October 21, 2023
Cindy Lopez:
Welcome. My name is Cindy Lopez, the host of this CHC podcast, Voices of Compassion. We hope you find a little courage, feel connected and experience compassion every time you listen.
Join us as we talk with Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide about the often misunderstood and overlooked strengths of dyslexia, shedding light on how to identify and nurture these remarkable attributes. The Eides are founders of Dyslexic Advantage and leading figures in the field of dyslexia research and advocacy. With decades of experience, they’ve really altered our understanding of dyslexia beyond its challenges and into the realm of its unique advantages. Discover how dyslexia isn’t just about difficulties with reading and writing, but how it shapes individuals cognitive profiles in distinctive ways. We discuss the amazing strengths that often accompany dyslexia. Knowing these different minds will be our creators, discoverers, explorers and more. To quote Dr. Fernette Eide, “something good is coming or may already even be here.”
Welcome Frenette and Brock. So why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about yourselves?
Dr. Brock Eide:
So, we’ve been working together in the field of learning issues for the last probably a little more than 20 years. And, Fernette and I met as interns at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center back in the early 1990s. And, spent internship together, and then Fernette moved back to, San Francisco to continue training in neurology. We met up again when we got married in San Francisco, and spent a few years there and then moved to Chicago where we were on the faculty at the University of Chicago Medical Center when we had children. And our children began pretty early on to show signs that they were different kinds of learners. And that was really when we decided to pool our interests in studying learning. And, shortly after we left Chicago, moved out to Seattle, which was my hometown and started our clinic in learning, the Eide Neural Learning Clinic. And, so we’ve been working together for the last, 20 plus years. We published our first book on learning that was called The Mislabeled Child in 2006, and our second book was The Dyslexic Advantage in 2011. And, we just published the revised version of Dyslexic Advantage in 2023. In 2012, we founded the nonprofit organization, Dyslexic Advantage. And in 2014, we founded the company NeuroLearning.com to create accessible dyslexia testing for students and adults.
Cindy Lopez:
So you’ve been busy between your organization, your books, your screener on neurolearning.com. And I didn’t realize that you also had some San Francisco roots. Good to hear that, too.
So, let’s talk about dyslexia. Define it first for our listeners to ensure that we’re all kind of working with the same definition and provide some context for the rest of our conversation.
Dr. Brock Eide:
The way that dyslexia is usually thought of is in terms of a disability that affects reading and spelling in related literacy issues, and the way that we tend to think of it on that level and to explain it to people is that it’s a set of brain based differences that cause differences in low level processing that make it more difficult to identify and manipulate the sounds in words and to match them up with letters on the page that represent them. And most of the definitions, the formal definitions of dyslexia deal with that. It’s very useful to have this sort of disability based definition for administrative purposes in dealing with schools and also to focus, interventions on improving, but we’ve also taken a broader view of dyslexia.
So when you ask what dyslexia means to us, we would say these are really specialized minds. So these are minds that are not trying and failing to do the same things that other minds do, but they’re minds that are organized in a different way to specialize in a different set of functions. And we can get into what those functions are, but that different kind of organization leads to advantages in some areas and it leads to struggles in other areas. And the struggles were sort of the first thing that people recognize that people with dyslexia share in common. And so that’s what most people think about.
Cindy Lopez:
You mentioned what probably most people think about when they think about dyslexia, which impacts reading and spelling and all of that. Is it related to intelligence?
Dr. Brock Eide:
So, there’s kind of a definitional criteria for dyslexia that you have to be at least normal or above intelligence, historically that’s been used. Some people more recently have sort of have argued with that, but in general the practice has been not to diagnose dyslexia for people with IQs below the normal range because there it starts blending into broader developmental language type issues, learning disability.
Dr. Fernette Eide:
Yeah. It’s more global when you got a lower IQ. So that aspect of it is really important to recognize, that it’s really intelligence on par with other students or even above. So you can have gifted students, intellectually advanced students with dyslexia. And that is important, of course, because when school emphasizes a lot of things like reading, writing, spelling in the early grades and mathematics is also often affected with dyslexia. It can look as if a student has a lower intelligence, but in fact the true dyslexic student does not, has a strong intelligence and that’s important for their education in recognizing what kind of support should be present for them in school.
