In previous posts I’ve looked at accommodations at work and at school and I’ve asked “who are they accommodating?”
Now, accommodations at home for people with nonverbal learning disorder.
People spend quite a bit of time at home, although a lot of it is spent sleeping. For instance, a child may get home from school at 4 and go to sleep at 9: That’s 5 hours a day awake at home. But then there are weekends, holidays and so on. Of course, some of the time people are neither at home, school nor work. Still, it’s worth thinking about how to accommodate our needs at home. Certainly people with other disabilities do.
One thing I’ve noticed is that many (but not all) people with NLD need time alone in a quiet space. To many of us, the world is overwhelming. So, if possible, home should have a space for the person to be alone. If a child (or adult!) can have a room alone, great. Not every family can do that. But it might be possible to have one room belong to the person for a certain period of each day.
Some people with NLD get easily overwhelmed by auditory or visual stimuli. Auditory stimuli can, if need be, be blocked with noise canceling earphones. But visual stimuli are not so easily blocked. So, if the NLDer in your home is easily overwhelmed visually, it would be good to have at least some space in the home that is visually calm – not a lot of stuff or clutter, not a lot of paintings, etc.
Another thing that can overwhelm NLDers is physical proximity and touch; I think some of us have visual processing issues that make it harder for us to keep track of who is where and what might happen. One way to deal with this would be to set up some guidelines for how to touch your NLDer.
What other accommodations at home have you used?
When I originally commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox and
now each time a comment is added I get several emails
with the same comment. Is there any way you can remove people from that service?
Thanks!
I don’t know, but I will try to find out.
Hi again. You have to remove yourself from the list. The e-mails ought to have a link for doing this. Peter
My 7 year old son has NVLD with a 30 point difference in VIQ/PIQ. Once we figured out what was going on, we started talking to him about being ‘on his team’ and wanting to learn how to help him and for him to help himself. This has been great. He asked for us to put labels on his dresser drawers so he could find his clothes and put them away ‘right’ so he could do it on his own. He also let us know that being able to take a quiet warm bath – often with the lights off and only a nightlight in the room – helps him calm. Now to get more teachers to listen — and value — his input to how to make it work’ at school…