Self-esteem and Dyslexia

Liz Sedley, the creator of Dyslexia Gold, a suite of neuroscience based computer programs to help your dyslexic child read, write and spell. Liz has 3 children with combinations of Dyslexia, Dyspraxia and Aspergers. She spent 10 years researching these conditions, and what caused them, before creating her first computer program to help her daughter to read. She’s now created 4 programs to help children with dyslexia, and is very proud to say they all get fantastic results.

Children with dyslexia may have low self-esteem, due to finding everything so hard. Not only do they have trouble reading and spelling and writing, but they probably also have poor organizational skills, poor working memory and slow processing. These can all make life very difficult.

Dyslexics don’t have to have low self-esteem. Self-esteem comes from being happy and confident with who you are, not from being good at everything.

As a homeschooler, you are already doing a lot to minimize this problem. Homeschoolers do not have classmates to keep up with, peers to compare themselves to, or a curriculum to complete by a certain date. These should all help your child feel fine about working at their own pace.

Some children may still find dyslexia takes a toll on their self-esteem.

Ideally you can find something they flourish in and enjoy. Consider sports or art or drama or music; or maybe jigsaw puzzles, or making friends, or cooking, or facts about trains. Do whatever works.

They may need to try ten different sports before you find one they love. Whatever it is that they like, support and encourage it. Give them lots of honest and specific positive feedback and help them avoid feeling judged. Talk to them about their hobby, ask how they enjoyed it, and what they want to achieve next.

While you want to play to their strengths, don’t minimize the problems dyslexia brings. Telling them it doesn’t matter that they find reading and writing hard will not work because it does matter to them, that’s why their self-esteem is low. Saying “it doesn’t matter that you can’t read,” breaks the trust between you. Using technology will solve a few problems but honestly, everyone needs to be able to read and write in today’s society.

If their low self-esteem is due to not being able to read, I believe the only way to improve it is to teach them to read. Offer to work together with your child to overcome this problem. You will work together to find out why they find reading so hard, and you will solve it. This does not just mean doing more reading practice, or slavishly following a learn-to read-scheme. If the program you are using isn’t working, and is making them unhappy, then you need to stop using it and find something else that does work. It would be great if the learning could be fun but learning to read isn’t fun if you’re dyslexic – it’s hard work. Using rewards or bribery to encourage them to read could be discouraging.

In order to find out whether a program or therapy works you need to measure progress. You can measure how many high frequency words they can read, and how many words a minute they can read. You can measure their reading age. You can video them reading. When you repeat these measures in six or eight weeks’ time, at least one of them should have improved. If not, you should try something else.

Instead of just following a learn-to-read program which may not be working, figure out what exactly is happening that makes reading so hard for them, and attempt to fix the underlying problem. There are many things to consider: Possibly, they have a vision problem. Or maybe they have brain fog due to not being able to tolerate gluten. I talk more in depth about this on my website. Click here to read more about this.

If they don’t believe in themselves you can talk to them about the very many famous dyslexics, and how they found something else they were good at. Richard Branson, Jamie Oliver, Steven Spielberg, Kiera Knightly and Henry Winkler all have articles online where they discuss their dyslexia and how it shaped their careers.

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