psych, all of our offices are accesible. We have customers and clients and lawyers and outside people who visit frequently and even if we weren’t fully ADA compliant (which we are) it would be bad for business if a customer couldn’t have a meeting in our conference room or have lunch in our cafeteria.</p>
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<p>The topic of what severely LD people get is exactly the topic. The OP’s son is diagnosed with NVLD. That is a severe disability! And he doesn’t get that he is unsuited for certain fields.</p>
<p>Let me clarify. I meant what severely LD people get or don’t get in the workplace is not very relevant to Op’s courses of action relating to funding for the Op’s child and continually underachieving student. </p>
<p>As I understand it the Op was seeking advice on whether/how long to continue funding college education of student. Am I wrong? So, whether or not A.D.A. is a good law, or how it applies in the workplace, what might be ideal in the workplace, does not address the Op’s funding question. Op’s question is the exact topic: Do I keep funding[forever?] underperforming student or do I set limits?? Psych might be terrified to work in Blossom’s office, but that isn’t relevant to Op.</p>
<p>Oh, OK, younghoss. I misunderstood your comment. ADA in the workplace is definitely off topic.</p>
<p>But I understood the OP to have a more general question. She said her son is pursuing a major she doesn’t think he’ll succeed in, and she wants to know how to respond. She could just announce she’ll cut off the money at Time X. Or she could continue to fund her son indefinitely. But those are not the only possible courses of action. Maybe there is another way she can help her son to the realization that certain careers don’t suit him, other than letting him fail his major.</p>