The Brainy Moms

Smart but Struggling: Why School Accommodations Might Not be Working | Dr. Amy Moore & Sandy Zamalis

• Dr. Amy Moore • Season 5 • Episode 525

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The gap between being "smart" and "struggling" often confuses parents, especially when school accommodations don't seem to be working. Dr. Amy and Sandy dive into this critical topic, exploring how cognitive processing differs from academic learning and why this distinction matters for your child's future.

Your child's brain isn't just responsible for thinking and learning—it processes emotions too. When cognitive skills like working memory, processing speed, or reasoning are weak, it affects everything from test performance to social interactions. A child who struggles to process information efficiently experiences frustration that can manifest as behavioral problems, avoidance, or diminished self-confidence. As one parent shared, "My vibrant child began to wilt because he just felt like a failure."

The conversation tackles the tough question many parents ask: how far behind is too far behind? While temporary slowdowns in specific subjects aren't concerning, persistent patterns of struggle across multiple areas signal deeper cognitive issues that won't simply resolve with time. These struggles eventually impact self-esteem and emotional well-being, sometimes in ways children can't articulate until they face a significant challenge.

Most educational approaches rely heavily on accommodations rather than addressing underlying cognitive weaknesses. While extra time or modified assignments help in the moment, they don't prepare children for college or careers where such accommodations may be limited or unavailable. Building cognitive skills creates long-term solutions that allow children to function independently throughout life.

When parents disagree about interventions, the key is moving beyond arguments about the present to discuss fears about the future. What happens if we don't address these issues now? What are the long-term implications for independence and success? By strengthening cognitive skills, we don't change who children are—we free them from unnecessary struggles so their unique gifts can truly shine.

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Dr. Amy Moore:

Hi Sandy.

Sandy Zamalis:

Hi Amy, how are you Good? It's super fun to be in person, it is. It feels like it's been a gauntlet of a day to try to figure all this out, but yes, it's been a lot of fun. Yeah, it has.

Dr. Amy Moore:

And we've had so many conversations the last couple of days about Wishing we had mics and we're recording them.

Sandy Zamalis:

Yes, oh my gosh, we and we're recording them.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Yes, oh my gosh, we should have been recording him. And we got really smart, like when we interview guests, we start recording right away, so we don't miss anything.

Sandy Zamalis:

That would have been a great interview conversation and then, but then we went and messed it all up today we did, but that's okay, cause I remember with one that I think would have, I think our listeners would want to hear. Okay, so when we were talking yesterday, I was telling you about a recent consultation I had with a family and we were talking about their child and they were behind in some subject areas, and so we did some cognitive testing to figure out what was going on. The mom definitely had all the radars blaring and wanted to get some help. Dad was a little bit more in the space of everything will be fine, it'll work itself out. And I always struggle when I'm having conversations, with that dynamic of helping a family by really advocating for the child who's struggling but also for, in this case, a mom who was really seeing a problem.

Sandy Zamalis:

And so what I wanted to talk about from a podcast perspective is how do we help families understand the cognitive piece, separate from the learning piece?

Sandy Zamalis:

Because there's always that notion of my child is really smart, they're going to be fine, but we don't really understand the cognitive piece, and so when you try to address it, a lot of times it just ends up in a behavior bucket or it ends up in a space where sometimes, when there's that disconnect.

Sandy Zamalis:

It's really hard to help a family understand the knowledge piece or learning piece, aside from how a child processes information and how frustrating that is when we're not processing efficiently. So that's what I wanted to spend some time talking about today, because really in our especially in education and the way we approach helping kids, it's all in accommodation and compensation strategies. We don't talk about skill building and that skill building can actually turn that around, so that child has less frustration and is able to process easier, while still being the brilliant human that they are with their own unique brain and how their brain processes information. So let's dig in on that a little bit. Let's talk about first what do we do when there's a disconnect between mom and dad and it can go either way and truly understanding that difference between our, how our brain learns information, how it processes, and then that unique piece of just learning in general, learning facts. I'll let you take it from there.

Dr. Amy Moore:

So that's a super frustrating space to sit in, right when you're working with a family and parents aren't on the same page, and so I want to talk about the second parts of your question first and then come back to okay, then, how can we use this information to help parents align their views? Would that work? Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. So I think that we frequently forget that our brain is responsible not just for thinking and learning, but for feeling as well, and so it's all connected, and emotions are actually our relationship with language, so it's the words that we use to describe what it is that we're feeling in our bodies and in our minds. That is all influenced by how we process what we're feeling in our bodies and in our minds. That is all influenced by how we process what we're feeling. So let me give you an example.

