My child learned how to speak when he was very young, and was well conversant with many vocabularies, except that he would often mix up sounds. He liked baby books and absolutely loved it when I read to him, though he still had a hard time telling sounds apart.

Although there was a small cause for concern, his teachers in preschool told me that my son was just having a developmental lag and that it was nothing to worry about. However, when he got to first grade, I took him to a doctor who diagnosed him with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

At that time, I assumed that his challenge with learning was the result of his ADHD and that he was just ‘a late bloomer.’ I did not think much about the issue, so I hired tutors to help him with reading, trusting that he would be OK the following year. However, nothing improved, and it was clear that he was years behind his peers in reading.

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By the time he got to second grade, he wrote letters correctly, but the strokes were either inverted or backward. Moreover, when he was learning how to spell, he would forget the words and jumble up the letters within minutes. Worse, his confidence was failing and he did not wish to go to school anymore. Some of his classmates would make fun of his reading, and the teacher pulled him out of class often to help him improve his reading skills.

I had my “aha!” moment when I stumbled upon a book that talked about dyslexia. I had never heard of that word before, and none of my son’s doctors brought it up. At the time, I was doing a lot of research to try to understand what my son was dealing with, and I was glad when I came across that book. The book helped me know that my son’s condition had a name, and I took him in for another test, and he tested positive for auditory dyslexia.

In the weeks that followed, my son went through an assessment and qualified for reading and speech therapy, and the help he received over the next few months helped his language to develop and improve tremendously. I then understood that the learning delays and difficulties he had were indicators of dyslexia, and we made up for the lost time. I wished I had not followed the guidance from the doctors that had diagnosed my son earlier on. How could they not have thought about dyslexia?

I wish I knew my son’s struggle right from the start. He loved books but reading was strenuous, spelling was a nightmare, and writing was grueling. I wish I did not think that my son was disinterested with school when he took three times longer to finish his homework, compared to the time his siblings would take.

If I understood that my son had to work twice as hard just to keep up, I would have talked to his teachers, who did not know about my son's learning disability – it was not a developmental lag. My son may not have been the best reader in his class, but he had visual strengths of seeing, and being able to describe things in detail.

Additionally, I wish my son knew that he was not different just because he would get only a small fraction of the way through a reading task before a group session would begin during class. It was frustrating for my son when nobody understood his learning disability. He was graded by how fast he could read, and how many sight words he could point out, which weighed on his daily.

Regardless of what my son’s educators thought, my son loved words as well as books even if he could not read them. Once we learned what my son was dealing with, I told him about it, and he understood how dyslexia affected him. He no longer thought he was dumb, and he started appreciating his unique method of learning.

Nowadays, my son likes to be in school and contributing to classroom discussions. My main job is to be there for my son, seeing him through each step and contributing to his Individualized Education Plan (IEP). My son is leveling the playing field for himself, and nothing brings me more joy than to see him put his fortes and desires into words others can understand.

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