FAQs from Parents of Kids who Struggle with Reading

Lots of kids struggle with reading. In a time where we are still reeling from the effects of the pandemic and figuring out what a “new normal” is going to look like, young kids especially are facing the consequences of disrupted school years. More than 1 in 3 kids are needing remedial reading support in the classroom. And on standardized testing, students are still performing far below grade level. This situation is leaving parents like you wondering… what’s next? Will my child ever really learn to read?

Here are some of the top questions we get from parents of kids who struggle with reading:

Will my child ever learn to read?

Short answer: they can! Reading doesn’t have to be hard. With the right approach, struggling readers can experience greater success in a short amount of time. 

What’s important is that they have the right foundation: a brain that is able to learn AND strong phonemic awareness and auditory processing skills. Many schools still use curricula that focus on sight words, inferring from pictures, or balanced literacy units of study rather than teaching foundational phonics and decoding strategies. 

If your child is in elementary school and is still:

• Unable to sound out a new word
• Stopping and starting when they read, without fluency
• Becoming a good “guesser,” but without the strategies to really know how to read

… Getting them back to the basics of sound-to-code reading is important! Our ReadRx program starts everyone back at the beginning, working one sound at a time and building in complexity from there. And the results show its effectiveness! Our clients experience an average of 3.7 years improvement in only 6 months of training! 

Why are school resources not enough to make reading “click”?

As we mentioned above, many schools do not emphasize basic phonics or the sound-to-code approach that is critical for effective reading. Reading is not a natural skill like talking; instead, it requires a re-wiring of your brain to learn how to recognize sounds, put them together, and derive meaning from them.

For some kids, reading is easier because they innately have stronger logic & reasoning skills or higher auditory processing. But for kids with weaker cognitive skills, the school’s approaches to learning reading may not be enough. Cognitive skills are the way your brain takes in information from the world around you. So if your child’s skills are not optimized, learning in general is going to feel harder and more frustrating than it needs to!

My child does well in school overall, so why is reading still so hard?

Reading is unique because of the wide variety of skills it requires. For example, you have to visually process the letter in front of you, assign a sound to it (auditory processing), logically figure out how the sounds in the word go together, effectively blend them, assign meaning to that word, AND remember it while you do the same thing with the next word in the sentence (and do all of this fast)…

You get the picture. There are lots of skills at play here, so understanding why your child struggles with reading is not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer. Instead, what we recommend is a cognitive skills assessment that will show us exactly where your child struggles in this progression. The answers you get from this skills test will show you the why behind your child’s struggle and present a way forward to help them succeed.

As to why they continue to do well in school otherwise—at the risk of sounding too negative, give it time. Kids learn to work around weak cognitive skills, but eventually it catches up with them. If your child struggles with visual processing, logic and reasoning, processing speed, working memory, auditory processing, or any of the other skills that are essential for reading, it will likely play out in other scenarios down the road if these weaknesses are not met head-on.

Is my child’s lack of attention span why they can’t read?

It could be!

Kids who struggle with any of the 3 main types of attention have a harder time learning to read fluently and effectively. These are:

• Sustained attention (Can your child maintain focus for a long enough period of time to keep reading without losing their place? Or to focus long enough to keep trying on texts that are hard?)
• Selective attention (Can your child tune out distractions or other things going on around them in order to focus? Or do pictures on the page, a bird outside the window, or their sibling walking in the room completely throw them off?)
• Divided attention (Can your child hold multiple things in their brain at the same time? Can they remember what they just read while decoding a new set of words?)

Attention struggles manifest in kids who struggle with reading in these and other ways. Understanding your child’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses can make it clear exactly why your kid struggles with reading!

My child was just diagnosed with dyslexia. Is there anything you can do for him?

First off: we know that a dyslexia diagnosis is scary. We understand the fears for their future abilities and success in school and beyond. But there is hope.

With the right kind of dyslexia help, it’s possible to build stronger reading skills and overcome learning difficulties. At LearningRx, we have helped thousands of kids, teens, and adults with dyslexia and other reading disorders. We have 35+ years of experience helping clients with reading difficulties, and we’ve built our programs through rigorous research and practice in this area. Today, roughly 1 in 10 students at LearningRx has come to us for help with dyslexia!

While brain training isn’t a cure for dyslexia, it has helped kids and adults with dyslexia become stronger readers. Our reading and reading comprehension programs include help with:

• Recognizing letters by shape
• Connecting letters to speech sounds
• Sounding out words while reading
• Spelling and vocabulary
• Reading comprehension skills

Between 2010 and 2018, we provided dyslexia help to more than 2,200 school-aged learners. After brain training, these students improved their learning and thinking skills by 3.6 years on average. Even more impressive, the average student improved by 5.7 years in auditory processing – the cognitive skill most commonly linked to reading difficulties!

While results may vary for your situation, the approach our dyslexia training program takes gets to the root cause of reading struggles and opens the door for easier learning, more fluent reading, and greater success in school.

Find Out Why Your Kids Struggle With Reading

The common thread through all of these questions is this: “Why?”

WHY is your child struggling? WHY can’t their brain process words on the page?

Understanding this will allow you as the parent to understand more about exactly what’s happening in your child’s brain and what is keeping them from being able to read on grade level. 

Give us a call to schedule your cognitive skills assessment today to get an inside look into the things that are holding your child back from successful reading. Then we can work together to create a plan to help them get back on track!

(All results mentioned are from past clients. You or your child may or may not experience the same outcomes, but we’ll do everything we can to help you achieve your goals.)