Your child with Dyslexia will most likely need more than just reading intervention to truly heal from the experience of being Dyslexic. Once your child is in elementary school, Dyslexia symptoms can become more apparent, more difficult to hide, and can be quite embarrassing for most children.  Most elementary students with untreated Dyslexia report:

• fear of looking “dumb” in front of their peers and teachers 

• Anxiety of being called on in front of the class

• Fear they won't understand what he or she hears

• Difficulty finding the right word or forming answers to questions

• Problems remembering the sequence of things

• Difficulty seeing (and occasionally hearing) similarities and differences in letters and words

• Inability to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word

• Great difficulty spelling

• Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing

• Avoiding activities that involve reading

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At Advocate To Educate we look through a trauma informed lens to promote healing from the experience of  being a child with Dyslexia. This means not just treating Dyslexia with reading intervention, but addressing the trauma and self-esteem issues resulting from the experience.

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We do this by:​

• Providing referrals to therapists to repair any feelings of physical, social, emotional, and academic inferiority.

•  Compassionately educating the child about their disability so as to "demystify" their struggles.

• Teaching the child a variety of self-advocacy skills (usually starting in middle school)

• Educating school staff about the real impact Dyslexia has on their students and sharing a variety of helpful resources on the topic.

• Implementing positive and culturally responsible policies and practices.

• Normalizing Dyslexia by being open and honest about our own struggles without minimizing the students' experiences.

• Using positive and culturally-responsible policies and practices

 

There is a direct relationship between adverse childhood experiences and academic performances for children with Dyslexia. The trauma experienced by children with Dyslexia has long lasting adverse effects -- and most teachers do not pick up on the symptoms. Even if these adverse events that occur for students with Dyslexia don't result in the clinical symptoms of trauma, they can still have a profoundly negative impact on all aspects of a child's development: physically, cognitively, academically, emotionally, behaviorally, and socially. 

 

Parents need to remember there is no magic pill that can fix Dyslexia for their child. We advise parents to learn all they can about Dyslexia, to better understand the complexity of the disability and  to be able to support and advocate for their child.