While we would always recommend getting help for dyslexia when it is indicated, there are reasons to celebrate dyslexia. To overcome the day-to-day challenges of being dyslexic, other areas of the brain start to become more active.
For example, dyslexic children often become more creative at solving problems. If you pose a problem to him, he’ll most likely think outside the box to answer the problem. This results because he has to use out-of-the-box thinking for reading and other daily activities he participates in. He’s unable to read like other children so he has to invent a way around his reading disorder in order to succeed in life.
To think outside the box, he may ask adults to show him the concept in a hands-on way. When he works out the concept with his hands, this activates another part of his brain so that the learning of the concept is made real to him.
One of the other brain centers that is activated by having dyslexia is intuition. If he can intuit the answers to questions asked in class, he can have better success academically.
Thinking outside the box, learning kinesthetically and developing the ability to use intuition at an early age are great achievements by the teen years. In some ways, the acceleration of these skills sets up a child for business success while other children will take years to develop similar skillsets. For example, read our interview with Henry Winkler to see how dyslexia affected this famous actor and author.
Dyslexia Should Be Helped Where Possible
However, there’s a downside to these reasons to celebrate dyslexia and the positive thinking about dyslexia. The downside is that it still takes a child with dyslexia years to develop the “gifts” of dyslexia.
And in the meantime, what’s happening is a string of repeated failures. Failures in the classroom on a daily basis. Failures at home with parents and siblings. Failures socially in the real world, too. And you can’t control how your child is going to interpret those failures.
How long will it take your child to take it to heart that he’s not reading as well as other children in the class? How long will it be before he decides that he’s not as smart as the other children? How can you expect your child to stay positive about these “gifts” of dyslexia when frankly he doesn’t have them yet, and he sees himself as lacking normal skills other children have?
How long will it be before he feels shame for not being up to par? And how many years will he carry that shame in life?
All these are the true realities of a child with dyslexia during these early formative years. There are reasons to celebrate, but on balance your child is better off without dyslexia symptoms.
These days there are ways to treat dyslexia at its source, generally by building cognitive skills that tend to undermine language processing and other fundamental skills. Gemm Learning offers a one-time dyslexia treatment.