Raising two kids with learning differences inspired Greg Pincus to lead a group for parents in similar situations. After 14 years of running the group, Greg has thoughts, resources, and encouragement to share that you won’t want to miss.
Resources mentioned:
Core Vocabulary Words: https://textproject.org/vocabulary-instruction/core-vocabulary
Academic Word List: https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/academicwordlist/information/thesublists
Mini Matrix Maker: https://www.neilramsden.co.uk/spelling/matrix/
Academic Word Finder: https://achievethecore.org/page/1027/academic-word-finder
One Look Dictionary and Thesaurus: https://www.onelook.com/
Online Etymology Dictionary: https://www.etymonline.com/
Coh-Metrix Common Core Text Ease and Readability Assessor: https://soletlab.adaptiveliteracy.com:8443/
BONUS RESOURCE:
The Collins Cobuild dictionary provides student friendly definitions, and game-like challenges.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english
Greg:
I'm Greg Pincus, I'm the dad of two different learning children now in their 20s. I have been through public school, private school, non public school, IEPs had advocates, had lawyers, learned tons and run a parent group for the parents of different learners, and have been running it for about 14 years now, where we meet together and offer up ideas, support resources and everything else.
Gayle:
Today I want to share my friend Greg’s journey from trying to find resources for his kids, to trying to share resources with other families in similar situations, because I think it underscores how valuable parent-to-parent support can be when you have a child with learning differences. I met Greg more than a decade ago, when my husband and I were at our wit’s end trying to help our oldest get his academic needs met at a charter school in Los Angeles, California. I remember that I had been beating myself up for a while. I told myself that if anyone should be able to support a child with a learning disability, it would be me, an educator with a passion for differentiation and a really robust network in education, but nothing was clicking. Then I got an email about a parent group associated with the charter school, and I felt like I received a key that would unlock some level in parenting that I had been missing. The email began like this:
Greetings from Parents of Different Learners!
We are a group of parents of kids who learn differently, whether that's from dyslexia, ADHD, speech issues, auditory processing delays, visual processing delays, autism or the alphabet soup that encompasses learning differently. We get together once a month to share information, resources, success stories, frustrations, offer support and eat lots of good food. We want to invite you to join us if you have a child who learns differently, if you think they might, or if you just have questions. You don't need to have a diagnosis or anything from the school. All are welcome!
Many of us struggled with understanding the issues our kids face, and we have found that talking to other parents was an amazing way to de-mystify the process, calm our fears, and get our kids the resources they need to succeed. Everyone wins when children are taught how they learn, when strategies are employed that a student needs, and when everyone is on the same page.
Greg:
The parent piece of the school puzzle is often something that's really missing. And for kids who are challenging like ours I think the more that we can learn as parents the better we can support them and that happier we will all be as a family unit.
Gayle:
So I was hoping that you could talk about what it was like when you first realized that
your sons learned differently and what it was like to experience that and how that kind
of informed, you know, your journey to being such a communicator and leader with other
parents.
Greg:
Both our kids have their own set of challenges and both were discovered in kind of different ways. And with the oldest, learning that first made it much easier to recognize and accept in
a second. But they were so different that it wasn't really clear. And I think with both of them, the thing that was really clear was – from the start – was like about their, for lack of a better term, their happiness, their fitting in, like something was wrong and making them unhappy. So it made it much easier for me rather than focusing on the, well, how do we fix, address all this? It's like, and solve all the problems. It's like, well, okay, what is the current situation and how do we work on right now making this better? What do we need to know in each case? And it's different depending on what their differences are with a younger one who is dyslexic. It was clear that everything about school just frustrated him and we, no one quite knew why because once the day started and he was just hanging out with friends, everything was great. But anything academic … and he could talk a blue streak. So vocabulary seemed great, everything seemed great. But it was really clear that he was unhappy and uncomfortable.
