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Welcome to Embrace, a heartfelt podcast series led by Rachel Forbes, Executive Director of LDS - Learn. Develop. Succeed. Drawing on her rich experience in community building, social justice, and nonprofit leadership, Rachel takes you on an intimate journey through the life of Mason—a remarkable individual whose story of navigating dyslexia and ADHD offers powerful insights into the world of neurodivergence.
Through Mason’s story, from his early years in preschool to adulthood, we explore the first signs of learning differences, how they evolve over time, and the impact of a strong, supportive community. Alongside educators, neurodivergence experts, passionate parents, and allies, Embrace shatters stigmas, highlights the unique gifts of neurodivergent learners, and offers empowering strategies for building confidence and self-esteem.
Join us as we celebrate the power of educational and social-emotional supports that embrace each unique learner for who they are—and who they can become.
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Hi, I'm Rachel Forbes. I'm a passionate mother, an advocate, a partner, a friend, and an ally. I bring those identities and my experience in community building, social justice, and nonprofit leadership to my role as Executive Director at LDS, Learn, Develop, Succeed. Over the next few weeks, I will lead you through the story of a beautiful soul named Mason.
from preschool through to adulthood. We get to witness Mason's early years, exploring the first signs of potential learning differences like dyslexia and brain-based differences like ADHD. In this series, we will feature educators from LDS, experts on neurodivergence, as well as passionate parents and allies who make up the community that rallied around Mason. Along the way, we'll reveal the gifts
that unique learners offer. Shatter some stigmas about neurodivergence, explore ways to build confidence and self-esteem, and offer a path forward. A path paved by educational and social emotional supports that embrace each unique learner for just who they are and for who they can choose to be. This is Embrace.
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There's no greater feeling than seeing our kids thrive and be filled with joy, especially in those early years as they move into preschool and kindergarten, learning letters, numbers and shapes, building friendships.
Mason is the kind of kid who always seemed to be in motion, a little whirlwind of energy and curiosity. His hair stuck up in every direction as if it couldn't keep up with him either. He has this way of crinkling his nose right before he smiles, an honest, unfiltered grin that made you feel like you were the most important person in the world. He hasn't yet learned to second-guess himself, and his confidence is as natural as breathing. His laugh, sharp and unexpected,
as a way of filling up a room, turning heads and melting hearts. He's small, but there's something about him that felt larger than life, as though he carried a secret, boundless potential even he didn't know about yet. Mason, between the ages of three and seven, starts to exhibit signs in his behaviours of preschool and kindergarten that indicate he may have a learning difference. He's resistant to learning letters and reading itself, but loves stories and being read to.
He's incredibly hyperactive and needs lots of sensory input. So what do we look for when we notice that our child looks at things a little differently? There's a lot going on in the early years that's developing. And like you said, everyone is developing at their own speed in different areas. That's Marlo Humiskey, the Senior Manager, Early Years Program at LDS. So you might start noticing a lot in daily tasks. That's actually, think, where families might find it a bit more than if we're looking at
just speech by itself. If you're looking at how do they move through their day, are they able to hold things tightly? Are they able to help themselves? Can they ask for things or indicate they need help? All of these little pieces on how do we move through our day. If there's a significant struggle in fine motor or gross motor challenges too, so like those small hand movements like zippers and things, or big movements like balance, there might also be a sign of something more going on.
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But we learned from Marlo that not every child experiences the same sensitivities, and therefore every parent has a different understanding of what neurodivergence looks like. Like, for example, a loud noise might make a young child more upset than their peer if it's incredibly loud. That might mean that they're sensitive to the sounds loud. But sometimes this can also mean under-responsive. So under-responsive can happen when a child isn't responding to stimuli.
So that might be you are calling their name 10 times and they're not answering you. So what you're looking for is less reactions or big reactions and trying to notice patterns within that. If there's a child that is very sensitive to sounds or noises, visual stimuli, what then? So I notice a pattern, what would I do with that information as a parent? And does it matter? Can I do anything with it? Should I be concerned?
