OnTrack Reading

Sending your child to school before he or she is ready to learn to read can be a traumatic experience for both parents and child, especially with the renewed emphasis on meeting testing standards.

I have worked with children who have just finished kindergarten who already feel that they have failed in school! Think about that for a minute. Think about how many ways an innocent five year old can be traumatized by classmates, teachers and parents when he realizes that he is not able to keep up with his peers in reading class.

Classmates

Your child easily forms judgments as to his classmates’ intelligence. He stands on the playground explaining the rules of a new game to another classmate who just doesn’t seem to get it, so he assumes with some justification that the other kid isn’t as bright. Then he comes back inside to reading class and the “not so bright” kid clearly outperforms your child in the most important activity of the first three years of schooling, learning to read. Not only that, he knows inside himself that reading makes no sense to him, and that it’s extremely hard. How on earth can the kid from the playground do it when he himself can’t? His logical conclusion: “I must be pretty dumb.”

And this all happens before it’s gone on so long that other classmates start to make comments. At first they’re innocent comments like “I’ll explain that to you.” Later, in the heat of battle on the kickball court they can turn into something more vicious such as, “You’re not so smart; you can’t even read!” Is it any wonder that the children who struggle to learn to read often develop behavioral issues?

Teachers

Then there’s the teacher, the focal point of your child’s day and probably a wonderful, caring professional whom your child respects deeply. Trust me when I say that the day will come when that wonderful, caring person, exasperated by your child’s inability to learn what appears to be perfectly simple material, will start to make damaging comments such as, “Susie, I just showed you how to do that, honey,” or “Johnny, you’ve got to start working harder and stop daydreaming.”

I know. I’ve been there. Until you understand what a child with a vision problem is experiencing in school, it’s almost impossible not to find fault with him in some way or other. There’s got to be a reason that an otherwise intelligent child isn’t learning apparently simple material. He must not be trying, or maybe he’s not listening because of an attitude problem?

Parents

And last, there’s the parents. Your child seems fine in school at first, then starts to seem tentative about going each day. At the parent-teacher conference you find that he’s a bit behind the other children. Actually he’s quite a bit behind, but the teacher’s hoping he’ll soon start to get it and will catch up so she can avoid confronting you with the awful news that yours is one of the children that just isn’t learning to read very well.

Now you’ve got a choice to make. Support the teacher or support your child. Most parents will align with the teacher for a while, but eventually you’ll have to take your child’s side. But until you get there, you’ll be sending hundreds of subtle and even not-so-subtle messages to your child that you don’t quite believe in his abilities the way you once did. By the time you decide to get back on his side, your child might be so alienated from you that it’s impossible to gain his confidence again.

What a Mess

This all sounds awful, I know. But it’s what the school and family dynamics are for most of the children who fall in that ten to fifteen percent of the class who come to school with undiagnosed vision problems. The lucky few who find that their visual skills fall into place, though a little behind schedule, will be just as traumatized up to that point as all the others. Furthermore, even though their vision skills have finally developed, they might have done so at such a late date that they have already given up learning to read or, more likely, have picked up all sorts of ineffective or even misleading methods of reading, methods that are not easily or readily discarded once adopted.

This is a discouraging page, but it is necessary for you to consider all this if you suspect that your family has a genetic tendency toward dyslexia. If your children are of preschool age, you can plan ahead and take many steps to avoid the nightmare scenario above. If you have older children who’ve already passed through the lower grades, it’s important to understand, and for them to understand also, that it wasn’t their fault that they struggled with reading, regardless of the hundreds and even thousands of little messages they received over the years telling them that it was their fault. And, of utmost importance, if you’ve got a child going through this now, you need to realize that you can probably do something about it. It may be hard, and it may take more resources than are available, but in most cases, something can be done.

Over the next few pages, I’ll describe how I would handle each of the above three situations if I had a child of my own who might be dyslexic.

We’ll start with Helping Your Preschool Child, or return to OnTrack Home Page