When my son was three, I felt for the first time something was off about his language skills. I volunteered to chaperone his preschool classroom on a field trip, and during lunch I noticed my son wasn’t able to express himself the way other children could. His vocabulary was rather limited, his sentence structure was simple compared to the other kids, and he took longer to retrieve his words. However, I brushed the incident off, reminding myself that my job as a systems analyst made me an expert in analyzing computerized programs, not the human brain.
During his kindergarten year, we met with a speech therapist who suggested waiting until the following year to better evaluate his linguistic skills and diagnose the problem, if any existed. He started first grade, and while other parents were excited and full with hopes for the future, I was terrified.
I considered all the language disability possibilities and ranked them from the most tolerable to the least. At the bottom of the list I’d placed Dyslexia. According to the Mayo Clinic, Dyslexia is a learning disorder characterized by difficulty with reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words. In reality, people associate Dyslexia with developmental or health disorders, which often harmed a child’s self-esteem and influenced their environment perception about them.
Receiving the evaluation’s results validated my fears. My son was dyslexic. My first thoughts were: Was there something wrong with his intelligence? Would he ever be a successful? Would he be socially accepted?
Then I learned Dyslexia occurs at all levels of intelligence; students with Dyslexia can perform very well in school and become leaders in their fields. Many people with Dyslexia are very bright and might be gifted in math and science.
Children with disabilities require an intense investment of time and energy and perpetual devotion. After my son was diagnosed with Dyslexia and word retrieval impediment, one thing was clear—he would need continuous support from his environment throughout his school years.
Many schools do not have dedicated Dyslexia programs. Programs that claim to help children with learning disabilities really focus on Special Education, which includes communication disabilities, emotional and behavioral disorders, or physical and developmental disabilities. Dyslexia is different, and treating it requires a distinctive set of tools.
The school in our district and other schools in the area didn’t offer Dyslexia dedicated programs, so I did three things: I read countless articles about Dyslexia, I advocated for my son and made the school apply every accommodation possible, and I searched for a professional Dyslexia therapist who could come to school and provide my son with needed therapy.
I discovered a program that involved the use of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile pathways simultaneously to enhance memory and learning of written language. The program is called Multisensory Language Training, and its application had remarkable results among students with Dyslexia. I contacted a therapist, and she met with my son for an hour five days a week.
Yet Dyslexia doesn’t only affect a person’s academic abilities but also social skills. Many children with Dyslexia feel inferior around their peers, because they are aware of their weakness and know the other children can use it against them. So I decided to use Dyslexia as leverage for social encounters. I sent the class parents an email, explained what Dyslexia is and the way it affects children’s education and socialization. I asked permission to invite their children to our home after school to work on homework and other fun projects that involved language skills.
Most of the parents supported the initiative, and kids started visiting us in the afternoon. I talked about Dyslexia and demonstrated ways to help my son. We worked on homework, played board and computer word games, and watched language learning programs. I read them stories, and they wrote new vocabulary in a small notebook we titled ‘dictionary’. At some point, parents thanked me for enriching their kids’ experience. They said it taught their child about important values such as acceptance of differences, tolerance, and sensitivity to others’ needs.
At the end of second grade, the entire class knew my son had Dyslexia, and he had many friends who helped and supported him. His self-worth and confidence were boosted, and he was a very likable, easygoing, sweet boy.
Over the years, with self-motivation and the help of the school, his therapist, and his classmates, my son gained confidence and can now read and write at his class level. He will always have difficulty in reading and writing, but he learned that his disability doesn’t define who he is. Almost as important, his peers learned that too.