Yeah, there's a lot of things that we can do with it and a lot of it is about setting up our environments or setting up a space for them to control their environment. So if you notice that a child is very sensitive to sound, you want to try to safeguard from loud sounds, but that's also not always possible in our day-to-day lives. There's loud cars, there's loud people, there's loud things that happen. So sometimes it's about having the right tools with you. So if somebody is sensitive to sounds, in that way you might talk about using like noise canceling or reducing headphones.
And young ones, as young as three, can be taught how to ask and put on those headphones. And so then that can be something that goes with them everywhere they go and help to support their senses while they're out and about. But it's also something that they can take action on and put on for themselves to protect themselves when they're having that moment. But there are other things we can do as the adults or the caregivers or the people around them to support them. So if you notice that blinking lights are, say, dysregulating, which means like upsetting and like causing the body to feel uncomfortable.
then you can try to control those blinking lights or remove those blinking lights. Sometimes when we're not in charge of our environment, it's harder to do these things, but when we can control it, thinking about what tools or what control we have over our senses and environments can be really helpful.
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And what about if we are in a place that we can't necessarily get out of or we don't have tools with us to mitigate the high sensory inputs that might be in that area? How can I support my child in that situation? like, maybe I wasn't even aware that my child was so sensitive to certain things and then I'm stuck in a subway or at a hockey game or something and I'm like,
this is really stressful, this is really like, is this damaging for them? How do I support them in that situation? Yeah, there are a lot of times, especially with the young ones, where we find that there's maybe a sensory reaction that we weren't expecting or prepared for, and we might not even see it as a sensory reaction. Sometimes you might see it as like, what we would call defiance, or refusing to do something, because it's either asking them to step into that stimulus.
or it's requiring more of that from them. And so you might see them like standing back and be like, no, I don't want it. So for example, the example you used of like the train station, for example, they might not get on the train and you might be like, why won't you? And it's because there's more going on. So usually when that happens is we actually want to make sure first where we're at, before we actually start approaching the child, you want to think about how your body is. Are you calm? Are you still? Are you able to provide that baseline for them to
grab onto and stay regulated with you, not physically grab, but like with their own emotions and their own energy levels. So coming back to where you are and trying to figure out ways to make them feel safe and comfortable in what you're working with. So sometimes acknowledging with your words what's happening can help because they know that they're not alone in it. So saying, wow, this is so noisy. This is really making me mad too. Or those kinds of things, talking with them about the feelings that are happening.
Sometimes we don't have the tools to bring in, but just making sure that we are a comfort and we are support, whether that can be like big hugs or maybe there's a stuffy in their bag. These kinds of things can help. But I find that if adults are able to bring themselves calmly into a situation, the child will try to match or meet that and can kind of use that as their lifeline as they're struggling with this moment. And that can go for behaviors as well. So for parents and caregivers who are
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navigating the early years and I don't know if it goes really smooth sailing for anybody, but if there's some challenges coming up with their child or children in the early years, what are common challenges that the parents and caregivers are facing? I think at first, I mean, every family is going to have their different journey through our program, but I think at first having other parents and families there feels a little bit scary because of that comparison that we're stuck in in society.
And I feel like that comes out in the first couple sessions because it's natural. People can't help but do it. But then as time goes through, I think the families start to realize that we're all in this together. And they stop seeing their child as like a one comparison to the next child in the classroom. And what ends up happening is that we start to build a community of families that are in the same space and working on different goals together. And so once...
Families get more comfortable with each other. They start to realize that one-to-one comparison doesn't work. It doesn't make sense because if you take one child over here and you compare them over here, it's going to be so different. And so I think they start to lose that feeling of comparing and start moving more towards just understanding each child and their own child better. And so seeing things maybe less in that black and white thinking and more so in like seeing the robust picture of their child, their family and
those in the classroom with them too.
