I think whether or not processing speed can potentially change may be related to why it's what it is to begin with - i.e., my ds12 has a fine motor disability and his processing speed is significantly lower than his other scores.
Thanks Polarbear! This is an excellent point. Another example that comes to mind is the child with excellent processing speed in life, who has a lot of perfectionist behaviors and gets a low score because they are trying to do the task perfectly. Or even a child with a good work ethic who has trained themself that 'slow and steady beats fast and sloppy' - who wouldn't want a child to learn that?
When I was a kid, the adults used to shake their heads on a regular basis and say 'slow as molasses in January' becuase that was the behavior that they saw. My processing speed is actually quite fast and one of the ways I compensate, but the overall picture of me as a kid was slow-slow-slow - a daydreamer, space cadet, etc. It turns out that there is so much ADHD-I (inattentive) in my family that it looks like normal to me, so it's possible I would have been diagnosed if I had been born more recently. What slowed me down in day to day life was my 'bottleneck' (not a true disability, just a place where my racecar brain had only tricycle wheels to ride on i.e. average for an average person, but a true PIA for me)
with Working Memory. Getting dressed, teeth brushed and fed in the morning is a great example of a complicated task with lots of little parts to juggle,track, and monitor. I recently took 20 minutes off of my 'get up and go to work' routine by not allowing me to leave bedroom/bathroom area until I was 100% complete in there,and not going back unless absolutely essential, and then moving through the house in similar fashion. What was I doing for those extra 20 minutes? I have no memory, but apparently a whole houseful of temptation is too much for me when I'm half asleep. Writing is perhaps the paramount of WM challenge - it involves supporting one's body in the chair, positioning the arms, hands, paper, pencil, thinking what to say, forming the letters, evaluating if the letters are being produced clearly enough, managing the spaces between words and the margins, Captiolisation and punctuation, spelling, subject/verb argeement, keeping on the main point of what one wants to say, oh yeah - what do I want to say? and what does the teacher want me to want to say?
So there is one example where a lot of slow behavior comes out of bottlenecked WM even for someone with plenty of Processing Speed.
(You might wonder why I think I have lightening fast PS even though I've never seen any of my test results. I sort of know because when I go to a movie, I laugh about 10 seconds before the rest of the crowd gets started. It also helps with reading between the lines to pick up on little things that are not directly stated.)
I'll type more soon, in the meanwhile, I've introduced the concept of 'bottleneck' which is a great concept to have when your kid has a profile like yours, also what WM is and how that can contribute to slowness, also I've surfaced the idea of what it's like to be bright with ADHD-I, (in my mind if the WM is 2 standard deviations behind the strongest other area, and can't be explained by any other reason, then that is 'by definition' ADHD-I, but I'm not a professional or a researcher, just a mom. In 20 years we'll look back and be amazed, or laugh)and the idea that challenges and strengths tend to group by family, and so looks both less impressive and less alarming to the parent who has a 'whole bunch more just like this one back in their childhood.'
Please ask about any questions that come to mind while reading this!
Grinity