Dr. Amy Moore:

When we are faced with a situation that feels like a crisis, we need strong cognitive skills in order to quickly weigh all of the variables. We need strong visual processing skills to take in everything around us to say is this truly a crisis or have I misunderstood what I just saw? Or we need strong auditory processing skills to go. Did I understand what I just think? I heard, and if we don't have strong working memory, then we can't hold all of the alternatives in our mind at the same time in order to reason through what's happening.

Dr. Amy Moore:

So that means we need strong reasoning skills as well, and we need strong processing speed, because we need to be able to weigh all of these alternatives and reason through them quickly before we hit fight or flight. And so we're using all of these skills that we typically associate with learning. We use that in how we process emotions as well. The strength or weakness in our cognitive skills is going to have this trickle down effect. So not only does it impact our ability to think and learn and remember and pay attention and reason, but it's also going to impact how we are socially and emotionally. So it has this broad reaching impact, and not just on. They'll eventually catch up in math, if that makes sense.

Sandy Zamalis:

Yeah. So that leads me to my next question, and this comes up a lot in my office, and especially for homeschool families, because we love homeschool families, we work with homeschool families all the time, but there is a general I would say pervasive approach of let the child be where they're at, go at their pace, and so it's hard to know. Yes, I know my child is behind, but how far is too far behind. So let's speak to that. How do we address being behind? Because we want both things we want to be able to meet them where they're at, but we also want to prepare them for the future and make sure that eventually they're catching up. Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Amy Moore:

So I think recognizing that a child is behind in a certain season is different than recognizing that my child is behind in all subjects, in all areas of development and has been for a long time. And so if it's because, hey, my child is really struggling with this math concept, so it's taking us longer to get through these three chapters, for example, so my kid is falling behind, that is not a red flag to me. That's just saying, hey, this is a difficult skill and some skills take longer to learn than others. And do we need to go back and revisit some of the prior skills that now have spiraled around to build on this new one, because maybe they didn't catch that prior one enough in order to be able to master this one, right? So, yes, we're two or three weeks behind, that's okay.

Dr. Amy Moore:

It's when it becomes a pattern across multiple subjects where we are not making progress. My child is struggling not just in math, but in language arts and in social studies and in science and in social skill development, right, like you're seeing this pattern of struggle in more than one area, then that's when you need to say what do we need to do? What are we missing? What skills doesn't my child have that they need in order to catch up. So I think we need to first say, hey, is this a pattern, and is it happening in more than one area, or is this just a season in a subject? You know, I think let's differentiate that.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Okay, my guess is those parents wouldn't be sitting in one of our offices if it was just a short season in one subject. So then we have to say, okay, how long has this behind pattern been happening and what does it look like? So is it just that they haven't been able to master these tasks or is it beginning now to impact their self-esteem? Are they becoming emotionally dysregulated because their frustration levels are so high that now it is bleeding out into our conversations as a family. It is bleeding out into their social development with their siblings and their peers. We begin to this permeate all areas of a child's life when they don't have the skills to function on age level and I say age level right, because grades can be arbitrary, especially in the homeschool world, and if they are significantly behind for their age, we're going to be seeing that impacting other areas and it's going to impact their confidence in things like joining co-ops, trying new sports.

Sandy Zamalis:

A family told me recently just that their child was not wanting to have to participate in their Sunday school class because they do a lot of interactive and read aloud work and so they didn't want the spotlight on them.

Sandy Zamalis:

I had a consult years ago where the family didn't really realize how much it was impacting their child until they had to make a big life adjustment. They had been homeschooling and this particular child had some struggles all along the way and because of life circumstances, they were having to make a decision to put them into private school. And that's when everything came apart, because that child was able to then express no, I don't feel like I can accomplish that and do it well, and so they had sought us out for some help in that regard, because I don't think kids often will share what their struggles are in that kind of depth. So sometimes I think as a parent it's easy to think everything's okay, that we're just accommodating and we're compensating and things are fine, and we're not really getting to the heart of how the child feels about their ability to process as compared to their peers. Yeah, would you agree?

Dr. Amy Moore:

Yeah, absolutely, because it's shameful and embarrassing and sometimes you don't even know as a child how to articulate what that feeling is.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Just that it doesn't feel right.

