Einstein Syndrome: Down Syndrome with a Positive Attitude

As the mother of many mixed-dominant kids,  (kids who have run-of-the-mill learning disabilities), I have experienced plenty of their emotional meltdowns over stuff that should be simple and easy.  Here is my trick to get through these meltdowns quickly.

Here is the scenario:  You are trying to teach some simple academic thing, and your child is completely irrational about how difficult it is; they are unable to even watch you demonstrate it, and instead dissolve into tears about the impossibility of understanding.  Sound familiar?

When the child reaches the point of irrational emotionality, all teaching becomes impossible, because the child is simply unable to process anything through all the emotion.

To understand what is happening inside his head, imagine viewing his two hemispheres in an MRI scan.  Neurons in the subdominant hemisphere, where emotion lives, are all firing, lighting up that area of the brain in twinkling lights.  On the other side, where logic lives, all neurons are dark and quiet.  There is no activity in the dominant, auditory, logical, factual part of his brain.

To recover from an emotional meltdown, you must get your child’s brain firing neurons over on the logical, factual side.  How?  Math facts.  Math facts are cold, hard, and logical.

When I have a tearful child who is simply unable to process anything amidst the swirl of emotion, first I demand their attention.  Then I ask for recall of a math fact that I know is easy for them to answer.   I keep my voice calm, low, logical, emotionless. They are usually yelling, sobbing or otherwise expressing emotion, but I persist until I get an answer on this one easy math fact.  Then I ask another.  And another.  As they begin to calm down I ask more difficult math facts, but again I keep it to what I know they can answer.

Here are examples of math that I ask of them at this time, depending on their age and abilities.

• Simple square roots (What is the square root of 100, 81, 64, etc.)
• Count backwards from 100 (This one is great, if they can do it.  They seldom get past 80 before logic is in control again.)
• Basic multiplication and addition facts (2+2, 4×5, etc.)
• Count backwards from 20 or from 10
• Count to 10
• What is the next number after …?
• How many fingers am I holding up?

This works with my kids everytime.  If they are willing to obey and answer the question, it takes about two minutes to move a child from irrational emotionality to having that emotion under logical control.  I can usually tell when they are getting the control, because they start giggling.

This doesn’t deal with problems of the will, but it has greatly helped my family to teach our kids emotional control.