Is it dyslexia?

December 16, 2019 10:22 AM

My 9 year-old daughter was assessed by a psychologist to have ADHD and dysgraphia. She also tested gifted and talented. I am wondering - is it common for ADHD and dysgraphia to be confused with dyslexia? Is dyslexia often a missed diagnoses?

Here I am, still trying to figure out how to help my daughter. I wrote this question last year. She is in grade 4 this year. I posted this question when she was tested last year. Currently she is on 20 mg biphentin (still assessing whether this helps) and has some accommodations for the dysgraphia and ADHD.

She has been bringing home failing spelling tests and I am concerned. Some of the words are spelled so incorrectly that I can't actually tell what she was trying to spell. She tries to spell things phonetically, but that often doesn't work in English. She'll grasp a spelling rule like 'ai' in raise, but get it backwards. She is still flipping b and d. She wrote "Sellping Test" instead of spelling test. I think she holds her pencil in a weird way. I don't get to hear her read out loud because she pretty much refuses to, but when I do hear her she reads slowly, appears to struggle, skips words she doesn't know or mumbles something nonsensical. She hates reading and will only read comic novels (I think that's pretty common though).We gave up piano this year because after 4 years she could not read even the eight notes from middle C to high C.

On the other hand, her teacher (who is wonderful) says she is "at grade level". She is getting B's in her core subjects.

I cannot figure this out. My mother's instincts are telling me something is wrong. Do I attribute the spelling/reading issues, poor grammar and messy writing to her ADHD and learning disability? Or is there more going on? I can afford more testing when my benefits roll over in January. I don't think she was properly assessed for dyslexia. Is this just ADHD? Is she just not motivated to do a better job? Do I just wait and let the years play out and hope that as she matures this stuff will sort itself out? Please tell me what you can - I know only a tiny bit about dyslexia, and I don't know if it gets missed a lot when assessments find ADHD and other learning disorders.

posted by kitcat to Grab Bag (17 answers total)

I am parenting a child who has been diagnosed with ADHD, dysgraphia, and also ASD.

Getting permission to type his work rather than hand write it was life-changing. His typewritten work is fluid and thoughtful, since all he has to worry about is the words and not the act of forming the words. If she takes the test on a computer, is she able to spell things correctly? Is the school providing OT or other intervention for the dysgraphia? If you are in the US, they are required to do this.

Bottom line is: if you're not happy with her diagnosis, you are within your rights to push for additional testing. Not testing you pay for - she is entitled to testing through the schools at no cost to you. Dysgraphia and another (or a few other ) LDs or language processing issues can certainly all happen together.
posted by anastasiav at 10:37 AM on December 16, 2019 [7 favorites]

Don't wait. Get an outside assessment.

I can't tell you whether your daughter has dyslexia, and I doubt whether anyone else here will be able to do. What I can tell you is that schools often miss things in their assessments.

One other point of feedback. Please don't let anyone tell you that your daughter "just [is] not motivated to do a better job". I have two kids who both have special needs and who both are very smart. There are so many things they should "just be able to do" but they can't. It's not helpful to think of them as lazy, or bad, or whatever other negative adjectives come to mind. They have to learn, and it is harder for them to learn certain things, and it's my job to remember that and find ways to help them.

So, please, don't wait. Get an outside assessment and get your brilliant daughter appropriate supports. It only gets more intense as she gets into higher grades.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 10:40 AM on December 16, 2019 [6 favorites]

my oldest boy is dyslexic and getting any traction with it has been very difficult. Since there are a wide variety of types of dyslexia, getting to the root of the combination of disorders that he has was difficult and expensive. if you have a dyslexia specialist in your area, I highly recommend seeking them out since special education in schools frequently do not know what to do with dyslexia. We have had success with the ortan-gillingham approach. After reading this we managed to get him into the same study in our area this summer.

does your child have an IEP yet? being able to type or using voice to text has been a game changer for us with written work.
posted by Dr. Twist at 10:42 AM on December 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

A few more thoughts specific to dysgraphia: my son had terrible problems with handwriting and with spelling. Our experience was similar to anastasiav's: being allowed to use a keyboard with spell check was huge. It meant our son could actually spend his time expressing his thoughts rather than struggling with how to spell the word "from".