Dr. Amy Moore:

I know that when one of my kids was in fourth, third or fourth grade and was really struggling with dyslexia, came home one day and said Mom, if they gave grades for making friends, I would get a D minus vibrant child begin to wilt because he just felt like a failure and it was showing. Kids compare themselves to one another and then if you're a homeschool family you don't necessarily see that comparison but your child will still feel like a failure if they aren't capable of performing or mastering a lesson. They're going to see your frustration at thinking maybe this is the wrong curriculum or maybe I don't have the correct instructional skills. But when we've changed curriculum last year and this year and the next year, we've learned new instructional strategies and the struggle is still there, then it's probably in the brain, it's not in the books and we talk about that all the time. Right that when we can identify the root cause of that struggle, then we can see not only the struggle in learning and thinking change, but the whole world opens up. At that point.

Sandy Zamalis:

So let's talk about that. Let's talk about the long game. Accommodations are great, compensation strategies are great. They're helpful, but I think they're more short term and immediate. They're like what we need to do to survive this thing that we're working on right now, but eventually we have to build the skill that we need so that long-term, I don't need that accommodation or compensation. So, from your perspective, what do you see as that long-term building strategy?

Dr. Amy Moore:

Yeah. So let's use extra time for an assignment or a test as a very common accommodation, especially for kids with ADHD. And so what that does is it says OK, my brain cannot stay on task. Therefore, my mom or my teacher have given me extra time to accomplish this task. That decreases motivation to get that task done, because the ADHD brain says oh, I have two more weeks, there's no reason for me to work on this now. The ADHD brain works best under pressure, so they're going to wait right until the day before it's due and we'll start it then and get it done in one day, two weeks later. If you can start and finish a task in one day, two weeks later, that means you can probably start and finish a task in one day, the day it's due or the day before it's due, right? So in fact, that's called Parkinson's law, that the time required for a task will contract or expand to the amount of time allowed for that task, and so the ADHD brain functions under Parkinson's law all the time. So it decreases motivation. Number one it sends a message hey, you're not capable of getting this done in the amount of time that everyone else is, and that impacts self-esteem and self-confidence and self-efficacy for learning, for sure. Self-esteem and self-confidence and self-efficacy for learning, for sure.

Dr. Amy Moore:

And we aren't always going to have extra time to complete tasks in the real world. So we aren't necessarily going to have that kind of time in college unless we also ask for accommodations in college, and that is not the same as accommodations in high school. So accommodations in K through 12 are governed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, idea, but it switches to the ADA Americans with Disabilities Act in college because you're now an adult and so it functions a little differently. Those typically are not automatically given. You have to ask each individual professor to use an accommodation every time you need to use it. That can create stress and anxiety and fear and shame, and so you're either using it all the time, which is stressful, or you're worried about having to talk to your professor about using it. So then you don't use it, which is stressful. And then once you get out into the world and you have a career if you have a job that's time sensitive you're not going to be able to have extra time to complete a task. And when we think about accommodations in the short term, it seems reasonable. Sure, okay, they can't stay on task so we're going to give them a few extra days or an extra two weeks to get this done.

Dr. Amy Moore:

And when you think about the long game, when you think about it years later, decades later, if we don't come and address the root cause of why we can't stay on task and accomplish something in a set amount of time, this struggle is going to be why we get fired from job after job. Or this struggle is going to be why we get fired from job after job. Or this struggle is going to be why co-workers are frustrated with us again and again. Or if we volunteer at an organization and we can't meet a deadline, right, people will be frustrated that we aren't dependable. This has long-term implications for our friendships and for our relationships at work and our ability to hold a job.

Dr. Amy Moore:

And oh, when we have our own kids, right, our kids are going to have deadlines, and so we can't just say I didn't get around to writing that check for soccer camp. I need an extra two weeks to do that. That's not the reality. To do that that's not the reality. So we have to go back and look at what is the cause of not being able to stay on task and address that not accommodate that.

Sandy Zamalis:

So in thinking about that long term strategy of there's the piece where we're handling the situation that's in front of us right at the moment and we're trying to get through that. But we also want to keep in mind that we're building something long term and we don't want to create a problem for our child down the road. And back to my original example what happens when you have two parents and disconnect about that? If you have a parent who thinks you know everything's fine, going at the slower pace is fine, but you have a parent who's clearly seeing this is a problem and it's causing me stress, it's causing the child stress. How can we help get parents on the same page?

