Educate Yourself

The very best support you can give a person with dyslexia is knowledge and understanding of what dyslexia is and is not. In order to help your child successfully learn, you will first need to understand dyslexia and how it impacts your child’s thinking and learning. Dyslexia is not all negative, and those positive traits, which are often overlooked in traditional classroom settings, will be key to helping your child succeed academically AND develop a positive self-image. It is easy to brush off a dyslexic child’s challenges as being lazy, not trying hard enough, or boredom when in fact they are often working extremely hard and are frustrated by the fact that no one can see how hard they are working, and how dumb they feel. Before you can encourage and support them, you need to understand for yourself the magnitude of their challenges.

So where to start? Fortunately there are many excellent resources available, which is a welcome development in the past few years. When I started teaching my children with dyslexia, information was difficult to find and typically dyslexia was problem to be “fixed” rather than a different way of processing information (still a common perspective). Discussion of the positive traits of dyslexia was almost non-existent. What follows is a list of resources I suggest parents start with first.

1. www.madebydyslexia.org (highly recommend you start here)
2. www.dyslexiacanada.org (search for Decoding Dyslexia in other countries)
3. The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan by Ben Foss (good overview)
4. Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz (research based and comprehensive)

There are many other good books and resources out there, but these will give you a good foundation and help you determine where to look next. With this information, you are likely to be far more knowledgeable than most teachers about dyslexia and what support your child needs. Unfortunately, teacher training in Ontario does not provide teachers with the depth of skills necessary to identify and teach students with dyslexia. [1] You will need to be the expert in the room in order to fully appreciate your child’s struggles, and to advocate for the support they will need to succeed academically.

The other important part of educating yourself is understanding this: it is not your fault that your child is struggling, and it is not their fault either. Dyslexia is a different way of processing information in the brain and it affects about 1 in 5 people . . . 20% of the population! The problem is not the brain. The problem is ineffective teaching methods and lack of appropriate educational supports for dyslexic thinkers. Once you understand what dyslexia is and is not, you will be able to fully support your child to use all their strengths to meet their challenges head on.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Benjamin Franklin (dyslexic thinker)

Other Posts in this Series:

1. Now What?
2. Educate Yourself
3. Take the Pressure Off
4. Reading: A World of Adventure
5. Goals: Essential Roadmap
6. Get the Right Kind of Support
7. Persevere: Good Days and Bad
8. Nothing is Permanent Except Change
9. Encourage! Encourage! Encourage!

[1] https://www.decodingdyslexiaon.org/dyslexia-facts/

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash