This Is What Years Of Struggling Without The Right Help Actually Does To Your Child

What if the thing that is costing your child the most has nothing to do with their reading level or maths scores? 

I want to talk about something that does not get nearly enough attention in the conversation around children who are struggling at school.

Not the reading scores. Not the spelling tests. Not the report card language that tells you your child is working below expectation or not yet at the level they should be for their age.

I want to talk about what is happening to your child on the inside while all of that is going on around them.

Because in my experience, that is the part that costs the most. And it is almost always the part that waits the longest to be addressed.

Why do parents wait?

I meet a lot of parents who tell me they have been watching their child struggle for a while now. A year. Two years. Sometimes five or six.

And when I ask them why they waited, the answers are nearly always some version of the same few things.

We thought they would catch up. The school said to give it more time. We tried tutoring and it helped a little so we kept going. We did not know there was another option. We could not afford to do anything about it yet.

I understand every single one of those reasons. I really do.

But here is what I also know from sitting across from these children week after week. Every single one of those years has a cost that nobody warned those parents about.

What is actually happening while they wait?

When a picture thinker spends year after year in a system that does not work for the way their brain processes the world, something starts to happen that has nothing to do with reading or spelling.

They start to build a story about themselves.

I am slow. I am stupid. I am different from everyone else and not in a good way. Everyone else finds this easy and I cannot do it no matter how hard I try.

I had a client, an adult woman, who told me she had been saying to herself for sixty years that she was stupid and different from others. Sixty years! She in our very first session when she realised that what she had been telling herself her whole life was not true. It was never true. It was just that nobody had ever shown her how her brain actually worked and that she was completely normal.  Her strength was thinking in pictures rather than words.

The children I work with are carrying that same story. Some of them have been carrying it since they were five or six years old. By the time their parents bring them to me, many of them have stopped putting their hand up in class. They avoid reading out loud. They rush through written work so nobody can see how hard it is. They tell their parents school is fine because they have learned that saying otherwise does not change anything.

One parent told me her son said to her "I feel like I am going to fail this year." He was ten years old.

Another child, when I asked him what he was proud of at school, looked at me and said "nothing."

That is not a reading problem. That is a child who has spent years being asked to learn in a way that does not match how his brain works, and has drawn the only conclusion available to him. That the problem is him.

Why do the usual solutions not stop the clock?

I want to be really clear here because I am not having a go at teachers or tutors or the people who have genuinely tried to help these children. Most of them are doing their absolute best with what they have.

But here is the thing.

If a child is a picture thinker, a visual spatial learner whose brain processes the world in three dimensions and pictures rather than sounds and symbols, then more repetition of the same things they are already finding hard is not going to fix it. More worksheets are not going to fix it. Another computer programme is not going to fix it.

Because none of those things address the actual mismatch.

They are all asking the brain to do something it was not built to do in the way it is being asked to do it. And the child keeps trying and keeps falling short and keeps adding another layer to that story they are building about themselves.

So the clock keeps running. And the cost keeps growing.

What becomes possible when you address the actual mismatch?

When I work with a child, the very first thing I want them to understand is that their brain is not the problem.

Their brains are extraordinary. It is creative and spatial and intuitive and capable of things that a purely linear thinker simply cannot do. It just needs to be worked with in the right way.

And when that happens, when a child finally has tools that match the way their brain actually works, everything changes. Not slowly. Not with painful incremental progress. Quickly. Visibly. In ways that the child notices, the parents notice, and that I honestly never get tired of seeing.

I worked with a ten year old girl whose reading comprehension increased by 17.4 points in nine months. The national average increase for that same period is 8.2. Her vocabulary score increased by 18 points against a national average of 8.5. Her mother told me there was more progress in those nine months than in the previous five years at school.

Another child told me after our week together that she felt like she was going to skyrocket in her learning.

These are not exceptional cases. This is what becomes possible when you stop asking a picture thinker to learn like everyone else and start giving them the tools that actually work with the way their brain processes the world.

What is one more year actually going to cost?

If your child is struggling right now and you are thinking about whether to act or whether to wait a little longer, I want you to really sit with this question.

What is one more year going to cost?

Not in money. I am not talking about money.

I am talking about one more year of your child sitting in a classroom feeling like everyone else finds this easy. One more year of that story getting a little more set in stone. One more year of their confidence quietly chipping away in ways they are not even able to tell you about yet.

The parents I speak with who waited longer than they wish they had say the same thing every single time. I wish I had done this sooner.

And the parents who acted, even when it was hard to find the money, even when the timing was not perfect, they say something else entirely. They say they watched their child come back to being themselves. Every single time, they tell me their child is happier and their confidence has come back. I never get sick of hearing that.

What would you like to do next?

If any of what I have written here sounds familiar, if you recognise your child in what I have been describing, I would really love to have a conversation with you.

Just an honest talk about what is going on for your child and whether what I do could help.

I am a specialist, specifically trained in a method that works with the way a picture thinker's brain actually processes the world. There are not many people in New Zealand doing what I do, in the way that I do it, and if your child has been waiting long enough, I would love to help.