OnTrack Reading

If you have a child with a reading problem, someone is eventually going to suggest that your child has dyslexia. What is it and is there anything you can do if your child really is dyslexic?

In this series of pages, I’m going to try to convince you that if you feel you do have a dyslexic child, you can probably do something about it. However, you should be aware that, except in rare instances, you’ll get precious little in the way of long-term solutions from any of the following sources: teachers and other school district personnel, medical doctors, your family optometrist (except for developmental optometrists,) dyslexia-oriented websites, or any of the hundreds of books that purport to be able to help you overcome dyslexia.

But first, I want to admit that I’m not completely comfortable discussing dyslexia, mainly because I know I’m still missing part of the puzzle. I still encounter children in my client base that I can’t quite figure out, and I’m not yet sure what’s going on with them. Having said that, I also believe that you’ll find a significant amount of useful information here on actually helping your child deal with dyslexia. I also believe that it is possible for a child to completely overcome dyslexia, become an avid reader, and even have a few advantages over their peers who never experienced being dyslexic. (For more on this, see Growing an Architect.)

So, what is dyslexia? Well, the word itself basically means “poor reader.” However, most people have the impression that a child with dyslexia sees things in reverse or upside down. This probably isn’t specifically true, though vision usually does come into play in ways you will learn here if you keep reading. Teachers tend to avoid the term “dyslexia,” claiming that it’s a medical diagnosis that they’re not supposed to be making, which is a bit ironic because they’re usually the ones who pick out the child who’s a poor reader in the first place (though an attentive parent often already knows something is wrong by the time the child enters school.)

The problem with treating dyslexia as a medical issue is that the medical community doesn’t have a way to fix the problem. All they usually do is diagnose dyslexia and then suggest accommodations depending upon what a child’s particular strengths and weaknesses appear to be from testing.

Similarly, schools attempt to accommodate dyslexics in a multitude of ways, ranging from desk placement in the classroom, to reading tests aloud, to providing books on tape, all the way to providing specialized one-on-one instruction. In spite of all this intervention, research has shown that once a child is behind in reading skills in school, he not only fails to catch up; he keeps losing ground to his peers with each passing year. So schools don’t fix dyslexia either.

And then there are the books! You can find hundreds of books filled with programs that claim to help a child overcome dyslexia and hundreds more explaining how to just live with it effectively. Some of the programs might actually fix a reading problem. But the absence of any sort of consensus regarding what works is an indication that no one has a good handle on the problem of dyslexia yet.

I said earlier that I, too, don’t feel I have the dyslexia puzzle completely figured out. But bear with me and see if what I’ve learned so far can help you.

This section of the website will explain, over several pages, what I think dyslexia is, whether your child might be considered dyslexic, what components of the dyslexia puzzle still elude me, and what you should consider doing to see if you can help your child overcome dyslexia. And I repeat, I do believe dyslexia can be overcome in many cases.

Next: My Take on Dyslexia, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page