It's also important to remember that kids with dysgraphia don't necessarily have any problem reading. My son was reading above grade level, but he still couldn't spell even very simple words. The fact that your daughter has trouble reading could certainly indicate that there's something more than dysgraphia and ADHD going on. Dysgraphia wouldn't explain that.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 10:50 AM on December 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: It was recommended that she learn to type, but I don't have a lot of time to teach her. Maybe I should get a tutor to help with that. She has an IEP (or whatever it's called here) for the G + T as well as the dysgraphia and ADHD. She's not seeing an OT - I don't know if they have to do that in Alberta, Canada. Our last assessment was outside the school, and yes I will pursue another outside the school.
posted by kitcat at 10:52 AM on December 16, 2019

I'm not an expert (but I have some background in education and reading disabilities) but you are describing signs that fit both dysgraphia and dyslexia.

It's possible your daughter is dyslexic but is bright enough to cover up in the classroom, but I think it's odd that psychoeducational assessment didn't catch dyslexia. They would have likely done some testing in that area. Have you asked the psychologist to explain the results centering around reading and writing so you understand the findings better?

FWIW I think it's odd that the school/her teacher isn't showing more concern with the spelling, I have a similar-aged son (he's grade 3, we're also in Canada) who has no diagnoses but his school has been all over him for reading and writing help since kindergarten (he's not dyslexic afaik but a bit below grade level). I'm considering getting a psycho-educational assessment done to make sure we're not missing anything that could help him in the classroom.
posted by lafemma at 10:55 AM on December 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I just wanted to add this - a comment from a professional who reviewed my daughter's assessment knowing that I felt skeptical about it. She had some skepticism too, but she had something to say about dyslexia:

The academic results for your daughter do not support a diagnosis of dyslexia, so it was not diagnosed. In fact, she is advanced in her reading skills, which supports the identification of gifted. At this point the written expression issues are the most prominent so it makes sense to focus on those. The reading issues may come out later on (like in junior high). Right now she is able to use her fantastic verbal skills to compensate for most reading issues.
posted by kitcat at 11:04 AM on December 16, 2019

I have a daughter with similar challenges but my daughter is not your daughter, etc etc etc. First, how long has your daughter been receiving pharmaceutical treatment for her ADHD symptoms? Second, how is your daughter's vision? We saw massive improvement in my daughter's basic skills simply from her being on the appropriate medication management. But - medication does not replace instruction, and I think a lot of kids with ADHD suffer from deficits because they missed out on a lot of explicit instruction in some skill. (Definitely the case with my daughter. Writing is a physical skill that requires practice, no matter how bright one is.) Is it possible for you to take her to an OT outside of school? The OT can really work with her on the supports she specifically needs, no matter what the underlying cause of the need is. I don't know how it is in your school district, but often public school resources are stretched pretty thin.
posted by stowaway at 12:01 PM on December 16, 2019

Just FYI, there are typing tutors for the computer that would require minimal supervision for your daughter, if you wanted to go that route. I learned to type myself on one of those waaaaaay back in the day of the Apple IIs with zero adult supervision, and I was four. I'm sure they're nine billion times friendlier now.
posted by praemunire at 12:10 PM on December 16, 2019 [5 favorites]

Type To Learn or Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing are two programs I used in school back in the day.

This article is about how American schools fail students with dyslexia. Perhaps there are some parallels to your situation?
posted by oceano at 3:46 PM on December 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

"at grade level" means *nothing* when you consider "gifted and talented". Gifted plus ADHD can be very, very confusing even to experienced teachers. I would look into more testing, I think your intuition is probably right. Look for more help from people who have worked with gifted plus ADHD. I had people tell me - oh he is so smart, there is no way that he has adhd, it must be something else, for years. You have years and years to help develop skills to go along with the adhd, etc. Don't waste them because your child is cognitively gifted enough to skate through and perhaps develop the wrong kind of coping skills.
posted by RoadScholar at 5:31 PM on December 16, 2019 [3 favorites]

My kid can read fluently and fast because she’s hyper verbal, but she’s dyslexic and to a fairly severe degree. Her older brother has dyslexia and reads at a lower speed comparatively but his phonics decoding and spelling abilities is actually better, cognitively. She masks it by using brute force memorization and guessing strategies to read faster. The actual dyslexia testing process is about 2-3 hours and needs to be done professionally, but there is a sort of basic way to check - give your daughter a bunch of nonsense words that are readable but not English, either in a similar language (Malay, Spanish) or using a placeholder generator, and ask her to read it. See if she stumbles reading that without her other language skills to help her. My little kid would struggle hard even after two years of intensive dyslexia intervention classes. If she can read through them fairly fluently, then classic dyslexia is very likely not your main issue. Dyslexia seems to pop up with ADHD and autism, although I don’t know the stats.

