It is natural to enjoy learning.

As you observe children, you can see their innate exuberance in learning new things.

So, why doesn’t your child want to learn to read or do homework?

You may be secretly afraid of taking your child out in public because you dread his or her unexpected outbursts or tantrums?

Your child is struggling at school in reading and other areas, and at home he seems to ignore your directions and refuse to do homework.

When you correct or reprimand him, he either throws a tantrum or ignores you totally.

You may have tried everything you know but still cannot get him to change his behavior.

And you’re too embarrassed to ask someone for help because you think they will see your child’s behavior as poor parenting on your behalf.

You stay awake at nights thinking you’re a failure and beating yourself up with one negative thought after another.

Let me share with you some reasons why your child may be demonstrating the behaviors that are upsetting you.

There may be a few things going on. While your child can learn listening and speaking from the people around him, reading must be taught.

Let’s look at what’s involved in learning to read and how the struggling child’s brain works.

There are 5 stages of reading development. I’ll highlight 2 of them here:

1. In Pre-Reading, your child builds early literacy skills and develops a positive relationship with books.
   • Learning how sounds in their spoken language work (playing rhyming games, reading rhyming books like Dr. Seuss’ books, and making up nonsense words)
   • Recognizing the letters of the alphabet (alphabet song)
   • Becoming aware of the relationship between print and speech.
2. Learning to Read – For most children, they begin learning to read in kindergarten
   • Here the child begins to understand the link between letters and sounds and learn how to sound out individual words. In other words, they learn phonics.
   • As part of this learning, they must put their skills into practice.
   • This is the stage where parents and teachers begin to see children struggle to read.

The reason is that the brains of those children are wired differently from how they are being taught, so they do not process the reading directions as given and cannot follow them.

Our brains operate on 2 systems:

1. The sympathetic system—the Fight & Flight system
   • All it does is Fight, flight, or freeze
   • When your child goes into any of these stages, parts of their brain shut down
   • The parts that shut down are the thinking parts because they use a tremendous amount of energy
   • To conserve energy, the brain shuts these areas down and reroutes the energy to the muscles
   • Your children are not thinking—just reacting in emotional ways
2. The para-sympathetic system—the rest and digest system

When your child is constantly struggling, their brains are always in fight or flight mode. Hence the tantrums.

Now that you know why they tantrum, what do you do?

1. Look for your child’s strong points, gifts, and interests
   • Choose activities around them
   • Select books to read to them on topics that interest them
   • Use their gifts and interests to modify their homework and tasks so they are interesting to them
2. Encourage them
   • Encouragement goes a long way in showing your child you believe in him or her
3. Do things to build their self-confidence
   • Confidence is essential for the willingness to try new things and for learning

Frederick Douglass once said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men [and women].”

What’s one way you have tried to build a strong child?

To ease your challenges and empower you to help your children, I created a program for parents of children who have been identified with dyslexia and those who have not been given any special testing but are struggling to read. In it I show you how to help your children overcome their challenges at home and make reading easier and faster and help them succeed in life.

Click here to chat at your convenience about helping your struggling child succeed – https://letsmeet.io/florencecallender/learning-assessment-call