First, can I say spaghetti, your kid rocks! I would consider this my finest moment as a parent:
Kid started a club in high school to help support 2E kids. Taught them how to get 504s.
And I think you get at an important issue here, which knute demonstrates well, below:
No where did I ever push for persistence for hard tasks. This is a kid who crumpled up and destroyed math fact tests, refusing to do them. It wasn't persistence, it was a task that had no meaning or purpose and would just reinforce to child the lack of ability.
There is a huge difference between learning to persevere with something that is hard, and being forced to fail endlessly on something you can't do, when no one is giving you the tools or teaching to be able to do it differently. It can take time and creativity and endless patience to figure out what needs to change to make that task doable for a specific child. As others noted above, the goal was definitely to get my kids independently functioning - but I admit, that took years and an ever-evolving array of approaches.
In grade 2-3, DD started using an iPad at school, with lots of word prediction. For shorter writing, she used a whiteboard and the teacher snapped pics with her phone (texture seems to be a big thing with my dysgraphic DD & DH). At home, when she had a lot to say, I'd mostly scribe (and sometimes she'd voice record or video), and when the ideas were coming out at a more leisurely pace, we'd play with keyboarding and voice-to-text. Grade 4-5 we got her a laptop for school, but apparently she's iGen and never liked it as much, as it didn't do word prediction nearly as well. We also found voice-to-text really didn't work that well for high-pitched kid voices, and also isn't very practical for school. Grade 6-7, we switched back to a tablet, one that comes with a detachable keyboard, and for her that seems the best of all worlds. I scribed as needed for several years: anytime writing it herself was going to get in the way of her thinking, learning or creating. Now, I can't remember when she last had me scribe text (though she still writes poetry on her whiteboard, then immediately reads to me to type up because when the muse takes her, she needs to run with it and it comes out so fast even she struggles to read what's on that board.)
I scribed for DS for a few years too, but he got pretty good with the keyboard (mostly, I shamefacedly admit, due to Minecraft) and again, hasn't wanted my help typing in many years. His solution, and his path to get there, was totally different than his sister's, though.
As knute notes, kids with LDs don't tend to do well under the time pressures that are built into most typing tutors (and don't even get me started on math minutes!). If they have fine motor issues, that may slow things down even more. I think one of the hardest things for me to learn as a parent is just how long these things take, how hard it is for my kids to learn certain things that were easy for me, and how flexible and always-changing I need to be. And how hard but important it is to ignore all the people around me who insist I am spoiling my kids and they need to do it all themselves, yesterday. My kids got there, but not by the path and not on the timeline that worked for anyone else. Patience! Never my strong suit, but they are teaching me
