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Lazy Is NOT A Diagnosis – Clues To “Lazy” Students

recently sat down with the parents of a high school student who has managed to barely get by in school. When we finished an in depth testing process we discovered he has a serious learning disorder. His parents told me with aching regret, that in the past, they had punished their son and taken things away because they had been told that his poor performance in school was due to “laziness and a behavior problem.”

Have you ever seen one of these kids that look lazy?

Maybe they always have their head on the desk. Others just never seem to be able to get started. Or maybe they just seem tired all the time, moving slowly, working slowly, barely able to muster any energy until it’s time for recess, P.E., or lunch. When asked about homework, they might say they didn’t have time, or didn’t have the right book, or maybe even say they just didn’t feel like doing it.

When teachers have gone “above and beyond,” done all they can do and the student doesn’t appear to be trying, lazy is often the only obvious conclusion left.

What we know about students is that if they could do the work, they would do it.

Not doing work is really embarrassing, and no student wants to be embarrassed.

So what is it with these lazy-like kids? A Learning Disorder usually has its root in one or more areas of inefficient processing or thinking, which are interrupting expected academic development.

Believe it or not, the developmental foundation for learning begins in utero. There is a developmental continuum that depends on each skill/ability building on the group that develops before it. If there is interference in this development, even at the earliest levels, it can affect school performance.

Let’s take a look at just one of these interferences.

Primitive Reflexes
The Central Nervous System is the control center for all development and learning. Its job is to facilitate a person’s ability to move well, speak fluently, play, and develop skills for living and learning.

Primitive survival reflexes, or automatic movements that occur without thinking, begin as early as 9 weeks in utero and are fully present at birth. These reflexes are necessary to help the baby with the birth process and with survival during the early months of life.

As the nervous system and the brain continue to develop after birth, new neurological connections are made and higher functions in the brain take over. The primitive reflexes are no longer needed and in fact, get in the way of the child’s thinking and learning if they remain active.

Remember, these reflexes are automatic (like a baby becoming startled or grasping your finger). They occur without thought.

Efficient learning depends upon more complex voluntary controlled movements and higher thought processes, so primitive reflexes need to become integrated and inactive. This should occur naturally by about 9-12 months of age.

When primitive reflexes are retained, they can cause neurological interference that affects motor control, sensory perception, eye-hand coordination, and thinking, producing anxiety and causing the person to have to work too hard and with less efficiency than would be expected. This is called neuro-developmental delay.

Dr. Lawrence J. Beuret, M.D., of Palatine, Illinois has developed an NDD checklist, clues that a delay may be occurring, which includes these risk factors:

Pregnancy and Birth:

  • Complications with pregnancy, labor,or delivery
  • Low birth weight (less than 5 pounds)
  • Delivery more than 2 weeks early or late
  • Difficulties for infant at birth: blue baby, difficulties breathing, heavily
  • Difficulties for infant at birth: blue baby, difficulties breathing, heavily bruised, low Apgar scores, distorted skull, jaundice

Infancy:

  • Feeding problems in the first six months
  • Walking or talking began after 18 months
  • Unusual/severe reactions to immunization
  • During first 18 months: Illness involving high fever, delirium, convulsions

Family History:

  • Reading/writing difficulties
  • Learning disorder
  • Motion sickness
  • Underachievers

The following learning challenges can be related to neuro-developmental delay:

  • Dyslexia or Learning Difficulties, especially reading, spelling and comprehension
  • Poor sequencing skills
  • Poor sense of time
  • Poor visual function/processing skills
  • Slow in processing information
  • Attention and concentration problems
  • Inability to sit still/fidgeting
  • Poor organizational skills
  • Easily distracted and/or impulsive
  • Hypersensitivity to sound, light, or touch
  • Poor posture, coordination, balance, or gait
  • Poor handwriting
  • Clumsiness/accident prone
  • Slow at copying tasks
  • Confusion between right and left
  • Reversals of letters/numbers and midline problems
  • Quick temper/easily frustrated/short fuse
  • Can’t cope with change/must have things a certain (their) way
  • School Phobia
  • Poor motivation and/or self esteem
  • Depression, anxiety or stress

Behavioral, self esteem and motivational problems are associated with this list.

Core Learning Skills Training
Movement is an integral part of learning. The kinds of movements needed for learning are intentional and controlled. For example, visually following an object with the eyes, holding a pencil, moving the mouth to form sounds and words, or kicking a ball all require intentional control of the muscles. According to Dr. Samuel Berne, O.D., “when this neurological control of the muscles follows an unconscious reflex instead of following intention, the movement pattern becomes confusing instead of becoming an automatic learned skill.”

In order for comfortable learning to occur, basic physical skills such as balance and being able to use both sides of the body (right-left and upper-lower) together in a coordinated fashion must be in place. With stimulation through specific kinds of movement activities, primitive reflexes can be integrated so that the neurological and motor systems are more available for higher level movement and thinking tasks.

We frequently have students who have great difficulty maintaining good posture while sitting in a chair. At first glance, it looks like a motivation or attitude problem, but our work with reflex integration and core learning skills training has shown us that these students simply don’t have the muscle control to do what is asked with any consistency.

What Can Be Done
In a clinical setting, we have developed a program called Core Learning Skills. It focuses on the integration of five primitive reflexes that are core to efficient learning and functioning. It also includes activities for vestibular stimulation, motor development, visual skills development, attention awareness and control.

As students participate in Core Learning Skills Training, we see that they begin to appear more mature, motivated, and attentive because they are no longer battling inefficient movement patterns and are gaining automatic motor control.

