Somewhere this fall, a parent and a four-year-old is standing on a front porch with a backpack that comes down past their knees. Not one person on that porch is aware that at least 10% of children are at risk for reading issues. Those risks show up long before the child begins to read.
Think of it as a watch list. You want to observe the patterns and weave them together to create a story.
This episode focuses on the early years because the research that I mentioned focused on toddlers. There is a misunderstanding that is perpetuated (by schools) that someone can’t be dyslexic until they’re older. If dyslexia is an unexpected inability to read, then a child has to be old enough to have been taught to read.
That is a partial truth that only benefits schools. It does a complete disservice to the child because there are early warning signs that suggest a child is at risk for dyslexia. These early signs and symptoms of dyslexia occur long before the fourth grade, the age at which many schools start evaluating students. Knowing that a child is at risk allows you to spend more time addressing the area of weakness, not ignoring and hoping they go away. Maybe part of the reason I’m so passionate about sharing signs and symptoms of dyslexia is because, I personally missed all of the early signs and symptoms of dyslexia in my daughter, and I don’t want that to happen to other parents. One more thing to keep in mind is that dyslexia has a genetic component. So, if anyone in your family is dyslexic (or really struggled to read) take note.
I’ll stop here, except to say that the early signs and symptoms become more subtle as children grow up, because older kids get very good at hiding. Look for avoidance of long assignments, weak spelling that never resolved, trouble with foreign language class, difficulty taking notes and listening at the same time, and a kid who is clearly bright in conversation and clearly struggling on paper.
You’ve got the early signs and symptoms of dyslexia so now let’s understand where it came from.
If a three-year-old is showing signs, how do we know these early signs and symptoms of dyslexia are a reliable indicator of being at risk? Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard, went after that question.
We’ve known for a long time that the brains of people with dyslexia are organized a little differently. But there was a chicken-and-egg problem in the knowledge. Did dyslexia cause those brain differences? Or did those brain differences come first?
Let me digress for a moment and explain why this matters. If the differences show up only after years of struggling to read, then they’re a scar. If they’re there from the beginning, they’re a starting point. Those are two very different reference points. It’s quite a paradox.
The brain differences are present at a very young age. The window when the brain is most responsive to intervention is preschool through the first years of elementary school. The average child in this country isn’t identified until around third grade.
Ouch!
Basically, the windows for remediation and our identification are in the wrong order. We wait for a child to fail before we agree that something is going on. Once we recognize this paradox we can push for schools to change their position and start looking for the early signs and symptoms of dyslexia much earlier than fourth grade. I’ll be talking about this in the next post.
Going back to the chicken or the egg question, in 2022 the researchers looked at 98 infants between four and thirteen months old. Half of them had what researchers call a familial history of dyslexia, meaning at least one relative (parent or a sibling, with a dyslexia diagnosis or documented reading difficulty). The other half didn’t. The babies were matched for age and sex, and the researchers controlled for things like home environment and developmental milestones.
Then they did MRI scans while the babies were sleeping. No tasks, no flashcards, no pressure. Just a picture of how different regions of the brain were talking to each other at rest. And they found something.
The babies with a family history showed different connectivity patterns in regions that later become central to language and reading. This was major! An earlier study from the same lab found something similar in the white matter of the brain, specifically in a structure called the arcuate fasciculus. Think of this structure as the highway connecting the sound part of the brain (Wernicke) to the meaning part (Broca).
Reading requires different areas of the brain to talk to each other very quickly. The part of your brain that handles sounds, and the part that handles meaning and language need to communicate all together. The arcuate fasciculus is the road between them. In fluent readers, that road is wide, smooth, and well paved, so traffic moves without anybody thinking about it. When the road is narrower or bumpier, the traffic still gets through, but it takes longer and requires more effort.
We are not talking about a broken brain. Rather a road that needs more construction before the traffic flows easily. Understanding that you need to improve the road is the true benefit of discovering the early signs and symptoms of dyslexia.
If a child has a parent or sibling with dyslexia, the likelihood of the child having dyslexia is somewhere between 40%-60%. Compare that to roughly 10% in the general population. That’s a significant difference but it’s not a verdict. Flip the numbers and you’ll see that a large share of kids with a family history of dyslexia learn to read just fine. As parents you want to be aware of the early signs and symptoms of dyslexia while keeping everything in perspective.
In fact, one of my favorite pieces of research from this same group looked specifically at children who had the family history and the early brain differences, and who then went on to become perfectly typical readers. The researchers were trying to figure out what those kids’ brains were doing differently. In simple terms the brain finds another route. It compensates. At least that’s the current hypothesis.
There are two bodies of work that we need to overlay with the finding just mentioned.
The first is a study by Hollis Scarborough, published in 1990. She followed a group of children from toddler through second grade. Many of them were from families with a history of reading difficulty. Then she looked backward from their second-grade reading results.
At two and a half, the children who later turned out to be dyslexic were already different in three specific ways:
Interestingly, they weren’t behind on understanding words at that age, and they weren’t behind on telling sounds apart. The difference showed up in what they produced, not what they took in.
The second study is a remarkable Finnish Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. Two hundred children, half of them with a dyslexic parent, followed from birth into adulthood. This study went beyond the signs and symptoms of dyslexia. Children in the at risk group were about four times more likely to end up struggling with reading and spelling. Around ages two to three, oral language skills, sound awareness, and naming speed began separating the groups.
Family history remained a meaningful predictor. So, your family tree is telling you something that a checklist alone doesn’t fully capture. However, many of us might not realize that family members were dyslexic because it just wasn’t readily diagnosed in the past. You might need to play detective.
My own grandfather never went past the second grade. Granted times were different , and he grew up on a farm, but it’s a piece of the puzzle in my family’s tree.
The Finnish researchers concluded that the earliest easy-to-use predictor of who’s going to need help learning to read is letter/sound knowledge. Does the child know the sounds that the letters make?
So, if your child is three or four and you have a family history of struggling readers, you now have something concrete to do. Play with letters and sounds. Magnetic letters on the fridge, pointing out the letter on a sign and spending time on the sound the letter makes. Children need to know that many letters have more than one sound. The letter a has more than 5 different sounds. A child won’t discover that if they only learn the name of the letter. Pay attention to the world around you and actively verbalize the sounds a few minutes a day.
Why does it work? Because letter knowledge is where sound and symbol first shake hands, and that handshake is exactly the connection that takes longer to build in a brain wired for dyslexia. More practice, early on to build those pathways in the brain. Then when your child does head off to school ask about the instruction and the name of the curriculum. This is essential because a child with a wobbly road between sound and meaning, who gets explicit, systematic, sound-based reading instruction, often learns to read well. While the same child, taught with guessing strategies and picture clues frequently doesn’t. The brain didn’t change; the teaching did. Make sure your child is being taught to read in a systematic, explicit fashion.
Before exploring dyscalculia symptoms, you’ll need to understand that dyscalculia is a specific neurological learning difference that affects the brain’s ability to understand, process, and work with numbers. Research shows differences in the part of the brain that gives people an innate “number sense” (an automatic sense for quantities, relationships
This post is based upon an interview with Mark Talaga, a licensed counselor and the owner of the Center for Identity Potential, to talk about 2e kids being too smart. These are the twice exceptional children who are both brilliant and struggling in the very same body. 2e Kids Are
