Summary: Advice for understanding your child’s unique learning style and how to support them.
I’m excited to feature Dr. Taylor Day as a guest author. She’s a licensed child psychologist and parental coach who specializes in autism and neurodivergent affirming care. Her expertise includes diagnostic evaluations, one-on-one therapy, group therapy models, and even extends to business coaching for other therapists.
When it comes to learning, we each have a unique learning style or way of processing information and getting excited about different topics. For both neurotypical and neurodivergent kids, learning — at home or at school — can come with a whole array of emotions. At times it can be exciting or rewarding, other times it feels frustrating and overstimulating.
As a parent, you want to nurture your child’s learning strengths while at the same time offer guidance and support to foster growth in areas that are more challenging for them. The balance likely feels delicate: encouraging child-directed exploration without interfering or squashing their enthusiasm while still providing support for the stuck points without making your child feel like they are bad at the skill they’re practicing.
When children feel confident in their abilities, they are more likely to feel encouraged to continue growing and learning in these certain areas. It can have a spillover effect too; excitement and confidence in one skill can lead to an increased desire to learn more in parallel skill areas. On the contrary, a child who feels discouraged by a certain topic in school, or experiences pressure to meet a certain expectation but falls short, can begin to withdraw in an attempt to calm their nervous system and protect themselves; this is a human experience and we even do this as adults.
Fostering joy, offering space for creativity within a specific activity, and not overemphasizing one mandatory result, is all easier said than done. Especially in my work with autistic children, it is so important to offer parents a toolkit so that they can identify and understand their children’s skills, create growth strategies for what their child need’s support with, and learn how to track progress without hyperfixation. As a parent, it is also important to identify when to seek help if you think your child is not developing as expected based on neurotypical norms.
How to Identify Your Child’s Strengths and Weaknesses
As a parent, you spend more time with your child than anyone else. However, as they grow, this will become less true as they spend more time at school, in afterschool activities, and with friends. Observing your child’s behavior and skills from an early age is helpful so that you can have a good idea of their developing interests, motivations, and strengths.
How can you identify your child’s strengths? I encourage the parents I work with to pay attention to what their child naturally gravitates towards. What does your kid enjoy most about learning? Or what does your child do at home in unstructured time?
When given free time, is your child usually reading? Playing pretend and using their imagination? Maybe they like to create structure by organizing things, drawing patterns, or aligning toys in a specific way. Paying attention to what your child does when you don’t make them do anything is a great way to identify their interests and even their natural skills.
For older children, get curious about their life at school. What comes easy for them? What subjects do they consistently struggle with, or complain to you about? Having a pulse on their self-identified strengths and weaknesses can make grades and report cards less of a shock or point of conflict.
Grades are an important datapoint, but they shouldn’t be the only aspect of your child’s school life that you pay attention to as a parent. Use report cards as a baseline, not a golden standard. If your child comes home with a lower grade, get curious as to why that grade might be slipping. What created the difficulty or challenge for them? Was it a new topic that they struggled to conceptualize? Or maybe it’s a specific learning style that the teacher is employing. Have these conversations with your learner by approaching it with a collaborative energy.
Identifying your child’s unique learning style, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, is a great way to connect with your child, help them develop their interests, and have a deeper understanding of their development. Fostering excitement and joy for the things that your child does well can lead to beautiful experiences, deep connection with your child, and a sense of belonging for everyone.
Encouraging What Your Child Does Well
Nurturing your child’s interests and providing them with the resources they need to develop their strengths can be one of the biggest joys of parenting. It is important, however, to encourage your child to do more of what they do well without making this activity or interest an obligation.
Especially with younger children, consider sitting down with them to do an activity they like. This not only gives you the opportunity to spend time with your child, but you can also learn about their unique learning style, listen to how they talk about the activity, what steps they take to reach completion, and how they talk themselves through a problem or setback that might arise as they engage with the activity.
Make sure that your child has access to the supplies or materials they need to do the activities they like. From saving shipping boxes, to having a drawer of random art supplies, these seemingly simple and cheap things can be the game changer for curious kids, particularly if creative play comes naturally to them. Signing your child up for extracurriculars in their areas of interest is another helpful way to foster your child’s interest in something, and gives them the opportunity to meet other kids with similar passions.
