Looking back on three decades of working with learning disabled children, Pearl Rieger recalls early methods of diagnosis and treatment that now seem “almost primitive” in comparison to the brain scans and sophisticated testing that can be done today.
But as understanding of such children has shifted and deepened, Rieger has held fast to one principle:
“I sit down with each child and show him or her their strengths, and tell them what their weakness is,” Rieger said. “The child who owns his learning disability is the child who makes the greatest progress.”
It is that philosophy and commitment to children that has made Rieger not only an expert in her field, but also a family friend to her clients.
“I go to their weddings, their bar mitzvahs, their confirmations, their communions,” said Rieger, who will turn 70 in February.
And now, some of those same families will attend an important event in Rieger’s life. On Thursday, she will be honored for her lifetime achievement with a new award–named for her–at the Rush Neurobehavioral Center, part of the Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center.
The Rush center will present the award during a benefit dinner at the Drake Hotel in Rieger’s honor, an event co-chaired by Maggie Daley, wife of Mayor Richard Daley, and Brenda Edgar, wife of Gov. Jim Edgar.
“Pearl is extraordinary,” said Dr. Meryl Lipton, director of the Rush Neurobehavioral Center, which diagnoses and treats children with neurobehavioral problems.
“She has a wisdom that she imparts to us,” said Lipton, who has known Rieger since 1990. “She teaches here, she trains everyone who comes in contact with her, and our hope is for her to train as many learning disability diagnosticians as possible while she still wants to do that.”
Rieger, a Chicago native, was a late comer to the profession. Initially trained as a speech and language pathologist and audiologist, she worked in that field for a few years before taking more than a decade off to raise her family. During that time she did volunteer work at a local hospital, but at age 40, when her youngest child was 10, she was casting about for new professional challenges.
Instead of returning to speech and language pathology, she pursued a master’s degree in educational psychology at the University of Chicago. Her mentor, Dr. Joseph Wepman, was studying aphasiacs, people who had damage to the left hemisphere of their brain usually due to an accident or a stroke. He believed that such work could be applied to help children with some learning disabilities, and soon Rieger was off and running.
“It’s fascinating to me,” Rieger said. “It’s like a puzzle. Each child–each child–is different. To be able to find out what is wrong with this child and to try to come up with a plan to follow them and to advocate for them, that’s very exciting.”
Rieger administers a battery of 15 to 18 tests. The examination takes about 12 hours, broken into three-hour chunks. After such an analysis, Rieger says she can can pinpoint a child’s disability, the foundation on which to develop a plan for using a child’s strengths to compensate for problems.
Rieger keeps a full schedule; she’s booked until next September. She runs her private practice out of her beautifully appointed home in Hyde Park.
“The children feel comfortable here,” she said. “They can go into the kitchen and have juice and a cookie.”
An estimated 10 percent of American children have learning disabilities. Although that percentage likely has not changed over the years, Rieger said, awareness of the problems and the pressures to succeed academically have.
“Children will say, `I’m stupid.’ I hear that a lot,” Rieger said. “But they’re not.”
The reaction of one girl who was told about her disability was typical. “She said to me, `I really thought I was stupid, but now that I know just what’s wrong with me, I’m going to be fine.’ “
During 30 years of working with learning disabled children, Rieger said she can count on one hand the number who could not be helped. “And that,” she added, “is primarily because they had given up.”
Some people bristle at the notion of learning disabilities, questioning the validity of such labels. Although the label of learning disability is sometimes misapplied, Rieger said, that does not mean it is not a real problem.
“We all have strengths and weaknesses, no doubt about it,” she added, “but a learning disability is when there is a significant difference between a child’s aptitude and achievement, and we can pinpoint that in a specific area.”