And for co-founder of Play Roly, Lisa Sturdy, it was a similar set of experiences with her son Mitch that prompted her to look deeper. But one thing I did notice about Mitch when he was about four was that he we were doing a seek and find in a little book and you had to rhyme the word to figure out what to seek. So it was like whale and pale and things like that. And
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I realized he couldn't rhyme, which I found quite surprising considering he'd been read rhyming books literally from birth. So I guess that's a hindsight thing, but with hindsight, now that I realize a trait of dyslexia is a lack of discernment in sounds of language, rhyming is one of the first traits that you see emerge when kids are really little.
She noticed that her son, once a calm, easygoing and laid back child who loves school and reading, wasn't very confident anymore. Tears were shed and she knew something was going on. But just like other parents, putting aside her gut feeling, she decided to wait. I just backed right off. I just backed off because he was in preschool. He's a happy little guy. I took him out part time and put him into an outdoor preschool. He loved that.
Yeah, I just stopped really doing it because, which by the way was not the right thing to do with hindsight, but especially when someone's young and they don't like it, I just stopped doing it. Yeah. But I knew something was deeply wrong. Right. And then what kind of feedback were you getting from anybody at the preschool at that time? They were just like, it's okay. What were they saying?
The preschool teacher is a really lovely lady. She's the one you see in the Play-Roll-E videos, actually, all the lesson videos. She's really, she's been teaching phonics to preschool children for decades and seen it all. She's a really special lady. She knows that every year some children don't blend. So this is typical. This is what happens in every school in the world, really. Some children don't get it. So...
You're typically told that children will develop at their own rate and to keep at it. But no one was setting off alarm bells, except me. Everybody was saying, you know, everything's fine, kids all develop at the same rate. But I'm in the preschool class, so I'm noticing he is not on the same trajectory as he was. more than that, he's upset. So I knew something was wrong. And then...
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Where did that journey go? Where did you kind of end up with being able to get some evidence other than your gut or professional support to understand what was going on with Mitch? You know, somebody handed me a book, friend of mine, weirdly. It was a time of life when with a young child I wasn't reading very much. But he handed me this book. It was a Malcolm Gladwell book. And there's a passage in the book that is about
this correlation between entrepreneurs and dyslexics. And I read this passage and I went, my God, my husband is dyslexic because he's an entrepreneur. But the way they described this, I was going, that is him. That's my husband. And then I went, that's Mitch. And once I started down that path, I started reading all about it. And just by fluke,
a specialist came into Vancouver, it was in the sun, that tested young children. Because typically, you wouldn't test a child that age, they haven't even been exposed to phonics yet, or any kind of instruction. So, by fluke, a man from England came into town, Dr. Gavin Reed, through a place called Reach in North Vancouver. And we paid for a private psych-ed, and lo and behold, he was dyslexic. And then subsequently, we realized
almost certainly that Mark and his dad is dyslexic too. What she learned was that dyslexia can be characterized as primarily a verbal skill issue, a mind-blowing revelation for lot of parents. I mean, when you think about dyslexia, the first thing that comes to mind is reading.
But after reviewing the research and the many studies which demonstrated the positive effects of early intervention, she was inspired to create PlayRoly, a free at-home early reading activity founded on science of reading research. So what Roly is really doing is it's bringing what we know from the research and the brain imaging, which is this, it's called a phonological awareness deficit. It means you can't comprehend the
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So the meaning of the word sun, we all know what that meaning is, sun, but fragmenting it down into a nn, and then bringing it back, that speech to print, it's a block. And if you actually see a brain scan of a dyslexic child before they have reading instruction, that narrow pathway is not in place. So the child who is at risk is developing that skill from scratch. That's why we do things like we show pictures of the mouth.
and we're constantly bringing every single letter back to the mouth and the way we speak. And the problem with a dyslexic child is they might need, you know, 12 times, not 12 % more, but 12 times more instruction. And also you have to get them to attend to something that they don't easily attend to. You know, the way your mouth says, mm, mum. They think of mum.
It's a tricky thing when you have a big class full of kids. So Playroly is bringing in reading intervention techniques from Horton-Gillingham, from Linda Moodbell, you know, ones that you would be using all the time at LDS. But they're bringing it to the individual teacher to use one-on-one with a student. And so what's super fun is in the most recent pilot, we had the at-risk kids identified.
