I thought if I just pushed him enough he would be able to do more, that he would somehow build up strength and endurance just by doing more, but his hands always hurt after five minutes...
This is how schools and teachers seem to approach my child and I did too - until recently. Pushing him to work despite the pain of his disability thinking that is somehow helping instead of causing way more harm than good. I have been a real pain in the butt to the school lately forcing them to wrap their minds around the fact that is is a permanent disability not going anywhere... and forcing writing is like focing a parapalegic to crawl around instead of use his chair b/c he "can" and we don't want to "enable" [love love love that analogy MON :)]
I could see it wasn't a simple matter of having him practice writing numbers. It was a physical issue that he had no control over. He could feel my stress and he already felt bad enough about the difficulties
Yup. It's hard to get to this very realization with this type of disability (I guess b/c of the invisibility of it and it's even more invisible when the child is not only okay cognitively but gifted even) and so so so hard to get others to 'get it' as well.