Dr. Brock Eide:
I can sort of add a little more nuance to this too from some work that we did with a series of over a hundred students in our clinic. So, when you talk about intelligence, when people measure intelligence and when you come to professionals like us to get tested, to come out with an intelligence quotient, the usual way of measuring with IQ tests, like the WISC for children, there are several different subscales and some of them deal with essentially higher level intelligence. So verbal function, nonverbal reasoning function, others deal with more housekeeping functions. So at the time that we did the series, we were using the WISC IV and there were four subscales, and two of them, the verbal comprehension index dealt with verbal abilities, and then the PRI, the perceptual reasoning index, dealt with nonverbal abilities. And then there was the working memory index and the processing speed index, and those dealt with more sort of low level housekeeping functions: how much information you can keep in mind at a time, how quickly you can process and work your way through that. Interestingly, what we found on the dyslexic students is that they showed clustered abilities between those high level functions and clustered abilities with the lower level functions. So on average, there was a big discrepancy of over a standard deviation in difference between the high level reasoning abilities, verbal reasoning and perceptual reasoning ability and the low level reasoning, the working memory and the processing speed. So when full scale IQ is measured, it’s normal to take all of those measures and combine them together and then see where the sum of all of those abilities lies in relation to the population and when you do that the dyslexic students tend to be sort of homogenized a little bit toward the mean, but when we separated out the high level abilities from the low level processing abilities we found that the dyslexic students tended to score quite well on the high level processing abilities. And if you looked at what’s called technically the general ability index, often the students scored quite highly. And so to talk about the intelligence level of dyslexic students, it’s really important to think about how we’re defining intelligence. And when we’re talking about high level processing ability, there’s actually evidence and we go over that in the book that often if there’s high level reasoning abilities, the dyslexic students not only measure up to the crowd, but excel in a variety of ways. And so I think that’s really important to keep in mind.
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, I agree. Just in my experience as an educator and working with students with dyslexia, I definitely have seen that in the classroom and in working with students they’re very good at like kind of thinking in a new way and bringing a new perspective to actually the whole classroom thinking. I’m wondering before we kind of move on from this kind of defining dyslexia, does genetics play a role in dyslexia?
Dr. Brock Eide:
It does. It’s very complicated, and [Dr. Fernette Eide: it’s in multiple genes], multiple genes, a very strong family relationship, but it’s not a perfect family relationship. So, for example, with identical twins, the concordance is somewhere between 70 and 80%. So there’s 20 to 30% of identical twins that won’t both be dyslexic. When you look at parent child relationships, if a parent is dyslexic, the odds are about 50% that each child will be dyslexic. So there is a strong family relationship, but it’s not perfect. It’s clear, it’s clear it’s nature/nurture and there have been quite a number of genes that are associated with dyslexia.
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah. I didn’t realize that the probability was so high between twins, that was interesting. Do you ever outgrow dyslexia?
Dr. Brock Eide:
Again, that kind of depends on whether you’re defining dyslexia according to the disability model or according to the cognitive specialization profile. So in terms of the challenges and the disabilities you can definitely outgrow some of those. Although most dyslexic children will grow up to be dyslexic readers. They may be good dyslexic readers, but they’ll still be dyslexic readers, and typically that’ll show up in speed of reading. You do see some dyslexic children that grow up and become fast, efficient, fluent readers, but that’s not very common. So, there tend to be some persistence of those lifetime things, but in terms of the strength side, the strengths usually continue to grow and amplify into adulthood when the low level processing abilities finally start catching up to the general population a little bit and really support those high level strengths even more.
Dr. Fernette Eide:
And Fumiko Hoeft at UCSF, she and her group had found that some of the brain based differences associated with dyslexic children versus non-dyslexic children are present before the age of reading. So it’s not something that these differences you outgrow just in terms of the wiring differences.