Spelling stuff is a really fascinating other subset - we still don’t entirely know why some people are bad spellers, aside from dyslexia. I looked into spelling research earlier this year, and there’s still a fair amount of dissent over how brains decode spelling. It’s different strategies in different languages, and may even differ among people speaking the same language. There are people without dyslexia who are terrible spellers, although that’s not as common.

You can get spelling bookmark dictionaries, spell-check aides that are small calculator-size gadgets, and ask for her to be exempted from spelling tests, or not graded on them or given additional time. Typing her homework with spellcheck is a great option. All those are reasonable accommodations if spelling is affecting her work and it’s something she has a specific issue with. It’s crazy to mark down work for spelling mistakes if it’s not specific.

I went for private testing for dyslexia because the wait time was so long with public and earlier intervention helped. Messy handwriting is still a big issue because they both get tired writing - something about holding the pencil and concentrating on working out the sentences, it’s like 200% the effort of a non-dyslexic kid, so they tend to write very short notes. On a computer or phone, they write longer and more fluently. I’ve read of other kids using speech-to-text to get homework done. 9 is ok for a cheap Chromebook with a lot of parent-control software.

I cannot emphasise RoadScholar’s answers enough.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:54 PM on December 16, 2019

I had absolutely no idea how to understand what could be going on with my daughter when she was in the third grade. She was later diagnosed, by an outside educational psychologist, as dyslexic. She had struggled since first grade with reading and letter and word recognition, and it finally became clear in the third grade when she could not combine letters and words to form sentences. We are a reading family, with loads of book-reading and lots of homework oversight. Still, she was just not becoming fluent. But because she was managing to function "at grade level" the school district refused to test her itself and repeated meetings with teachers and support staff minimized my concerns.

I found the designation "at grade level " to be a disingenuous, blame-shifting dodge. Please proceed advocating based on your instincts, and don't let this go hoping maturity will solve her problems. The content and assignments only grow more demanding and she will be further and further behind.

This is not to say that your child is dyslexic, only that schools can be willfully blind to children who require testing, tutoring, or other labor and resource-intensive resources. If your gut tells you your child has a learning difference, especially a complex one that requires a nuanced response, you will have to be her advocate..
posted by citygirl at 5:57 PM on December 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

When one of my kids had was having an unexpectedly hard time developing reading fluency, I started reading about dyslexia and found that different sites describe and define it differently, but the most common definition is basically difficulty learning to read when there is no other explanation, such as vision problems or inadequate instruction. Dyslexia is really a word for a symptom, not the underlying disorder causing it. People don't really know yet what causes it; probably there are multiple causes that are not the same in all people. So "diagnosing dyslexia" only means figuring out whether your kid is having difficulty learning to read. If your teacher feels she's on grade level, it may be hard for anyone to conclude she's having more than average difficulty. In one sense, it doesn't matter. You can see what types of things she's struggling with and you can research what approaches work to address those problems, or consult an expert. I don't know if officially having a dyslexia label would make a difference as far as what the school would do for her. That's something you could look into.
posted by Redstart at 6:07 PM on December 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

My sister has dysgraphia (and ADHD) and not dyslexia.

Definitely prioritize the typing. My sister now has a very successful tech job where she “writes” (emails and docs) all day...but this was only made possible by the fact that she has been allowed to use a computer for schoolwork including in-classroom tests since middle school. She doesn’t need a human tutor - there are a ton of games and websites to teach kids to type.
posted by amaire at 7:58 PM on December 16, 2019

Nthing the typing. One of my sons was diagnosed with dysgraphia when he was around 12- he's 46 now. One of the weird things was that he could do amazing technical drawing, but he could not write a legible sentence. We had a computer, got Mavis Beacon, he learned to type, got to use computer at school, got extended time to take tests. He's done fine ever since, succeeded in college and grad school.
posted by mareli at 2:19 PM on December 17, 2019

Response by poster: I was going through old questions and thought I'd post an update.

In August 2020 I had her see a different psychologist who did some targeted testing to answer this question for me. She does not have dyslexia, but the psychologist said she was low in her scores, just not quite low enough to merit a dyslexia diagnoses. She also scored extremely low in math, low enough that the psychologist said she considered adding a math disorder, but thought it wouldn't be helpful for her to have another diagnoses added. I agreed. I have insurance coverage for more testing a couple of years from now, so we can wait and see.

Meanwhile, I now have her in specialized tutoring twice a week - once for writing/reading and once for math.
posted by kitcat at 11:04 AM on October 29, 2020 [1 favorite]