Children 5-12

Imagine a theme park where a family of four could get in for fifteen dollars – for the entire day. Imagine arriving by public transportation or enjoying free parking right outside the park’s entrance. Imagine bringing your own food and drinks through the gate, rather than paying extortionist prices for less healthy options. Imagine never waiting longer than ten or fifteen minutes to board a ride, and never worrying about losing a child in the crowd. Imagine a place where people of all levels of physical and cognitive ability are welcome and even celebrated.

Open your eyes. You’re at Morgan’s Wonderland.

He was always the worst-behaved child in the room. It didn’t matter where he went. Or when. Three-year-old Cameron* simply couldn’t control himself — ever.

“He was bouncing off the walls all the time,” recollects his mother, Susan*. “I loved him dearly but couldn’t bear to be around him because he was so obnoxious, in-your-face, he could never sit still, never stop moving, couldn’t control his impulses—he was always hitting, kicking, jumping or touching.”

Desperate to figure out what was going on with her son, Susan stumbled onto an article about a little girl whose behavior seemed nearly identical to Cameron’s and who was “cured” through a special diet.

If anyone should have noticed her daughter had a learning disorder, Liz Green figured it would have been her. As a kindergarten teacher, she had been specifically trained to spot learning difficulties. But since her daughter, Hayleigh, was an excellent student and an enthusiastic reader, the subtle clues went unnoticed.

“Each night we read, Hayleigh made more and more substitution errors,” she says. “She read ‘rampant’ for ‘repellant’ and ‘habitat’ for ‘hatchery’.”

It didn’t make any sense. Ms. Green asked her daughter’s teachers about the errors, but nobody seemed particularly concerned. Until second grade.

When Ryan Voldstad was a toddler, he’d pick up a badminton racket and pretend it was a guitar. Weekdays would find him performing impromptu concerts for his friends at daycare, serenading them with his own rendition of “Little Bunny Fu Fu.” By second grade, it became apparent Ryan should play an instrument, so his parents enrolled in him in Austin’s Childbloom Guitar Center — a move they say changed both his, and the entire family’s, lives.