In a classroom setting, there is a series of movements you can use with your students. These can take as little as 5 minutes and help prepare the brain for learning. While these are not specifically for reflex integration, doing these movements will give students greater focus and ability to use the skills they have in a more efficient way.

The program is called Brain Gym by Paul Dennison. You can find this resource at www.braingym.org.

Becoming a Successful Student
Being a successful student involves many skills. When a child is struggling in school and a little extra support isn’t making enough difference, it is likely that there is something in the developmental learning skills or underlying processing skills and such a learning disorder is interfering with academic success. In most cases, these skills can be developed so that efficient and comfortable learning can take place.

Smart but Struggling – How to Help a Child with Weak Learning Skills

Smart but Struggling: It Just Doesn’t Make Sense!

Recently, we have had parent after parent calling and saying virtually the same thing:

“My child is bright. He’s a good kid and wants to do well, but he’s struggling in school. He doesn’t qualify for help but he tests below state standards. How can this be?”

What most people don’t know is that about 30% of the children in school today have some degree of difficulty with reading or learning. In spite of caring teachers, supportive parents, good intelligence, and motivation, many students experience academic frustrations as a result of weak or inefficient underlying reading and/or learning skills.

If a child doesn’t qualify for special help at school, does it mean there’s not a problem? Only about 5-9% of children are formally diagnosed with learning disabilities, so that leaves roughly 7 million students who struggle but don’t qualify for help.What to do your child struggles with reading or learning because of weak underlying reading or learning skills.

What does it look like for these kids?

Aaron was a very bright high school senior who wanted to go into pre-med in college. He was at the top of his class in physics and chemistry, but close to failing English and History. He had such weak auditory processing skills that listening in class was exhausting. His teachers reported that he often fell asleep during lectures. Aaron’s poor auditory processing also affected a key skill for sounding out unfamiliar words when reading. He could read, but not well, so he often failed to complete reading-related homework assignments. Because he could do well in some areas, people often misunderstood and thought that he was not trying hard or not motivated.

Mark, at 12 years old, was outgoing, friendly, and confident—that is until it came to school. Mark was a terrific athlete and built fantastic Lego structures. He got As in math except for word problems but was beginning to fall behind in his other classes. Mark was a very poor reader. He’d been able to compensate pretty well up until 7th grade, but the reading and writing demands in junior high were becoming too much to keep up with or talk his way out of.

Kelsey could read well but struggled to completely comprehend what she read so her test scores were inconsistent, making it look like she wasn’t studying. Her biggest challenge was with math, which made very little sense to her and caused her a great deal of anxiety.

How can my bright child have so much trouble in some areas? 


When smart children and teens struggle in school it is perplexing and frustrating to all involved. They often excel in some areas, but do very poorly in others.

  • Sam knows all the baseball stats but can’t memorize his math facts.
  • Keely is a smart and savvy soccer player but gets poor grades on tests.
  • Casey is witty and clever, but can’t follow 3 directions.
  • Michael excels in math but reads slowly and laboriously.
  • Justin can focus on video games for hours, but gets distracted immediately when reading or writing.

Comfortable, easy learning requires strong underlying learning skills. These include such things as:

  • Body and attention awareness and control
  • Memory
  • Auditory and visual processing (how the brain perceives and thinks about things we see and hear)
  • Phonemic awareness (the ability to think about the sounds in words and critical to success reading)
  • Language comprehension
  • Processing speed
  • Logic and reasoning, strategizing, and mental organization and flexibility.

Children who struggle in school typically have real strengths and weaknesses within their underlying learning skills. Since different types of tasks or activities are supported by different sets of learning skills, these students can easily show perplexing inconsistencies in their performance.

Our child is getting tutoring. Why aren’t things changing?

Using the analogy of a tree to represent learning, you can think of academic skills as the top of the tree and underlying learning skills as the roots and trunk. If the root system, or the underlying learning skills are weak the top of the tree, or the academics will be affected.

Traditional tutoring works at the top of the tree with the weak academic skills. This may be helpful to students at the moment but is a bit of a “band aide” approach as it is not addressing the real cause, or root, of the problem and will not provide a permanent solution.

So Does My Smart Child Just Have to Live With this?

The Good News is that the brain can change. While weak or inefficient underlying learning skills are not likely to self-correct with time, discipline, or even tutoring, the brain can be retrained to process information more effectively. Underlying learning skills can be developed through specific and intensive training so that underachieving and struggling learners can gain the success and independence they are capable of and deserve.

Students Who Used To Struggle

  • Aaron went through an intensive summer program to increase his auditory processing and reading skills. His energy, stamina, and confidence for listening, reading, and writing improved greatly. He is now in college with a pre-med major.
  • Mark went through a program to develop his phonemic awareness so that he could learn and use phonics for reading and spelling. His visual skills for reading were also developed so that he didn’t have to feel disoriented and overwhelmed when he looked at a page of text. Mark is now functioning well in a private high school and playing quarterback on the school football team.
  • Developing underlying processing and language comprehension skills has helped Kelsey to become much more consistent in her test scores and much less afraid of math. She can now understand and follow directions in class and do her math homework independently.

Many children cope with their underachievement by putting on an attitude of not caring and resisting help from parents, teachers, and clinicians at a learning or tutoring center. Success can change bad attitudes, though, and gradually, as the foundation of underlying processing/learning skills got stronger, students become more confident and engaged. Here’s one child’s thoughts:

“This has also made me a better person. I am now a more thoughtful person. Before I came I got bad grades. Now I have improved in all subjects. My grades before were Ds. Now they raised to As and Bs. It makes me feel special to be known as a smart kid to other people.”  Brett…5th Grade