How can I help my child who has a learning disability succeed in school?

By Patrick J. McGrath, OC, PhD, FRSC

Dr. Pat

Question:

It is only a month till school starts and my stomach is churning. Summer is great but school is terrible for our entire family. Our 8-year-old son is a smart, delightful, pleasant, polite child all summer but when he gets to school, he turns into an unhappy and sullen child. It is mostly because school is one failure after another. He has a serious learning/reading difficulty and is falling farther and farther behind. His father had the same problem when he was in school but has done very well because he found his niche in sales. He reads poorly still. I don't know what to do.

Dr. Pat responds:

Schools often don't help children with learning and reading problems enough. The reasons include:

• children are labelled as behaviour problems
• teachers are not trained in remedial reading
• scarcity of special reading resources

Children with learning and reading disabilities often experience constant failure at school.

Many children with learning disabilities develop behaviour problems. This is because many of these children also have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and also because of their frustration with constant difficulty at school.

There are many excellent sources of information on the world wide web. Medline Plus at www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/learningdisorders.html has a lot of useful links.

Children with learning disabilities have normal intelligence but have problems with some aspect of learning. The most common learning disability is reading disability. This is sometimes called dyslexia.

Children with a reading disability will not learn to read well without direct and expert instruction. The regular reading program at school will not work.

Poor readers learn differently from those who read easily. Children who are poor readers have difficulty understanding how to "sound out" words and then remember them. They cannot easily make unfamiliar words into a word they recognize by sight. Thus they have to figure out new words many times over and this makes reading a real chore. It is not enough for children with reading problems to learn how to sound out words. They need to learn how to remember them when they come across them.

Your son's school should provide what he needs to learn how to read. But they may need some help to make things work out. You can:

• Tell your child's teacher and the school principal of your concern and ask that he be assessed in a timely way to determine what he needs. They are your best ally for getting help for your son. Don't accept that it will take many months to have him assessed. Become a pleasant but broken record. "Thanks for your help. You know my son needs help. When will he be assessed?" Once he is assessed, you will need to be his advocate for treatment.
• Get involved in the parent/teacher association. It can support the school to ensure that children who need help will get it.
• Write your school trustee and the superintendent about your son and his need for help in reading. Don't write just once. Be a pleasant broken record.
• Write your member of the provincial legislature. Tell him or her that your son needs help.

Pleasantly but persistently demanding what is your son's right, namely to get education that he can benefit from, is the best way to get what your son needs.

There are things you can do at home:

• Read to your child for fun. Don't make it a chore but a pleasure.
• Find areas of success for your child and encourage his participation. Maybe it is sports or music.
• Try to figure out how he learns best. Try to encourage this type of learning. Maybe he needs his math presented in words rather than in writing.

Treatments for reading problems work. Treatment for reading problems should:

• Start early before the child gets too far behind.
• Use intensive methods. The regular school reading program is not enough. A half-hour once a week of special instruction is not enough.
• Be long term. A few weeks of treatment is not enough if the problem is severe. Sometimes bursts of intervention for 9 to 12 weeks repeated over years is best.

If you can find a way to pay for it, a private clinic can help. Spell Read is a program developed in PEI that has been shown to be effective. It has been adopted by some US school systems.

Your son is lucky to have you as his advocate. Don't get discouraged.

	PSYCHOLOGY The study of human behaviour and the function of the mind.

	PSYCHOLOGIST A professional specializing in the mind and mental processes. This may include studying the development of the mind and behaviour; studying the effects of various factors on the mind and behaviour; or diagnosing and treating mental disorders, emotional disturbances, and behaviour problems.