As a parent you’ve undoubtedly heard the educational doomsday forecast that ‘if your child is not reading on grade level by the fourth grade, he or she will have a 75 percent chance of never reaching grade-level reading skills.’ Great! Your child seems to be struggling with reading, so now you have one more thing (along with the West Nile Virus), to keep you awake at night.

The important information to discover is whether he has a reading delay or true dyslexia. A reading delay means he’s just missed some of the strategies such as phonics or word attack skills, but with early help, those skills will come. It’s a matter of filling in the gaps, such as with tutoring. Dyslexia is much different.

Dyslexia is a complex learning difficulty because it varies from individual to individual. In general, it is a specific type of learning difficulty where a person of normal intelligence has persistent and significant problems with reading, writing, spelling and, sometimes, mathematics. The person may be extremely creative, think laterally and have excellent problem-solving skills or artistic skills. It may be helpful to think of dyslexia as an information processing difficulty.

Margaret Livingstone, Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and the Dyslexia Research Laboratory, Beth Israel Hospital in Boston defined dyslexia as follows: “Developmental dyslexia is the selective impairment of reading skills despite normal intelligence, sensory acuity, and instruction. Several perceptual studies have suggested that dyslexic subjects process visual information more slowly than normal subjects. Such visual abnormalities were reported to be found in more than 75 [percent] of the reading-disabled children tested.” Therefore, it is important to rule out problems with sensory acuity (including visual acuity and visual processing) before labeling an individual as truly dyslexic.

Characteristics or Warning Signs of Dyslexia

If your child has three or more of the following warning signs, you should have your child tested for dyslexia or a language processing/reading disorder.

In preschool, your child may:

• Have delayed speech
• Mix up the sounds and syllables in long words
• Have chronic ear infections
• Have constant confusion of left versus right
• Be late in establishing a dominant hand
• Have difficulty tying his shoes
• Have trouble memorizing their address. phone number or the alphabet

In elementary school, your child may:

• Have dysgraphia (slow, non-automatic, handwriting that is difficult to read)
• Demonstrate letter or number reversals, continuing past the first grade
• Exhibit extreme difficulty with cursive writing
• Have slow, choppy, inaccurate reading
• Guess at words based on shape of the word or context of the sentence
• Skip or misread prepositions (at, to, of)
• Ignore suffixes on words
• Struggle to sound out unknown words
• Have poor spelling skills
• Forget sight words (they, does, were) or homonyms (their, they’re, and there)
• Have difficulty telling time with a clock that has hands
• Demonstrate trouble with math
• Have difficulty in memorizing multiplication facts
• Have difficulty in memorizing a sequence of steps
• Exhibit problems with directionality
• Have difficulty when speaking with finding the correct word
• May use lots of “whatyamacallits” and “thingies”
• Make common sayings come out twisted
• Have an extremely messy bedroom, backpack and desk
• Dread going to school and complain of stomachaches or headaches
• Have average or above-average intelligence, but has difficulty with reading, writing and spelling

In high school, your young adult may:

• Have all of the above symptoms plus:
• Have limited expressive and receptive vocabulary
• Demonstrate extremely poor written expression
• Exhibit a large discrepancy between verbal and written skills and written composition
• Be unable to master a foreign language
• Have difficulty reading printed music
• Earn poor grades in many classes and may drop out of school

Who Can Diagnose Dyslexia?

You may have to do some research to find someone who is trained in diagnosing and treating dyslexia. The certification is expensive, time-consuming and takes both course work and having experience with lots of kids.

You can search for a Certified Dyslexia Evaluator at www.UREAD.org or www.dys-add.com. Both of these websites list certified specialists.

Remember to first rule out whether or not your child needs glasses or whether or not he has a visual perceptual problem like the Irlen Syndrome. (For more information on this Irlen Syndrome, see the article archived in the article listings below)

Research reveals several important points about when to have your child evaluated:

• Parents report waiting too long to get testing for their child because they believed their child just had a ‘developmental lag.’
• There is a crucial ‘window of opportunity’ for identification which is during the first couple of years in school.
• The National Institute of Health states “that 95 [percent] of poor readers can be brought up to grade level if they receive effective, early help.”
• Older children can be diagnosed and helped as well; it just takes a longer, more intensive program to accomplish the same thing.
• The most effective reading program must include intensive instruction in at least these areas: phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension strategies.

Once your child is diagnosed, it’s important to help him understand that he can start getting help now that the problem has been identified. Let him know that 20 million school-age children suffer from reading problems as he does, but that only a small fraction can get help like he will receive. Dyslexia often runs in families, and by explaining that other family members have this reading problem, too, your child may realize that the situation isn’t hopeless. Keeping self-esteem high is important to a child with dyslexia.

There’s an interesting story at www.SchwabLearning.org. It’s called “MacKenzie Thorpe’s Art ‘from the heart.’” The story is about a now-famous artist who struggled throughout his entire school years with dyslexia. He recounts the despair caused by having the unidentified reading disorder, yet he speaks of how this led him to the refuge of art which he now shares with other children. It’s very important for children diagnosed with dyslexia to know that they are good at other things, and, yes, reading, writing and other school subjects may be hard but they have worth.

Three books that are great to read to children with dyslexia are:

• My Name is Brian, by Jeanne Betancourt
• Josh, A Boy with Dyslexia, by Carolyn Janover
• Elbow World, by Rene de Toit

Often a diagnosis of dyslexia feels like that doomsday forecast, but it shouldn’t be--just having a good, clear picture of your child’s reading problems can provide the rainbow at the end of the thunderstorm.