So it really became about, “How do I understand what they're saying is and experiencing is
so different than what I experienced? How do I learn how to speak an approximation of that language so I can explain it to others in terms that maybe they'll understand?” Which continues to be the lifelong learning challenge for us, parents.
Gayle:
So how and when can you remember transitioning from being a parent who was seeking support and understanding and acceptance for your guys to being someone who was a parent offering support and acceptance and guidance to other parents as well, even if you didn't have
it all totally dialed in yourself yet? What was that transition like?
Greg:
That transition actually happened for two different things. One, at the encouragement
of the younger son who was like, you know, you guys should all talk.
Yeah. It's like, why aren't you talking to each other? Why? Fair.
And his point was like, we could learn a lot from each other and support kids better.
Everything that happened was, was AYSO, soccer, which was the Saturday soccer
league and the younger son was on a team and we're talking to other parents who we've
known are older kids, knew each other. So I'd known them for a number of years and the younger kids were in the same grade in my younger son's class and we're talking to the parents.
And it turns out that their kid is going through all the same stuff and has been for an incredibly
long time and just no one talks about it. And this is so stupid, like we're constantly reinventing the wheel, right?
Like I knew things that they could, I could save them time and they knew things that would
save me time and other people have been kind enough as I'd reached out to offer some advice
and I was like, well, why aren't we just doing this all the time?
So I for 14 years now, I think I've been running the Parents of Different Learners, which
is just a loose collective of us, parents of kids who learn differently in any way or
we think they learn differently in some way and it's a range, you know, the alphabet
of diagnoses we have all of them, I think every single one ever, ever, well, maybe not.
And we meet once a month during the school year and have for the last number of years,
it's no, people come, people go, people show up for five minutes, now we're on Zoom and
in person sometimes and people can pop in for five seconds, even just to say hello.
And the idea behind it is it's not group therapy, it's not, we know how to solve this.
It's literally just, we're all on the same journey and anyone who is on this journey
knows that people who are not can be as empathetic as they, they're wonderful people, but
they don't actually know what it is like to have the kids that we have and the challenges
that it causes our kids and our families quite often as a result of simply not fitting
into the mainstream and some of our kids really don't fit in and some of our kids almost
fit in, but all told when you're out of sync with everyone around you, it becomes much
more of an experience and if you're not on it, you can only try to approximate it.
So we do offer support and we share resources and we talk about everything from school's
specific problems to parenting problems, to relationship problems to name it, anything
that could potentially help our kids by sharing knowledge and help people save time and
also that experience of knowing that you are not alone in this because I think everyone
who has experienced these moments of, my kid is different, I'm alone on this journey
and sometimes it is incredibly lonely at two in the morning.
Gayle:
What keeps you doing this now that your sons are out of the K-12 age group?
Greg:
I, you know, a few things keep me doing it one, I think it's still the same community
of people and some of the people that have been in the group for a long time and also
have kids in their 20s as mine are, so that we have that in common, there you go.
And I think that I still in read every single thing that I had ever subscribed to at
the time because I'm lying, if I say I've solved things, I'm fascinated by it because
I've become curious, endlessly curious about how do all these different methods of thought
Work? And so every time I've thought about maybe, well, maybe I should move on, someone new comes to the group and we see the experience of the support and the helicopter that flies
over our house and here this is how much having this group and this space to just talk
openly helps all of us, myself included, just to know that that others understand this
and then to be able to see and help other people find resources or just have a safe place
to talk for an hour about how life is affecting them because of their kids and how all that.
And so I see no real reason to stop, I always wanted to make sure that the group was literally
just that a collective group where we get together once a month, so it's a couple hours
a month and I was reading all this stuff anyway, so to send out some extra links takes
me about an extra hour, maybe a month to collect everything, so why wouldn't I if I still
think it offers me value and others value?
Gayle:
As a parent yourself, in observing other parents, do you have any observations? I know they're not clinical but any observations about patterns, about the parents who thrive and the parents who get stuck or struggle, and… because of course I'm trying to extrapolate, like, what helps parents to thrive?