Now, you know, it is true that many dyslexic children become, you know, good readers with comprehension. They may prefer silent reading over reading aloud. I think that’s more effortful, and so you see more people who can actually silently read with good comprehension, for instance, at the college or older level, but these changes are present before the age of reading, and they’re present also later on once reading becomes better at the level of comprehension. But see, understanding these differences even in older children or in adults is important because there’s still some things that can crop up that are related to the dyslexia that aren’t part of that core phonological issue, it might be things like background noise, or it might be, you know, other kinds of neurologic differences, and it’s just good to know the broad literature because it helps you navigate life and understand why certain things happen. And as Brock said, the strengths tend to get stronger and stronger over time. Certainly, metacognition is a lot of dyslexic adults’ strength. And the better they understand themselves, the better they can advocate for themselves and navigate the world.
Cindy Lopez:
I’ve heard you talk before, both of you talk about the strengths of dyslexia and the strengths and challenges as being kind of two sides of the same coin. So let’s dive into talking about strengths and that analogy.
Dr. Brock Eide:
Yes, so in, kind of the late 2000s after we’d been working together for a number of years, it became really obvious to us that we weren’t just seeing the same set of challenges coming in and again with students with dyslexia and their families, but we started noticing that we were seeing the same patterns of strengths over and over again. And so we set out to try to identify those patterns that we were seeing clinically, and then to go into the research literature and see if there were things in the research about dyslexic brains, the physical structure of dyslexic brains, the way the connectivity patterns were operating in the brains that matched up with those patterns, and then also to see if sort of the mid-level functional patterns, the things that show up on psychological testing batteries — if other people were noticing similar kinds of things. And then also to see if there were real world signs of the kinds of strengths that we noticed. Are there things that people have found about the kind of jobs people with dyslexia take or the kind of educations they pursue that go along with the strengths? And then in the process of doing that we came up with four strength patterns that we identified, and we called them the mind strengths. And we have a little acronym for those: M for material reasoning, which was basically three dimensional spatial reasoning; I for interconnected reasoning, which is the ability to make connections, see relationships, think in systems; N, which is narrative reasoning, and it’s basically kind of relates to personal memory, personal thinking, thinking in terms of stories, examples, cases, rather than definitions and abstractions; and then D for dynamic reasoning, which was the ability to think forward or think backward in time to make predictions about how things will be in the future, how things might have been in the past based on the processes that we observe taking place around us now.
Cindy Lopez:
I love the way that you organized your thinking and findings around strengths and using that mind construct ‘cause it’s so easy to remember. So it helps me, but I’m wondering, you know, students with dyslexia spend so much time and energy in the school years, especially learning to read and they kind of always feel like they’re behind their peers and this takes a toll on their social and emotional wellness and, you know, here at CHC, that’s what we do is think about and address that intersection of learning differences and mental health, and I’m just wondering if you could comment on that, the social emotional side of all of this.
Dr. Fernette Eide:
Recently UCSF has done some studies looking at emotional sensitivity in dyslexic children and found, if anything, they’re more sensitive than their non-dyslexic classmates and that can also take its toll, which means that if there is a situation of stress, like inappropriately being asked to read aloud in class, where it could, you know, trigger shame and bullying and things like that, that those students will be more sensitized to that. And similarly, even if there’s something where it’s meant to be a positive thing, but they are pulled out. They might have a stronger emotional reaction of being sort of separated from their peers in a very public fashion.
And in that aspect of the sensitivity is a good thing in humanity, but it can also be very painful and the way children react can be negative. It can be turn into anxiety, can turn into social isolation, depression, things like that, as you all know. And so it’s something to be aware of because many times a student appears on the radar because of school related difficulties, but the IEP may not identify these kind of social emotional factors, which are so keenly experienced by these students. They’ve done studies of dyslexic adults and almost across the board, they’re similar to post traumatic stress disorder when they actually recall what they experience as children and, you know, problems that arose subsequently because often dyslexia wasn’t recognized and they didn’t get appropriate educational supports and things like that. So it’s important to, you know, definitely identify strengths to also look for those. You know, many children try to tough it out and hide these difficulties, but, you know, it’s important for families and teachers to be aware of that because, you know, certainly this is a vulnerable group of students. It has tremendous promise for the future, but they’re vulnerable, they’re at risk for having more difficulty because of these extra burdens that come with schooling and the fact that they’re emotionally more sensitive.
