We are grateful to Miss Yung Siu-ying of Caritas Youth & Community Service for listing the five major categories of "learning disabilities". Please pay attention to the features of these categories and see if your children are in need of further assessment. What's more important is to understand the problems that may arise and help your children adapt to and face up to the problems, as well as to study the strategies for learning so as to enable them to grow happily. Should you require any assistance, please contact Mr Tsui of the New Teritories Welfare Office on 2417- 6471.

After having a basic understanding of "specific learning disabilities", you can appreciate the pressure put on these children and their parents as Hong Kong places so much emphasis on academic qualifications, achievement and excellence. No doubt, this gives rise to a lot of other problems such as the following:

1. Tense Parent-child Relationship

According to my observation and cases that I handled before, the relationship between parents and children is usually very tense because of homework or revision. On each and every day, doing homework turns out to be a wrestling and a never-ending battle causing much pain to both parties.

2. Easy to Get Labelled Innocently or Bullied by Classmates

Children with "specific learning disabilities" are often mistaken as being lazy, stupid and rebellious, thus easily getting labelled as bad students. Moreover, as some of these children have speech problems and appear to be "clumsy", they are targets of bullying by their classmates.

3. Depriving these Children of their Leisure and Social Life

Although these children do not suffer from intellectual disability, they tend to spend much more time on homework and revision than their classmates. In an achievement-driven society, parents cannot help but limit their time for leisure and social life.

4. Poor Self-image

As a result of low academic achievement, tense parent-child relationship, being labelled and bullied, there are lots of difficulties throughout the growth of these children. Lack of recognition and loss of confidence on a long-term basis give these children a poor self-image.

Category	Distinguishing Features
Dyslexia	need to study every "word" again and again but tend to forget it right away difficulty in word recognition, dictation and spelling skip words and lines when reading difficulty in understanding a question because of problem in word recognition, but they can understand the question if we read it out to them
Specific Language Impairment	weakness in speech organisation, difficulty in both expressive and receptive language disorder in retelling a discourse which causes difficulty for others to understand relative weakness in "making and reorganising sentences and reading comprehension" of a language subject
Developmental Coordination Disorder	tend to stagger along and appear to be "clumsy" relatively bad with body coordination, and prone to accident involving themselves and others difficulty in ball bouncing and rope skipping difficulty in hand writing and tend to write out of proportion usually exceeding the prescribed area
Specific Learning Disabilities in Mathematics	always make mistakes in calculation or logics always make mistakes about the signs of plus, minus, multiplication and division difficulty in reciting multiplication table and applying mathematics formula difficulty in understanding long question of mathematics Hong Kong has not yet come up with any assessment tool for this area
Spatial Perception Disorder	easy to make a stroke longer or shorter than required and tend to add or miss strokes difficulty in identifying space, such as failing to distinguish up or down and right or left fail in letter combination and tend to break a complete word into separate components, such as breaking "goodbye" into "good" and "bye", "outside" into "out" and "side", etc. fail to distinguish similar words, such as "sun" and "son", "air" and "hair", etc.