Dyslexia and Processing Deficit: A Dangerous Combination for a Pre-Teen

I saw a 10-year-old 4th grade boy and his parents in my office, already diagnosed with dyslexia and auditory processing deficit of greater than 50 percent.

He had a series of severe ear infections as a baby and toddler and learned to speak much later than the parents’ other two kids.

He was reading at a second grade level and his grades were C-D, even with hours of help from his parents with his homework.

His parents had spent thousands of dollars paying for reading tutors out of school and during the summer break.

The public school had already had him in Wilson Reading tutoring twice per week. He also had speech therapy once per week to tackle his auditory processing defect.

The reading specialist had so many meetings in the school, that she had to cancel the intensive reading tutoring multiple times. His teacher said he was not improving in his reading skills.

This happens quite often.

The public school reading specialist, often has multiple meetings, and with the budget cutback, often he or she is required to cover multiple schools.

This ends up with the Wilson reading tutor actually spending less time than allotted with the child. This boy often comes home from school and when his parents ask him what they covered in history today, he has no idea of even what century or what country was being studied because he has a severe auditory processing deficit.

I explained to his parents that their son has a double barreled problem with both dyslexia and auditory processing deficit, and that these often come together in the same child.

The Wilson method of reading is fine, but this boy needs daily intensive help before he gets any older. This type of drip-drip method of helping him will not work.

He will get frustrated with school, and will put less and less effort into it. He needs daily intensive schooling that is like basic training, where all efforts from adults are directed toward fixing his problems before they become worse.

His parents need to become assertive advocates of their boy, or they will find their boy becomes a very frustrated, angry teenager if he feels like a failure.

Michael Kaufman and Madeleine Kitaj: Attorney and Physician

Girls Approaching Puberty Before Age 10 - A New ‘Normal’?

One day last year when her daughter, Ainsley, was 9, Tracee Sioux pulled her out of her elementary school in Fort Collins, Colo., and drove her an hour south, to Longmont, in hopes of finding a satisfying reason that Ainsley began growing pubic hair at age 6.

Ainsley was the tallest child in her third-grade class. She had a thick, enviable blond-streaked ponytail and big feet, like a puppy’s. The curves of her Levi’s matched her mother’s.

“How was your day?” Tracee asked Ainsley as she climbed in the car.

“Pretty good.”

“What did you do at a recess?”

“I played on the slide with my friends.”

In the back seat, Ainsley wiggled out of her pink parka and looked in her backpack for her Harry Potter book. 

Over the past three years, Tracee — pretty and well-put-together, wearing a burnt orange blouse that matched her necklace and her bag — had taken Ainsley to see several doctors. 

They ordered blood tests and bone-age X-rays and turned up nothing unusual. “The doctors always come back with these blank looks on their faces, and then they start redefining what normal is,” Tracee said as we drove down Interstate 25, a ribbon of asphalt that runs close to where the Great Plains bump up against the Rockies. “And I always just sit there thinking, What are you talking about, normal? Who gets pubic hair in first grade?” 

Fed up with mainstream physicians, Tracee began pursuing less conventional options. She tried giving Ainsley diindolylmethane, or DIM, a supplement that may or may not help a body balance its hormones. 

She also started a blog, the Girl Revolution, with a mission to “revolutionize the way we think about, treat and raise girls,” and the accompanying T.G.R. Body line of sunscreens and lotions marketed to tweens and described by Tracee as “natural, organic, craptastic-free products” containing “no estrogens, phytoestrogens, endocrine disrupters.”

None of this stopped Ainsley’s body from maturing ahead of its time.

Read more of this article here: Puberty Before Age 10 - A New ‘Normal’? - NYTimes.com

Estrogen, Puberty and Autism | Neurodiversity

Estrogen, Puberty and Autism | Neurodiversity

To what degree have high and low-fat diets influenced human evolution? If low fat delays puberty and results in more brain growth, might this be because more synapses are useful for finding more fat?

When there is more fat in diets and puberty rates drop, for a woman there is a greater number of children produced over a single lifetime. Less fat in diet, fewer children produced. This seems like an evolutionary process.

Do thin males with less fat have less estrogen, reach puberty later, have bigger brains and exhibit more neotenous features?

Should autistic males be on extremely low-fat diets so that they reach puberty later, thus allowing more time for their brains to mature?

Is the degree of brain synapse pruning that occurs in infancy related to the estrogen levels in the mother or the child? High mother testosterone levels encourage higher rates of autism, which may be directly related to less pervasive synapse pruning. Is it possible that a high mother estrogen level results in low male baby estrogen levels that prolong or diminish the testosterone prunings?

In other words, the Simon Baron-Cohen research regarding mother testosterone levels and autism may be related to mother estrogen levels. If low estrogen at puberty translates to delayed puberty, delayed testosterone surges and increased brain growth, then the same process may be engaged during the first testosterone surges that compel a diminution of the right cerebral hemisphere during infancy. Low estrogen levels as an embryo, infant and toddler may have a direct impact on cerebral lateralization and synapse production.

Another interesting article 'Introduction to Neotenty' Here ............