In 1985, Dana Buchman had it all. An emerging fashion designer with ared-hot career, she'd just been asked to design a women's clothing label underher own name by her mentor, Liz Claiborne. Buchman and her husband lived in aglamorous loft in Manhattan, where they had just welcomed their first child,Charlotte. Everything about little Charlotte seemed perfect-just like Buchman'slife.

But when Charlotte was a little over a year old, Dana and Tom realized thatthey could no longer deny something wasn't quite right with their little girl.She had never crawled and still wasn't walking at 15 months. After their seconddaughter, Annie Rose, was born when Charlotte was not quite 2, the cleardifferences in the way the girls had developed led Buchman and her husband intoa maze of therapists, doctors, and tests to try to find out what was wrong.Finally, at age 4, Charlotte was diagnosed with a host of "learningdisabilities," a term Buchman now avidly crusades to rename "learningdifferences."

For the hyper-successful Buchman, the news came as a shock. "I suddenlysaw my baby as not like other kids. Different. 'Disabled' is what the diagnosissaid. It felt unfair." How Buchman and her family learned not only to copewith but also embrace Charlotte's learning differences is the story ofBuchman's first book, A Special Education.

The "special education" of the book's title was not Charlotte's, buther own. "I had to learn how to open myself up to other ways of success,other forms of happiness, other forms of intelligence than the standardones," she says.

A talented, creative artist with an instinctive charm and warmth, Charlotte,now 21, continues to struggle with things like numbers, direction, andorganization. Her original diagnosis included "language, fine-motor,visual-motor, and sensory-integration difficulties." Through it all,Buchman learned to appreciate what was just as important as high scores onstandardized tests.

"By opening myself up to what was unique [about Charlotte], I was ableto see her in new ways," Buchman says. "My biggest mistake was that Iwas so interested in 'fixing' her that I forgot to see the whole personsometimes. Charlotte is not her learning differences. They occupied so much ofmy attention that I would often forget that: She's not her LD, she's a wholehuman being."

Learning Curve

Charlotte is just one of some 4.6 million children diagnosed with learningchallenges in the United States. Roughly 7.5% of American children between theages of 3 and 17 have been assessed as having some type of learning difference,according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

But they're not all the same. "It's different for every child, and eachchild's specific issues emerge over time," Buchman says. "I wish I hadknown this at the beginning, that understanding her learning differences wasgoing to be a process. It's not like being told you have the flu."

In A Special Education, Buchman is unsparing in describing themistakes she made. A critical one: silence. "We've only recently gottenbetter at talking about Charlotte's learning differences," she says. Whenthe girls were younger, Buchman and her husband didn't know what to say, or howto answer questions, when it became clear that little sister Annie could dothings-like read books, play board games, and participate in sports-faster andeasier than big sister Charlotte. Today, Buchman wishes they'd started talkingsooner.