8) Social Ecologies

The final behavioural component of the success process highlights the tendency for successful adults with learning disabilities to seek and utilize assistance through supportive and helpful people. This network of support, or positive social ecologies, comes in many forms encompassing parents, siblings, spouses, friends, mentors, colleagues, staff, and so on. Almost all the subjects cited the importance of having moral and psychological support in childhood. In adulthood, they sought help and guidance for specific situations, yet they resisted becoming overly dependent on their support systems. They knew what they could do and when not to call on help. They often developed interdependent relationships where they returned support by offering their own unique talents. They learned to accept help when it was necessary with the realization that a degree of dependency was essential to achieving maximum control and autonomy.

Self-designing apprenticeship types of programs, modeling careers on those of mentors, and consciously seeking others who could provide specific services to fill in the gaps created by learning disabilities represent diverse ways that subjects developed favourable social ecologies. In some cases, subjects had to negotiate for specific accommodations; in this instance, they exerted control over their psychosocial environment to enhance their adaptability. In other cases, they combined a measure of learned creativity to establish innovative types of support systems. ¹⁰