When my husband and I have  found our children struggling with different needs we don't have the answers for or know what to do about, I sometimes feel reluctant to ask for help, even though I care very much. That is probably a common situation. We value our family's self-reliance, privacy and independence. It isn't easy to know how much to trust possible sources of help, wondering if they truly can have our child's best interests at heart. We may also fear the possibility of someone else's solution requiring more of our resources (time, money, energy, etc.) than we can ultimately subscribe to. We worry about self-esteem/self-concept issues for our child and want to avoid negative labels being applied.

An example would be when a daughter at age 5 couldn't say her "r's" well. I liked to think she would outgrow it, but wasn't sure that was true. I didn't want her to think she didn't speak well, or that she was less capable because she needed speech therapy and her friends didn't. To make a long story short, simple work with her tongue prescribed by our school's therapist for a few weeks solved the problem. A few years later, she found that that weakness became her strength when she began excelling at speaking a foreign language and became better at rolling her r's than anyone else in our family.

I've been glad we didn't just wait for that stumbling block to go away. Knowing what to ignore until it's outgrown is so tricky in parenting! Knowing how long to wait until we panic. Knowing how long to wait out a baby's cold before deciding there must be an ear infection to get checked by the doctor. Knowing how long to put up with certain forgetfulnesses in chore-doing...etc.  But there is always hope that we can figure it out. We, as parents, can keep learning and progressing from where our understanding once was to where it needs to be so that we can meet new challenges head on.

If your child is struggling with reading, there is a good chance dyslexia is involved. This isn't something that will be outgrown without specific types of help. Research shows that explicit, systematic, and sequential phonics instruction is required. If you would like to educate yourself on that, you can take our Online Workshop at no charge or obligation. In about four hours, you will learn more about phonics than many public school teachers know. When you explore systematic phonics yourself, you can better know how to help your struggling child with an appropriate reading program. With the internet, parent education is more available in our day and age than ever before. I'm so glad!