Dr. Brock Eide:
One of the few compensations for aging is that you get to follow up as clinicians with people that you saw a long time ago. And being in the position now to have followed for more than 20 years students that we saw quite a long while ago now into their adulthood and to see how they’re doing. It’s very very clear to us that students who grow up understanding that dyslexic challenges are just one side of a two sided coin in that they represent trade offs in cognitive functioning that are in place because there are also strengths in place that creates a lot of resilience for students in a different way of looking at themselves.
So, the students that we see now in their kind of late 20s, 30s that are moving through their education and now into their careers, many of them just are doing so well because they really don’t feel bad about the areas that they struggle with, they don’t feel that they make them stupid. They have a balanced understanding of the fact that some wiring differences have caused these difficulties with spelling and things uh and that’s okay because it’s, you know, it’s what makes them who they are, and they recognize the connection with their talents. And I think that’s one of the things that can really support students growing up is to understand that these really are just kind of isolated functions and basically pretty low level skills that really don’t have a major impact on who they are.
Dr. Fernette Eide:
And I would say, you know, our organization, dyslexicadvantage.org, we have a lot of videos. Our book is out on audiobook. We know lots of families who listen to the book with their kids. They answer questions. We also have a YouTube channel with lots of videos about people talking about their dyslexia and discovering their strengths. And if you grow up with that wider view of your dyslexia beyond the early elementary school classroom, you know, it’s just so much better. So actually we’re in the midst of a film that we’ll have also available hopefully soon, but we’ve already started filming on a film that’s talking about and interviewing people with dyslexia and talking about their advantages, which we’re really excited about.
Mike:
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Cindy Lopez:
I think it’s important for our listeners to know, especially if there are parents out there and even educators like taking as you said, Fernette, that kind of wider view of yourself and learning and understanding that your strengths and challenges are two sides of the same coin as you noted, Brock, has a lot to do with developing resilience and being resilient adults, especially. So to all of our listeners, take some time to help the children with dyslexia to understand their strengths and help them cultivate those strengths too. And of course check out the Eides’ book to find out more about their mind construct that they use around those strengths.
I’m thinking about school again because it’s kind of my background in education, often a pain point for students with dyslexia, we mentioned that, and traditional methods of instruction may not work for those kids with dyslexia. They spend so much time every day in that environment where they’re constantly kind of focused on their challenges and what they can’t do. So do you have some ideas, strategies, thoughts about how they can identify and cultivate their strengths?
Dr. Fernette Eide:
Well, I would say certainly even within the classroom, I think because of the structure of literacy, I mean, there’s a lot of intervention aspects that hopefully you know about multisensory instruction, which is, it will be a lot more, you know, effective for dyslexic students. It’s a lot more engaging, active and enjoyable, but also for other activities where it’s not that sort of intervention, allow them to use technology. It frees them up. They also see, you know what, I can take in all this information and do this with audio and then be able to, you know, not start all over again once I get home, trying to read through it. So using technology for reading, using technology for writing can be really a big boost for students, especially when they feel so beaten down. Then they realize, you know, I’m getting better at this, but look, I’m able to do this. And technology is not just getting a student out of things. It’s remediative as well and empowering, and it lifts all the boats, basically, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats. Technology can do that, especially in the younger years. And it’s the younger years where studies show that teachers are the most reluctant to offer technology. So it’s an important thing to remember that it’s a really powerful thing to have within the classroom.
And then outside the classroom, usually that’s really where a lot of dyslexics shine. They may shine, you know, in the arts, in athletics, they might shine in nature. A lot of times the real world is a great place for dyslexic thinkers and leaders. So there’s a lot of ideas about this that are available in our monthly newsletters, but usually that’s where you can really find students are observant, they’re thoughtful, they’re creative, and they can have a lot of social strengths as well.
