Learning Disabilities

Who We Help · Learning Disabilities

learning disabilities: fix the cause, don’t slow the child down

The standard answer to a learning disability is to slow instruction down and teach your child to cope. NACD does something different: a home program that identifies the neurological inefficiencies causing the difficulty and works on them directly, every day, with you.

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Learning disability home program
For Parents

The slow-down trap

Children diagnosed with learning disabilities are misunderstood by most professionals, and often by parents as well. The strategy typically used to deal with a learning disability is to slow instruction down in order to give the child a better chance to grasp the information.

But by slowing the instruction down, aren’t we ensuring that the child will never catch up?

So, if a child has a learning disability, is it a diagnosis that means academic failure? It is not. Since 1979, NACD has worked with over 50,000 families, and children labeled learning disabled have been proving that label wrong for as long as we have been doing this work.

What NACD Does

We don’t teach coping. We fix what’s wrong.

NACD does not teach the child how to cope with his or her existing learning disability. As a matter of fact, the NACD staff does not use the label “Learning Disabled.” NACD uses an assessment tool that allows us to ascertain the cause or causes of the learning difficulty. Having identified the cause, we are then able to move forward to fix what is wrong.

Unlike other programs that help the child cope with the disability, NACD seeks to identify and rectify the underlying causes. These causes are neurological inefficiencies, and a program designed to correct them, assembled from a toolbox of more than 1,000 techniques, is essentially a program to resolve the disability at its source.

Auditory processing

Inefficiencies in how your child takes in and processes what they hear affect following instruction, language, and learning in every subject. Daily targeted input develops the channel itself.

Visual processing

Inefficiencies in how your child processes what they see affect reading, writing, and working from the board or the page. The program works on the underlying visual processing, not just the schoolwork.

Retaining information

Short-term memory, working memory, and sequential processing are the foundation under learning and retention. These are among the most developable pieces of the entire program.

Problem solving

Conceptual thinking and problem solving grow as processing grows. A child whose underlying inefficiencies are addressed doesn’t just keep up. They begin to think and learn across the board.

What We’ve Seen
many of our “gifted” children came to us as learning disabled.

An adult or child diagnosed with a learning disability does not have to learn to live with it. NACD will work with you and your child to develop an efficient, if not superior, level of function. What do we expect? We expect success.

At Any Age

It works for adults, too

Our approach is unique and it works. It works for adults with learning disabilities as well as children. The brain remains changeable across the lifespan, and the same assessment-first, home-based approach applies at any age, adapted to adult life, work, and goals.

Is your child’s struggle specifically with reading? The set of symptoms often labeled dyslexia has its own causes and its own page. Read about how NACD approaches dyslexia.

NACD Learning & Attention Problems – Understanding What Works (Full Seminar) on YouTube

NACD Education Series on YouTube

How To Get Started

Three steps, starting free

1 · Free application and interview 2 · Evaluation and your child’s program 3 · Coaching and follow-ups, three times a year
Start Your Free Get Started Program

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Questions

Common questions from parents

An NACD home program is a set of daily activities designed specifically for your child after an assessment identifies the neurological inefficiencies causing the learning difficulty. You are trained to run the activities at home, with coaching and support from NACD, and the program is updated three times a year as your child progresses.
NACD’s experience since 1979 says the difficulties behind the label are developable. The causes are neurological inefficiencies in how a child processes, retains, and works with information, and those inefficiencies respond to the right input delivered daily. That is why NACD works on the causes rather than teaching your child to cope with them.
Dyslexia is a label usually applied when the struggle is specifically with reading and writing. Learning disability is a broader label. In both cases NACD looks past the label to the underlying causes, but if reading is your child’s main battle, the dyslexia page covers those specific causes in more depth.
Because the label describes the struggle without explaining it. Two children with the same label can have completely different underlying causes, and they need completely different programs. The assessment tells us what is actually going on with your specific child, and that is what the program is built from.
Slowing instruction down is the standard strategy, and it comes with a built-in problem: a child receiving less input falls further behind, not less. NACD’s approach is the opposite. Develop the underlying processing so your child can handle more input, and teach efficiently so they catch up while the causes are being addressed.
Yes. Our approach works for adults with learning disabilities as well as children. The brain remains changeable across the lifespan, and an adult who was told decades ago to live with their limitations may find there is far more room to grow than they were led to believe.
Two things: individualization and frequency. Your child gets one integrated program built around the actual causes of their learning difficulty instead of a standard protocol, and it runs every day at home instead of an hour here and there. NACD also helps you coordinate everything your family is doing into one coherent plan.
Both. Many NACD children attend school while running their program at home before and after, and many families homeschool with NACD’s guidance. Either way, the program and your child’s education are coordinated into one coherent plan.
Your NACD Developmentalist works directly with your child and with you, looking at auditory and visual processing, memory, motor development, language, learning, behavior, and health factors. You leave with a clear picture of what is causing the difficulty and a program of activities with clear instructions.
Every child is different, and we do not make promises. What we can say is that input compounds day after day, and progress is measured concretely at follow-up evaluations three times a year, so you always know what is moving and what the program targets next.