Understanding Children With Dyslexia
To call it a surprise would be an understatement. My seven-year-old daughter had verbal skills so advanced they took adults by noticeable surprise. She could command a room of strangers with confidence and a fluidity of language equal to anyone. One adult speaking of her said, “I always find myself doing what she tells me to do, because she makes really good points!”
And yet here she was, standing in front of a chalkboard at her private (read: expensive) D.C. elementary school, totally and utterly baffled. Over weeks and months, things got worse. Reading the school’s morning message became her personal Mount Everest. Her confidence fell. She used to skip and sing her way to school, but her mornings became filled with tears and frustration. She begged to stay home. Her teacher told me, “She’s behind in reading for sure, and I just don’t know why.”
Now we know the reason is dyslexia. Like 1-in-5 children, my daughter’s mind works differently when she assesses images on a page. Her diagnosis came via an interview with a trained clinician. But the science is even more impressive than most people know. Neurological imaging shows how blood flows differently in the brain in dyslexics than normal readers. It can be identified with an actual picture on a screen. But in my daughter’s case – like that of the vast majority of children - it simply took the school and us too long to learn this.
After she began struggling with reading, the school put my daughter into a separate reading program with a specialist. But her school then made several mistakes that modern linguistic experts warn against. It avoided using the word “dyslexia,” preferring to talk around it. It said my daughter had “lower than average scores in rapid naming” and “her phonetic awareness is below target,” in all cases avoiding the “d word.”
Too many schools decline to say the diagnosis out loud for fear of offending parents. This is particularly true in D.C.-area private schools where the costs are high, and the parents have a strong need to be told that their kids are brilliant.
Other mistakes that many schools make include isolating the child, evaluating the child with the same metrics as other children, and – worst of all – failing to say, “We don’t have the resources to handle dyslexia; you should look at other schools that do.”
The latter is the one that is truly dangerous and is the reason I find myself determined to help others learn what dyslexia is and is not. My daughter lost two years of learning because her school and her parents had trouble accepting her situation. We were perversely “fortunate” that her school had outplacement after third grade. During my daughter’s entrance exams for other schools in town, it became all too clear that she couldn’t be taught properly in most typical environments. But if she were not at one of the many expensive private schools in the D.C. area that conducted outplacements early, we might have had to dance around the “d word” for years.
I write this out of concern for the children who are falling through the cracks of a system that has not caught up with available knowledge. Dyslexia can now be easily diagnosed and managed. And when it’s managed, real magic happens.
Dyslexia on its own is not a disability. Far from it. Famous dyslexics include Richard Branson, Walt Disney, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albert Einstein. Dyslexia does bring with it gifts. All these individuals turned a challenge into an advantage. They were fortunate to work their way through the challenges of reading to unlock those gifts. Some dyslexics today attribute their success to the fact that they think much more creatively than others. Dyslexic thinking helped discover the Titanic. It has built rocket ships. And only a dyslexic thinker would have the courage to envision and then assert that gravity is actually the bending of space and time.
But most dyslexic students suffer in undiagnosed silence, their talents hidden behind a society that judges academic success by a few simple metrics. This is particularly true in communities where parents take competitive pride in their young children’s achievements.
So, parents, please beware, especially those with students in the more affluent and competitive schools. There is so much pressure to keep up appearances that people are reluctant to accept the reality that dyslexia is prevalent and that its impact is real. Parents should demand that teachers have proper training to identify and remediate dyslexia. We should insist that if they don’t have the right training that they are honest and work to find the right school for the child.
I have learned how beautiful the mind of my dyslexic daughter is. She can visualize unique solutions to seemingly intractable challenges. She can read people better than most people her age in large part because she has had to rely on nonwritten cues to assess situations. These are the gifts that will allow her to tap into talents that others cannot.
But she spent years in a world of fear and confusion that could have been avoided. It’s time to understand both the prevalence and the power of dyslexia. The science is robust, but most of our schools don’t use it. Schools and parents should give dyslexia, its diagnosis, and its prevalence the attention it deserves.
Michael Bright lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and works in the District of Columbia.
