GAPS and Learning Problems

Do any of you have a child that seems to struggle with…well…with almost everything? I have never known exactly what to think of my second child. Her older brother is very bright and seems to learn by osmosis at times. I vowed to never expect her to be like him or to put pressure on her because of him. Not everyone is academically inclined. But the truth is that I’ve had a hard time knowing what was within the realm of “normal” and what was not because he is so unusual.

A number of times over the past year or so, I’ve asked myself…Is she slow? Or is this a real problem? Do I just need to wait until later? Or is there something I can do to help her? That I ought to do to help her? It really is an area for wisdom, and I don’t pretend to know the answer for every child.

One of the things that has been painful to watch is that this child really wants to know. When she was four, I watched her work so incredibly hard, just to learn her alphabet. I’ve never seen a child work so hard before. I was ready to throw in the towel and wait until she was older, but she didn’t want to do that, so I indulged her {for only 5 or 10 minutes per day, of course}.

Last year {first grade}, I had one goal, and that was to get her reading and narrating. I didn’t really do that, but this allowed me to put my focus in one place and not really worry about other things so much. She has done well in narrating, at least I thought so, but the reading was still a struggle.

I wasn’t introduced to the better-late-than-never stuff until very recently, so I’m still letting those ideas percolate. I am far more willing to let math wait than I am reading, so when this child continued to want to do reading lessons–she was never resisting them, mind you–we just kept working away, even though I felt like it was at the pace of an inch worm!

We did the typical first grade stuff–math, reading, narrating, writing, and so on, and I felt secretly like she struggled in every area. It wasn’t that she was doing terribly, but that every single thing seemed like such a struggle for her.

I know that this can build character. I know that some children need to just wait until later {but doesn’t their desire also wait until later when this is the case?}. I know there are probably some things that I have been and still am overlooking.

But with all of this said, I must share with you that after about three weeks on the GAPS diet, it was very evident that this was going to help her. She improved tremendously in math. Her narration is much more detailed and includes more proper nouns. She is suddenly speeding through her reading lessons at a tremendous pace. She finished the Treadwell Primer, a Frog and Toad book, and is into the Treadwell First Reader. I haven’t really worked with her on it, and yet her handwriting has improved. She even had some remains of baby talk that I was concerned about–did she have a slight speech impediment?–that is basically gone {she still has an orthodontic appliance, so it is hard to tell for sure}. She has had trouble verbalizing her thoughts in the past–she is very quiet because of this–and yet I heard her talk on the phone on Sunday with her grandma for at least fifteen minutes, something she has never had the patience to do in her entire life. And she was funny! And she talked a lot.

So much of this could be chalked up to it being a new school year and a lot of children advance quietly while they play over summer. However, we did two weeks of school before beginning the diet, and it was a case of the same. old. thing. It isn’t that she never improved in anything, it’s just that it always seemed so slow and so hard for her. I know slow and steady wins the race, so I was trying to play the Patient Mom while I was privately fretting over words I see thrown around these days…dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, and dysphagia. For two weeks, I worked with her.

But now? Now, it is a ton of fun. I’m not going to lie to you. It is far easier to work with a child who gets it. Now, obviously there are a lot of reason why children don’t get it, and I’ve already mentioned some of them. But for this particular child, it looks like her chronic tummy ache and history of food allergies were more connected to her learning problems than her age or level of ability. It has truly felt like a miracle to me.

GAPS is hard work, and that is why I put it off for years after reading about it. Our problems didn’t seem so big that they merited that kind of sacrifice and effort. I am so glad that we reached the tipping point because this alone makes it worth it to me. My daughter is able to become more of what she was created to be.