What Makes A Ten Year Old Decide He's Dumb?

A ten year old boy sat on my couch and sobbed. Not for a few minutes. For three sessions.

He was so distressed his mum had to leave him there on the couch, crying, and step out. He was convinced he was never going to read. That it was too hard, that he was dumb, and that he was never going to get through school. He had already decided all of this about himself, and he wasn't old enough to have decided anything of the sort.

This was a boy who was brilliant on the sports field. Nuts about football, and properly talented at it. Out there he knew exactly what he was doing. But none of that counted for anything in his own head, because he couldn't read, and reading was the thing he'd decided measured his worth.

The one thing he couldn't do had quietly cancelled out everything he could. There was nothing wrong with him. There rarely is.

Why Does Reading Fall Apart For Some Children?

Here's the part most people don't know. A lot of children who struggle with reading are visual thinkers. They think in images, in whole scenes, in meaning. Show them a dog and they see their dog, the smell of it, the feel of its fur, the time it ran off at the beach.

Now give that same child the word "the." There's no picture. Nothing to see, nothing to hold onto. The word is just a set of marks that make a sound, and for a mind built to think in pictures, that's like being asked to grip water.

It has nothing to do with how clever they are. What they're missing is a way to make sense of a system that was built for people who think in words, not pictures. Put a visual thinker in a word based classroom, day after day, and of course they come unstuck. It was never a fair fight.

What Changes When A Child Understands Their Own Mind?

The boy on my couch didn't need to be told to try harder again. He'd been trying his whole short life. What he needed was to understand that his mind worked in a particular way, and that the way it worked was not a fault. It was actually a strength. But this isn't something most people understand. I was a teacher for years and I had no idea.

Once a child gets that, and I mean really gets it, it changes everything about how they see themselves. The story flips. It goes from "I'm dumb and I can't" to "my mind works like this, and now I know what to do with it." I never tire of watching that moment.

The reading follows. But the reading was never the first thing that had to change. The first thing was him understanding there was nothing wrong with him.

He's at intermediate now and hasn't come back for his scheduled reviews. To me that says everything. He's found his feet, and reading isn't the thing standing in his way anymore.

If you want to understand what's really going on for a child who finds reading difficult, and what actually makes the difference, that's exactly what I unpack in my workshop, From Confusion to Clarity, on Wednesday 23 September. One hour, online.