What to do when your child has what people called a "condition"?

It's been more apparent to us that Ethan has some trouble with focus.  In the past, people from co-op, have approached us about him not being able to focus during group lessons.  However, I treated it as something he will eventually outgrow, he was only 5 or 6 years old after all.

During this year of teaching him at home, spending more time one-on-one with him, I noticed that he gets distracted easily by little things.  It can be a sound in the background, a reflection from the TV, or just plain old backyard.  I often got frustrated having to reread passages and he still couldn't answer questions about it.  I thought he just unwilling to listen.  In addition, his Sunday school teachers have told us that they would have to call on him a few times before he would respond.  So taking all these into consideration, I finally realized that we need to look into this more and not waiting for him to grow out of it.

So we went to see a neurodevelopmentalist and had an evaluation done.  It turns out Ethan is hyper-auditory.  It means he's hyper responsive to both auditory and visually.  He has very strong peripheral vision and anything he sees becomes "visual play" and distract him from focusing on what is in front of him.  He is hyper responsive to even tiniest sounds around him and would get distracted by them and not hear what we're telling him.

However, it isn't as bad as it sounds, he doesn't need to be medicated or anything.  There are activities we can do with him such as number sequencing, reading comprehension practices, verbal direction activities that would help enhance his memory and focus.  I would have to do this daily on top of his schoolwork.  So far it's been difficult to actually follow through it all, but the times that I'm able to do them, I see little progress made.  It's still hard to get his focus at times, but at least I understand and "try" not to get angry or upset all the time over this particular issue.

I am trying to not treat this as a "condition" because it would become a crutch.  I'm constantly reminded that what might seem to be a "weakness" now can be a "strength" when he grows up.