These are strategies that can help a child with FASD remember what he/she learns:

• Present the child with information that is simple and concrete.
• Show the child, doing the activity with the child.
• Use visual cues along with verbal cues (symbols, signs, charts)
• Teach one skill at a time, one step at a time.
• Hands on activity, sensory and tactile (water paint, play dough)
• Encourage exploration and creativity
• Include nature and real life experiences
• Music, rhymes (clapping, tapping, singing)
• Play matching games
• Less distractions, quiet environment (make cubby out of big box)
• One-on-one with eye contact
• Avoid flourescent lighting or visually stimulating environment
• Freedom to move about without having to sit still
• Cheerful reinforcement (verbal encouragement)
• Frame work visually (place worksheet on a food tray or outline work area with tape)
• Appropriate and effective medication (ADHD meds like Adderall and Ritalin)
• Avoid additives in your child's diet (no MSG, food coloring, nutrisweet)
• Read to your child each day
• Repetition, repetition, repetition
• Practice, practice, practice
• If it's an "off" day, don't pressure the child, wait for a better day.
• Research shows that all children learn more easily if the lesson is fun and stress-free.

There may be limits to what level of learning they can achieve in certain subjects, especially math. John could learn his multiplication tables through 7, but he forgot them the following session. To this day, he cannot remember what 2 X 4 is. They may reach a plataeau in math or reading and not be able to progress beyond that point. When helping a child with FASD learn something, we first need to do an assessment to see where he/she is functioning and start there, not at age level or grade level, but at the developmental level for that child at that time.

Once we get the child to remember (routines, rules, lessons, etc.), we must still consider two things that we cannot teach the child: impulse control and good judgment. Also, once they learn something and it is in their head, they may or may not be able to retrieve it on any given day, and one day they might remember and another day they might not, all depending on neurological function at the moment. Meds can help reduce problems with impulse control, but not all the time. The child cannot learn good judgment, that is something that cannot be corrected as it is directly due to permanent brain damage, mostly the frontal lobes.

Memory processing is a neurological function that does not work well in children with FAS disorders. There may be limits to how well the child can process information. It is important to recognize and accept these limits so as not to burden the child with unnecessary frustration and stress. Find an activity or subject that the child enjoys, find a mode of expression for which the child has some talent (drawing, singing, painting, playing music, etc.) and encourage the child to learn new ways to express the talent that are pleasant and comfortable for the child. Music is one of the best ways to enhance memory for the child with FASD and everyone will enjoy the lesson!

Social stories and social groups are good techniques. It’s important to remember that their social skills, or lack thereof, are one of their most important and handicapping deficits so we need to plan for and expect that; and provide protective supervision and structured social activities.

Sometimes I think the improvements I see are just a function of maturity but in any case he is more eager to please me and be “responsible” than he was in his teen years. So I’m not really sure that it is anything I have done. Except that I kept him alive and away from bad influences until he could mature.

One technique that works very well with our kids is social scripting (which is probably the same as social stories but maybe more practice involved?) where you take them through a situation and have them practice a response. Since our kids don’t generalize well we can’t expect this to work in as many situations as we would like but every time they fail it’s an opportunity to teach the response yet again in another situation.

A neuropsychologist that is trying to help Ricki said the trick with kids like ours is to bypass the short-term memory problem and get the correct responses into long-term memory as habits and routines. So where they break down is in novel situations where they have no “habit” developed.

When teaching social scripts I recommend you teach adult standards of behavior and language. It will take a long time to learn these skills and will be very hard to change once learned so you really don’t want to try and re-teach a response later in life. Just my 2 cents.

There are lots of materials I believe, developed for children with Autism that would help our children tremendously. We have a lot of the same problems they do. The sad thing is that people with FASD are superficially chatty and friendly and that keeps others from recognizing the depths of their delays, instead they are rejected and punished for immature behavior that is not under their control. If there is one thing you could do to help your child it is to protect them from the chronic failure and frustration that drives so many to hang with the worst of kids (other rejects and rebels) and reject and rebel against the community that has rejected them.

Eva