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So how would one help a child with this sort of issue? My DS does not have a diagnosis at this point but has difficulty with certain things. Anxiety is one problem with testing him, but he also shows much better results when motivated in some way. So how does one help a child get better at doing tasks that he or she finds uninteresting!
apm, with my 2e ds it was really difficult teasing out whether or not anxiety was the issue, lack of motivation, or actual learning challenge. The thing that worked best was to look at a wide range of situations over time - what type of assignment is causing the symptoms that look like anxiety? Is it truly random, or if you pay attention over time do you see any pattern? With my ds, the "pattern" was open-ended writing assignments - he appeared to be zoning out in class, "lazy" (according to his teacher), lacking motivation etc. Other times he was able to complete writing assignments. It took looking over a full year's work, plus a lot of other thinking about what was going on, but we eventually realized it was the open-ended nature of the questions. He was eventually diagnosed with an expressive language disorder by an SLP - I noticed on your earlier posts you'd mentioned early delays in speech but also mentioned you'd anticipate his scores on a speech eval now would come out in the average range. FWIW, my ds' scores on the CELF *did* come out in the average range - some were actually very high - but the diagnosis came from observations on the part of the SLP related to how long it took ds to come up with the answers to the questions.
Sorry that probably veered a bit OT too!
My last piece of advice - I think it's really important to listen to your gut feeling as a parent - you are the person who's spent the most time with your ds. If you feel like there is something going on, it's worth looking into. If you find out it was all for nothing and everything is a-ok. that's ok! And if you do find a challenge, you'll be so glad you found out now instead of later on.
Best wishes,
polarbear
