Parenting & Family Quote by Anne Ford

Denial shows up here not as melodrama but as architecture: a "huge wall" built to keep a parent functional, and to keep a frightening reality from gaining legal residency in the mind. Anne Ford chooses a blunt, physical metaphor because learning disabilities resist the usual parental narratives. With a broken arm, you get an X-ray, a cast, a timeline. With LD, you get ambiguity, misread signals, and the constant temptation to label the child as lazy, defiant, or simply "not trying". That uncertainty is the pressure that makes denial feel like self-defense.

The line about LD being "not seen or easily diagnosed" is doing quiet cultural criticism. Ford is pointing at the cruelty of invisibility: when a condition doesn't announce itself, society treats the struggle as optional and the support as negotiable. Schools delay services, relatives offer armchair theories, and parents are left litigating reality in meetings, forms, and late-night guilt. The wall isn't only inside the parent; it's reinforced by institutions that require proof a child is suffering before they will help.

Her intent is also corrective. By admitting it took "years", Ford makes space for other parents to acknowledge the lag between love and acceptance without turning that lag into a moral failure. The subtext is an appeal for earlier recognition and less shame: if we built systems that validated invisible disabilities sooner, fewer families would need denial as a coping strategy in the first place.