My difficult child wants to thank you guys! (Especially IC and other 'Auditory Processing Disorders-experts')

[SuZir]

Not only I think you are awesome in many ways, but you just proved to be super helpful in figuring out a major accommodation that helps my difficult child and he wants to thank you.

APDs are not well known with general public in my country and they only test for them with kids with dyslexia and other learning difficulties. I had never even heard about auditory figure ground before coming here. Last spring I began to consider that it kind of sounds like my son and went digging on information and passed that to difficult child's sport psychiatric, who was interested. difficult child is now in new club abroad and there is also some language barrier going on between him and his positional coach and sport psychiatric used that as a reason for the need of the audio system they use also in motor sports etc. that tones down the background noise and heightens the coach's talk. They have used it in the practises, there the positional coach is directing and advising him a lot.

difficult child says it has been really helpful and while he has some difficulties trying to understand coach with his very thick English accent and limited vocabulary or coach's much better German skills meeting difficult child's limited class room German skills, it is at times easier than before at home trying to get instruction given with languages he is fluent and that are native languages of the person speaking. And when sport psychiatric talked with coaches, he got almost no usual complaints about difficult child being stubborn and wilful and doing opposite than instructed during practise and not heeding the advice. Of course part of it is difficult child trying to give good impression and part may be, that when difficult child doesn't do what asked, they assume language barrier and reiterate instead of assuming wilfulness and yelling or punishing.

But anyway, difficult child finds audio system helpful and wanted to know, how I came up with the idea. I told him I have a foreign friend who has a kid with Auditory Processing Disorders (APD) and something she told me sounded familiar and I asked her more about it and went digging after it sounded even more familiar. difficult child asked me to say his thanks to that friend of mine. So here you go, difficult child's thank yous

 

[LittleDudesMom]

Isn't the site great, SuZir! So many with experience and knowledge - the "I'm not alone" is the best feeling!

So glad you were able to get help for difficult child and that he is thankful!

Sharon

 

[soapbox]

You tell that difficult child of yours... that every person who understands Auditory Processing Disorders (APD) better, is one more advocate for all the others with Auditory Processing Disorders (APD)... I'm impressed that he was so open-minded about it!

 

[SuZir]

I fear my difficult child is not a person to advocate anything - at least not yet or any day soon. While he may be open to trying new things that could help him, especially when he can explain it to himself an others as help for hearing in noisy environment, he still very, very much would like to be 'normal' and 'like everyone else' (except of course preferably better in his sport than those 'everyone else' ) and any kind of advocating or even admitting his issues if not absolutely necessary is the last thing he wants to do.

And to be honest, in this very vulnerable part of his career he would be stupid to make a roadblocks for himself by admitting his laundry list of issues to everyone. While some can't be hid, and while for some he has working solutions (and those are indeed given to new coaches etc. as a laundry list of simple and easy solutions that help difficult child do well), difficult child and his gent certainly try to hie and downplay issues. Because even though difficult child is very good, it is insanely competitive field and there are other boys with almost similar skills and comparable potential with no (known) issues. While difficult child has the edge over them performance wise (kiddies with difficult child's skills and potential and without issues are already competing at next level) it only buys him so much room to be extremely high-maintenance. So instead of admitting problems to short term employers like this current one, we give them 'workable package with manual.'

 

[susiestar]

I am so glad that this helped. In many ways the language barrier may be a gift in disguise because it gives a bit of tolerance.

I didn't know the term for it was auditory figure ground, but I was aware of it early on because my grands were losing their hearing when I was a child/preteen. As we spent several weeks a year with them, and treasured them and every minute of that time, we got to go to their senior center and sit in on things like lipreading classes. I loved them. When it was explained that it was helpful because it can be hard to distinguish a speaker from background noise when you are losing your hearing or get a new hearing aid because the noises all blend at the same intensity/volume. It was an "aha!" moment that made me not feel so alone and freaklike even if the people I know who had the same issue were older by a couple of generations. Later my mom explained that it was like not having any filters in place and on bad days we called it having our filters go down or need to be cleaned. She has always had this problem also. It made it easier for my folks not to get angry if we didn't do something because they assumed we didn't hear them rather than we ignored them. I won't say that it was always true, cause lightning would strike me, but it was mostly true.

I am glad he finds it helpful. I think it is awesome that he is socially aware enough to realize how helpful it is and how you had to ask around to figure out what is going on, and that he then wanted to say thank you. I know a lot of "easy child" kids who wouldn't do that, Know what I mean??

 

[SuZir]

Susie: I too had heard about this issue with people using old hearing aids. I remember well, when I was a kid and older relative got her first hearing aid. She complained a lot how all background noise was so loud and how difficult it was to understand speech because of that. She also only used the hearing aid few hours a day, because it was so taxin g and if she had to use it all day, she was totally exhausting.

Still I hadn't heard of this phenomenon existing with people with perfect hearing. Remembering that great-aunt also makes me wonder, how much my son's issues may have been about exhaustion and frustration. I mean, it has been countless fights even at home about 'Why didn't you do as I told?', 'You haven't said anything!', 'Yes I did, several times', 'I haven't hear anything', 'Don't BS me' etc. And even more outside of home. Being often in trouble even when trying your best has to be extremely demoralising. In fact local explanation of ODD tends to be, that it is the situation that develops when child is often/all the time asked to do things they are not capable and as a reaction they develop oppositional attitude to everything.

So if this most of the time helps difficult child to be wilfully and stubbornly oppositional only when he actually wants to be oppositional, I will be extremely happy.

And yeah, language barrier may indeed buy him some extra tolerance and that could help. Language barrier with team mates also gives him social acceptable explanation why he isn't exactly 'one of the guys.' difficult child likes also his on company so he may indeed be happy with less actual socialisation when it also means the expectations of him being social are lower. And now it even seems he an his room mate may come along well enough. Well, at least they are already fighting like brothers and still like to also do things together.