The Alpha child

When Marielle, my second daughter, announced two years ago that she might be a candidate for magna cum laude, I beamed with pride. Before you think that I am bragging about my daughter’s achievement, there is something you need to know about my daughter, a right-brained, creatively different Alpha child,. She thinks otherwise but she probably doesn’t recall the early years of her learning challenges. For the first six years of her life, I thought she was learning disabled or a slow child. I often compared Marielle to Lauren , my eldest girl. Lauren as a precocious little girl was talking in straight sentences just after she turned one, sight-reading at the age of two years and 3 months, writing her first story called “The Virus,” and playing the piano at four and so much more.

Marielle often stuttered in her speech, and confused left from right. Though she made some progress with her basic reading during nursery, she didn’t do well in phonetics or writing. I didn’t want to pressure her or compare her with her more fluent sister. I accepted the fact that one child may not be smarter than the other until one summer just before she entered first grade.

While shopping for children’s books, “Unicorns are Real: A Right Brained Approach to Learning” by Barbara Meister Vitale caught my attention. Skimming through the pages, I thought my daughter might be this Alpha child.

Within the last few years, some have called these children Alpha children, right-brained and creatively different. Recent research on the development and specialization of the brain has opened new doors to understanding how some children learn.

Was Marielle predominantly right brained? Out of curiosity, I played a little game with her by going through the checklist. Out of the 26 characteristics displayed by right-hemispheric children, I observed 15 from my daughter. There were sixty-five practical, easy-to-follow lessons to stimulate the much ignored right-brain tendencies of children. Let me share three activities:

1. Haptic activities – This entails writing on the child’s back, writing in the air and counting numbers by body movements. I taught her the basics of Math by hopping and jumping.

2. Whole-word approach – Phonetics didn’t make any sense to her. Whole words did. I showed her a word, explained its definition and discovered she could read and understand it.

3. Flashlight tracking – I used the flashlight to write shapes, letters, numbers on the ceiling, which forced her to visualize the symbol that was drawn and activate the haptic system with the arm movement.

My daughter thought these activities were games so we had a lot of fun learning them during the summer.

I never got a tutor for her. Marielle learned to study on her own, often asking me to give her study guides just before an exam. She topped her first grade class and consistently made it as an honor student till her college years. Despite flunking her math subject in college, she still reached the grade requirement of magna cum laude.

Was it the brief summer activity that opened a window to learning? Was it the confidence gained because she found a pathway to learning? Maybe I caught her preference for right-brained thinking patterns just before she reached her seventh birthday. Was it my affirmation “you are a smart child?”

I may never know but I am proud of my beautiful Alpha child.