We found some at-risk kids that weren't identified because they weren't presenting quite as typically. They didn't have the behaviours issues. They could print their name.
We see this every day at LDS because we focus on addressing the foundational academic skills with the help of important tools and resources. And the hope is that if we do that right up front, that it can make a world of difference in how our children navigate their learning. And more importantly, their relationship with learning. Marlo sees that every day. Early years are tough because you might know that something is going on with your child's learning, but not have the ability to receive the assessments that you need.
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whether that is that they're age appropriate or just actually accessing that assessment. But in the early years, there's a lot of things that we can start doing before a diagnosis. And one of them is to find strategies that work for the diagnosis you suspect and start applying that now. So if you think your child has ADHD, you can start researching ADHD in young children and you can start applying those strategies and those tools right now and you can see if they work for your child.
If they work, that's great. If they don't, there are other strategies out there you can try. But you can begin looking for resources and strategies and applying them right away. You don't need a doctor to tell you to implement those strategies. And that can also be part of the journey because then when you go to an assessment or it is time for that assessment, you can say, well, you know, we've tried having very structured routines and that has been really helpful for them. That can help.
bring evidence of what you're trying to get assessed, while also help your family figure out what's going on now and what works for your family. So it's very often for families, would suggest finding maybe a certain area that is affecting the child the most or affecting your family as a whole the most and start there, start researching strategies in there. If you have a suspected diagnosis that you think, you can pop that into your Google search. You might get some great strategies. There's a lot of good.
OTSLP ran websites out there or websites like LDS that has great strategies as well. And you can start learning now and wait to get the doctor to tell you, but you can already start now. So yeah, you're talking about some assessments might be available in the early years too. So I know that you integrate working with occupational therapists and speech language pathologists in some of the early years programming.
What kinds of things can these professionals tell us about early years development? SLPs, so speech language pathologists, are really great for telling us about children's communication, their social skills, also their emotions as well. We often think of speech language pathologists as only covering speech and language and communication, but they cover all assets of how that, and facets of how that goes into our world. So it's not just about saying the sentence correctly.
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It can be about how to use that sentence with others, how to ask others to play and all those kinds of supports that children really need. And then when you go to an occupational therapist, they're providing something that's a very important therapy, but they're also focusing on skills that are similar but different. So occupational therapists support with our daily tasks. So our fine motor skills, so small hand movements and our gross motor skills, our full body movements. So an OT can help.
with strengthening those parts of the body, but also working through our daily tasks and how to get through our structured day, as well as support emotions. So that's another part of the OT is that they connect how a child is feeling and how our emotions feel like in our brain, how they feel to our body, and then how to implement strategies of support. So an SLP and an OT are really important supports for neurodiverse child.
because they not only teach them about themselves and what they need, but they also teach them about how to interact with the world and get what they need from the world as well. With kids like Mason, it's important to look at the early signs because a vast spectrum of learners are deeply misunderstood. And by normalizing their differences and empowering families to better understand their children and how their brains are developing, we can put them on a supportive path.
where their unique challenges are expertly addressed and their unique strengths are celebrated. By making learning a positive experience, using play, following learners' interests, emphasizing strengths to build confidence, we help create more opportunities for a child like Mason to try and to try again, to build resiliency for learning more and more later down the line. In the next episode,
We touch on the moment of recognition of a learning difference and dive deeper into the power of early detection and intervention. I like that it gives you a picture, an entire picture of how your child works in cognitive speaking, also academic skills and behaviours. And if a child is struggling and an assessment comes back and there's no underlying issue, but they're still struggling, there would still need to be something put in place for that child.
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We talk about how timely support, along with the right assessments and tools, can be a critical piece of the bigger puzzle. That's all for today. Embrace is an everything podcast production, an award-winning team focused on engaging storytelling that connects with its audience in a meaningful and memorable way. Our showrunner is Rithu Jagannath, and our audio engineer and sound mixer is Scott Whitaker.
And if you like the show, please rate and follow it. It helps us reach more listeners like you. Until next time, embrace your kids.
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Another Everything Podcasts production.
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