Greg:
Right, I think I can point to a few things. One is, as a group our parents like us are incredibly
hard on ourselves, we're incredibly hard on ourselves because we're running into behaviors
that are bonkers, how could we be a parent and allow our kids to behave this way or our kids
are failing in school and so we feel bad?
And I think one of the big shifts people who thrive or survive, well, even if not thrive
make is accepting that things like that are not about us as failing, I mean we can learn
to do better in individual moments but in general it's a learning curve for us parents as
well and we have to accept that we're on this and that we're trying and doing our best.
And when you start to accept that I'm trying and doing my best and I'll continue to work
on that and I'll continue to learn, it becomes a lot easier to parent rather than constantly
thinking that you're failing and beating yourself up for the failures.
So that is one big thing.
I think another is a change in expectation which is so many of us expected to have, I don't
even know what the right term is, kids like us, many of us don't want kids like us, kids
who are on the trajectory that we expected of them as we're having kids, they're going
to go to school and then they're going to go to college and then they'll get married
or they're going to get this great type of job. And it's not that those things won't necessarily happen, it's just that the path to that with our kids tends to be a little more circuitous than we anticipated and the more we have expectations and try to keep our kids on some preconceived track of what should be, it becomes more difficult to thrive as a parent and as a family and to help our kids.
Gayle:
Is there any anecdote you can share about watching somebody maybe reluctant who benefited
from the experience of a parent group?
Greg:
Yes, so I can and one of the rules that I instituted at the group is no one ever has to
speak. It's not like you have to go around and share your thing if you don't want to talk because
first of all most of us never really get to talk openly about this anyway so I would say about certainly more than half, maybe as much as 80% of the people who come to the group, it's the first time when they finally share their story. So sometimes just hanging out and observing in a group, no stress, doesn't matter if you talk, and then you realize that these other people are
just like you and then eventually someone will say something that resonates, and that you choose to comment on, and that's usually what happens it's first just a small aside comment.
We've had people in the group who I think have never spoken who have been in the group for 10 years and I ping them and say, “Hey, do you know, would you still want to be on the list?” “Yes, absolutely, I read everything, I come to meetings, I've never spoken…” It's okay,
we all get out of this what we need to get out of it.
Gayle:
You’re a curator like I am. If you were just giving some links or books, videos, articles, websites… what would be the top three or four things you would send to
somebody new on this kind of journey?
Greg:
I think it depends on the type of kid, but Debbie Reiber's book ‘Differently Wired’ is fabulous in the Tilt community and her now Full Tilt podcast, it's great. ADDitude magazine is fabulous for all things ADHD or ADD depending on how we wish to define it.
Gayle:
When you think back, what do you wish someone had told you in your early days of discovering and finding your way?
Greg:
Accept. Accept what your kids are telling you, accept that this experience that they're
having is really the experience they're having. They might not always be able to explain exactly why that is. Their reasons might be proved to be slightly different, but that they are feeling unhappiness or they don't fit in or they can't understand, even though they're smart enough to understand or they seem like they understand it five times out of ten, radically accept their experience and work from there.
Gayle:
My son is in college now, and I still get calls from people who have a friend they want me to talk to, because that friend is new to the learning differences parenting world. I always say yes. I always say that I am happy to pay it forward any way that I can to other parents. And now that I have heard Greg’s last answer to me, that he wishes people had told him early on just to accept his kids, I think I will add it to my go to advice. Until now, my number one piece of advice I have given parents is this: If you can, find a group of parents you can talk to regularly. And if you can’t find one? Well, why not start one yourself?
Big thanks to Greg Pincus for everything he does, including being on this episode. In addition to his many parenting hats, Greg is a wonderful writer, particularly of kids’ books, and you can find a link to his site, gregpincus.com, in today’s show notes.