I do wonder what my attitude to teaching and learning would have been if I hadn't had my ds1. Perhaps people without experience of difficulty with their own child's development and with little experience of other peoples' children in a learning environment, can never fully understand.
Ds1, who was hypotonic, hypermobile, evidently incredibly early to develop receptive speech yet delayed with expressive speech (approaching age 3, if you wanted to have a chance of understanding him and get more than one or two words at a time: about the age when he revealed he could actually read books he had never seen before, fluently), physically delayed (gross and fine motor), exceptionally clingy to his mother and almost pathologically resistant to difficulty as a young child is now, at just over six and a half, bearing a remarkable resemblance to a relatively normal child, with totally normal humour and interests - and an exceptionally gifted one at that, with a phenomenal imagination and memory, highly articulate and with an unusual ability with numbers. He still has his difficulties, of course, or tendencies along the lines of his earlier difficulties, but these no longer define him. The compartmentalisationist (is this a word?!) tendencies of the medical profession prevented me from obtaining help for my whole child at the most appropriate time - I was given help building up his muscles and teaching him to move and improve the muscles in his mouth for clear speech, but not help with how to deal psychologically with his extreme avoidance of doing or being taught. I asked for help until I was blue in the face, trying to explain that a clearly intelligent child trapped in a useless body must be going through a colossal sense of anxiety and that by getting me to do the work of physically teaching him without giving me the skills to deal with the stress this was causing for both of us, would result in mental health issues for both of us and possibly an unhealthy parent-child relationship, because he would see me as an aggressor going against his wishes and not as a protector trying to help him if I got it wrong. I felt I was pretty much having to bully him into learning, uncertain how much practice was enough and being aware that, given my own personality, I was probably doing more than enough and stretching him too far each time, but not actually knowing that, so then vascillating between too much and too little and generally showing him how anxious I was about it, which only served to make us both worse. What a huge sigh of relief when he went to school and was finally treated as a whole child - a human being, not a list of symptoms and treatments. I actually now think he might make great contributions to society one day - when he was little, I was beginning to wonder whether he would be living at home with his mother for the rest of his life. And it was rather lovely watching him practice the piano this evening, excited that his efforts were making such a difference to the quality of his output. Hopefully, instead of being damaged by his early experiences and my reactions to them, he has ultimately been made a little bit stronger by them, because he understands a little bit about overcoming adversity. That's the way I like, optimistically, to view it, anyway.
And if my child can be quite so arse about face in his development and come out of it alright, then it just shows how complicated human development really can be and how open we should be to all the ways of encouraging it.