Dr. Amy Moore:

Yeah. So I would encourage the parent who recognizes that it's a problem to talk about what it is that they truly fear, and so for them to be able to share. What I truly fear is that my child will not be able to function independently when they're older. That opens up a different part of the conversation. What would that look like? And so, when the other parent sees it as a fear, it no longer.

Dr. Amy Moore:

I think my kid needs this in the moment, but I'm fearful for their future, and here's why that might be a conversation that no one has helped mediate before. That it may just be, and once there's a disagreement and an argument ensues, the other person stops listening. Right, once we start arguing, we stop listening to each other. And to be able to mediate, here's why I'm concerned. Here's why I think that we should address this now.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Then you can step in at that point and say, hey, I want to tell you what research shows that in the absence of an intervention, these struggles tend to continue to worsen, and so it's a lot easier to catch things early than it is to catch them later. Not only remediate a weak cognitive skill later, but then you have to go back and look at all the content that was missed, right? Whereas if you catch it early, you can remediate the cognitive skills and then a little bit of catch-up time and then your child then begins processing all of the content. On age level, that would be the goal. But if you're ninth grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, not only do you have to remediate the cognitive skills, but then you have to go okay, what did they not learn as a fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth grader, right? Because their cognitive skills were weak. Yeah, so it's a little bit harder.

Sandy Zamalis:

I have found that a lot of times these conversations, the disconnect is often from a parent who understands struggle because they have struggled and so they're seeing their child struggle in the same way, and a parent who didn't really have that struggle, and so let's talk about that, because I think sometimes for what you would call neurotypical or someone who just cognitively was really strong and so they'd never had to really dig deep, and the same way someone who has weaker skills would have to dig deep, it's like they're not seeing, it's invisible to them. They don't see that cognitive piece or that feeling piece that you addressed before.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Yeah, yeah, and it is hard to ask someone to step into a struggle that you had 20, 30 years ago maybe, but it is helpful to describe. Hey, I want to share how hard this was for me and how it impacted me, and I don't want that for our child. I was bullied, I had low self-esteem, I had struggles with friendships, right, whatever the actual issue was. To be vulnerable and honest about it can go a long way in some relationships. Are you going to have parents who are not going to ever get on the same page? Sure, absolutely. And so humans are human. Humans are going to continue to human parent who doesn't seem open to seeking an intervention. Then that conversation can be the same as well. What do you fear by trying? Right, because it could be financial, it could be the time commitment, right, it could be not that they don't think it's worth doing or that it wouldn't be valuable, but it okay. You're fearful of this and you're fearful of this. How can we compromise? How can we meet in the middle?

Sandy Zamalis:

to help the child and sometimes, when it's coming from two loving parents who you know are invested in their family and in their child, where one is having fear because they're recognizing the hardships and the difficulty. There's also the other side of the coin, perhaps, where that parent is seeing the blessing, is seeing the uniqueness, is seeing the individuality and not wanting to squelch that. So let's talk about that. Remediation doesn't change who someone is fundamentally.

Dr. Amy Moore:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really good point. We're not trying to change the person, we're trying to help make it less of a struggle. So your personality doesn't change because you, who you are fundamentally at the core, doesn't change because you have stronger cognitive skills. So there is this trend on social media to call whatever the diagnosis is a superpower, and so I think that if you are approaching your child's diagnosis as a superpower, then the idea of changing anything about that child's diagnosis then is going to make them lose this superpower. What? What's making them unique, what's making them special? And the reality is they're still going to be unique and they're still going to be special.

Dr. Amy Moore:

And it doesn't change a diagnosis to strengthen some weak cognitive skills. It changes the struggle associated with the diagnosis, and the reality is it isn't a superpower, it's a struggle. And to not say it's a struggle is to not see the struggle. What is a superpower are those things that your child excels in, those things that your child does well, that bring them joy, that they accomplish and succeed in despite the struggle. And so I think that we have to shift our focus to right what is it that you're really great at? What is it that's so great about you. Focus on that as the superpower and then work over here and say I noticed that you're struggling and I want to help with this.

Sandy Zamalis:

Yeah, because what we're trying to do is unshackle them, right, because that's the issue with the processing side of the equation is that it can shackle them and their ability to function successfully in as an efficient way as possible. We want them to be able to soar, have less frustration, yeah, and use their unique gifts in a more abundant way. I love that, yeah.

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