By Rich Barlow | June 30, 2007

For several years, Tyler Grenzeback slid toward depression as he struggled with dyslexia. Then he plunged headlong into sorrow after coping with his girlfriend's depressed state and her pushing him away. "After that fell apart, I started to fall apart," he recalled.

His mother, Sally Patton, kept her cool when he approached her about his despair. "I care for my child; I wanted to help him," Patton said. "But I could help him better . . . by not crying with him, by not agonizing with him, by not getting sucked in to his depression. My best love and gift to him was being able to be a supportive, calm parent."

She took him to a psychologist, who taught Grenzeback to meditate and to visualize a "spiritual place I could go to," a mental safe house where he could ponder sad feelings without acting on them.

Patton's approach sounds like the proverbial power of positive thinking. Fused with the sensibility of her Unitarian Universalist faith, it became for her "spiritual parenting," which she teaches in workshops, promotes on a website (embracechildspirit.org), and hopes to bring to a national audience via The Creative Soul of Children Project.

She and fellow organizers -- including Jamaica Plain psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan, author of the well-received 2003 book "Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair" -- are trying to raise money for national conferences, including ones involving religious believers, to wrestle with several questions: Have schools and parents overdosed on labeling children as requiring special education, when some simply have unusual imaginations or creativity? Is there a better way to nurture those children?

While her son's experience reordered her faith in the education system, it had the opposite effect on her spirituality. At the time Grenzeback's dyslexia surfaced, Patton worked for a Unitarian antipoverty program in Boston. The twin engines of her church and child slung her from agnosticism to the conviction that "we are all spiritual beings, having a physical experience."

The church influence began with the director of her program, who, though part of the noncredal Unitarian Universalists, embraced Christianity.

"I started having to explore what that meant, and it coincided with my fight for Tyler and realizing what Tyler was going through," Patton said.

She gave a talk at her church on her son's experience, after which she was mobbed by parents with similar stories.

One woman asked her: " 'If I can't bring my child that's been labeled to church, where can I bring him?' . . . Churches are not very welcoming to children with special needs."

Patton wrote a book advising religious communities on how to accept such children into their education and worship programs.

Grenzeback, now 19 and bound this fall for the Maine College of Art, first showed signs that he was different when he was 5. He refused to go to school unless he was costumed as a Power Ranger or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. When his mother quizzed him about why he disdained regular clothes, he answered, "I can't go to school and be Tyler."

Coming from a seemingly bright and creative boy, the answer seemed odd to Patton, who has a master's degree in education from Tufts. Grenzeback was diagnosed with a form of dyslexia, after which he attended the Landmark School, a Beverly campus for children with learning disabilities.

"We see our children that get labeled as a mass of deficits, a mass of problems, and then we try to fix them," Patton said. "And if you look at children from a spiritual perspective, you can see the whole child, you can see past the labels, and you can see that what we really need to do is . . . work with them from their strengths and from their gifts, rather than try to fix [them]. . . . I don't believe that God thinks that anybody is a mistake."

She acknowledges that enrolling her son in a private school made it easier to deal with his special needs. But the first necessity is changing how you look at such children, she said, and attitude costs nothing.

"I've had some people who just don't get it at all," Grenzeback said, referring to people who think dyslexia is a simple matter of misperceiving word order in sentences. For him, it slows down knowledge acquisition across the board, from reading to math.

"It basically takes me longer than what other kids would take for learning," he said, "and it takes a little bit more time and concentration and more help from the teachers."

http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/mental/articles/2007/06/30/mother_...