Related reading: Social Emotional Learning and Children’s Attention
When done intentionally, using your child’s skills to help improve their weaknesses can also be a productive tool. For example, if your child loves to paint or draw, consider an activity where instead of merely writing the alphabet, you use paint and colors to practice new letters. This helps to increase internal motivation. While this practice is a great way to make more mundane activities more interesting, it’s important to not just take advantage of something your kid likes for the sake of tempting them into an activity they despise or else they may grow to despise the activity or skill they once loved.
Creating Growth Strategies For What Your Child Needs Support With
Not every child is good at every single subject, sport, type of art, or other activity they try; nobody is! We all have strengths and weaknesses. Some weaknesses may mean they fall behind their peers while others may just be relative to the rest of their own skills. Either way, this can create internal frustration for your child.
It is important to keep this in mind as you monitor your child’s development and interests as they grow up. As a parent, it can be easy to end up in a spiral of comparison. Remember, the most important benchmark is your child against themselves, not your child against their best friend or their classmate. With this being said, there are important things you can do as a parent to help your child get support in the subjects or areas they struggle the most in. It is important to keep in mind that you know your child best, and so it is likely that you will notice first if they are falling behind in their development to the point where you should seek professional help.
The best way to help your child develop a skill they struggle with is to do so in a fun and engaging way. Create a low-stakes environment where effort is rewarded rather than the outcome. When you pay attention to the actual progress rather than very specific successes, progress often moves more quickly. This is the “gain mentality” (i.e., how much they have progressed), rather than the “gap mentality” (i.e., how much they still have to go to “catch” up).
It is also important to remember that your children look up to you and one of the best ways children learn is through observation. If you want them to develop a specific skill or value, I strongly encourage you to model it yourself. Be patient with their progress, encourage them to do things alongside you, and remember that you are their biggest cheerleader and it’s likely they will follow your lead and match your energy. Meaning if you’re stressed and anxious about it, they likely will be too. Remember children learn at varying paces so try not to project society’s often high standards onto them.
How To Track Progress Without Hyperfixation
When tracking your child’s progress and development with a specific task, skill, activity, or subject, it is important not to hyperfixate. Set a reminder once a week or once a month to check in on progress. Do not check in every day. If you track progress on a daily basis, you are assuming that you will notice growth each day; this is not realistic. And often this is perceived as pressure for the child. Turning a goal into a daily obsession can also drive your child away and crush their previous engagement or interest in the activity due to the mounting urgency to perform, achieve, and master something every single day.
Also remember to celebrate the small wins! This might mean noticing that your child pronounced a certain letter in the alphabet better than usual, rather than fixating on the fact that they didn’t know the whole alphabet from start to finish. This is another example of shifting away from the gap mentality to the gain mentality.
If you feel like you are struggling to keep tabs on your child’s development, or you feel like you are hyper fixating and it is affecting your child and your own mental health, consider reaching out to a professional.
Tips For Finding Professional Support For Your Child’s Development
If after identifying your child’s strengths and weaknesses, encouraging them to develop their interests, practicing resilience with their weaknesses, and monitoring their progress, you feel as if your child’s growth is not meeting neurotypical milestones, or that they may need extra support to reach their goals, there are resources available!
At school, consider meeting with your child’s teacher and school team to see if they have noticed anything similar happening in the classroom. If you are identifying challenges that align with what a teacher starts to notice, you can ask for an IEP or 504 meeting to be convened.
If you are looking to meet with a speech or occupational therapist, know that you do not need a professional diagnosis for a consultation, but you may want to get a referral from your primary care physician, and always check with your health insurance first.
If you are concerned that your child might need an autism diagnosis, please feel free to book a call with me, Dr. Taylor Day, or another neurodivergent affirming care specialist, like a child psychologist.
More about Dr. Tay:
Dr. Taylor Day is a licensed child psychologist and parental coach who specializes in autism and neurodivergent affirming care. Her expertise includes diagnostic evaluations, one-on-one therapy, group therapy models, and even extends to business coaching for other therapists.
Dr. Tay has supported hundreds of autistic children and their families for over a decade. She builds a bridge between autism care and family dynamics with her innovative Whole Family Approach™, focusing on the needs of parents and siblings of autistic children, as well as the children themselves.
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