Dr. Brock Eide:
One thing I would add to is in our revised version of the book that came out just earlier this year, we spent a lot of time talking about what I mentioned earlier, that the nature of the cognitive specialization that defines dyslexic thinking, and when it comes to thinking about formal learning, it’s actually very helpful to understand what the nature of the specialization is and how it can be adapted to the learning process. Just in very short terms what’s going on at the level of memory and learning is that dyslexic students tend to be slower at the kinds of basic skill acquisition, rote learning, things that are made automatic through practice. So handwriting, spelling, writing mechanics, math facts a lot of times, and decoding, and, you know, learning the basic rules of phonics and those things. They also struggle to learn lists of things that are learned in kind of an abstract manner without connection to any kind of a story or background or framework. And those are things that obviously take up a lot of time for school activities. Now the flip side is that while they have weak impersonal and automatic memories, they often have very strong personal memories, memories for things that they’ve experienced or memories for things they can imagine as experiences. So stories, for many students, poems, songs, things that have some kind of meaning that they can tack things to. There’s some very good studies looking even at young children that show that people with dyslexia pick up more things from their environment when they’re engaged in experience than other people do because they’re not so focused on the central goal of the task at the time. So taking advantage of that ability to learn from experience and learning how to use that imaginative ability to connect facts to stories to other associations and things in mind can beef up the learning process. And so instead of sitting down and just trying to by brute force memorize a list of items or terms or words, [Dr. Fernette Eide: it doesn’t mean anything to them].
Yeah. Suddenly you’re creating stories or you’re creating, you know, raps or songs or something that have some kind of meaning for you.
Dr. Fernette Eide:
I have an example like this. So our daughter is dyslexic and when she was younger, she had trouble with some of these ages and keeping the sequence. So we had her play age of the empires, which was this simulation game and suddenly she became this history buff, you know, and she would even sort of, you know, like at a young age, I think she was like seven, she would sort of quote things, you know, that the emperor would say or things like that. And she knew all of the different characters because she lived through it when she was doing age of the empires, or when she had problems with presidents there was this funny children’s book about all the presidents, which told like a little story about each one, like silly ones, like, you know, one was John Quincy Adams got in trouble like he was skinny dipping in a lake and some women journalists arrived to interview him. And, you know, suddenly she knew John Quincy Adams, didn’t matter what you added to them, because that little silly story was like a peg where all these other little facts could be hung, but otherwise, if she were to look and just sort of dryly look in a textbook about the order of the president, she couldn’t keep them straight. So that’s one of those things, if you can harness that, you know, silly aspect, the good story. In fact, sometimes dyslexic journalists, they may have trouble with spelling without spell check, but they know what a good story is and that makes them a great journalist.
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah. I think it’s easy to for parents, especially younger children, school aged kids, there’s this distorted view that academics is everything. And so parents might develop kind of their own anxiety about the future that’s projected onto their child.
Dr. Fernette Eide:
It’s really common. I have dyscalculia, and I know when our son was having problems, that fear would just creep up, you know, and at that point early on I don’t think I really understood how using a different strategy could be dramatically easier. And so it’s really tough, you know, when you’re on the other side, because even though they’re seven, when they immediately forget all the math facts, suddenly it’s irresistible projecting the future. Well, how can you possibly go to college if you can’t remember that, you know, when you add two to five, you don’t have to start back at one again, like, there are these things that creep in. I think it’s just really easy to be susceptible to stuff like that. And so it’s good to, to talk about it, to be aware of it, you know, and hopefully it’ll help your relationship with your kids because it’s just you want good things for them. And when there’s this shortcoming, you sort of want to, you know, maybe it’s some type of, I just wanna get it taken care of, but you have to do a different way. And the more you learn about this, you’ll find it’s fascinating, and the way dyslexic minds learn, it’s just wonderful.
I would say, you know, that personal side of things, you know, the creativity that’s involved, you know, it can be maddening when things aren’t done the same way all the time, but then when you sort of embrace the difference, you realize that that’s kind of a beautiful thing too. And that’s really the path that you should go down. It’s a lot healthier, and you’ll see it’ll really help your relationship with your kids.
Dr. Brock Eide:
Yeah, I would say also, you know, for most of the successful dyslexic people that we’ve interviewed and written about, the pathway to their adult success was not paved with elite certification and tremendous success in school. It was achieved after school was over. And oftentimes the educational process was just a skin of the teeth kind of survival period, you know, just to get over some of the basic hurdles to certification. You know, for others, it was leaving school early and just going by an entirely different pathway. So, you know, it’s very important to get over the sort of sense that the only way to adult success is through that kind of pathway that everybody else goes over because the pathway to success for dyslexic people often is a very divergent path.
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, I think also in addition to all that we find ourselves comparing, right, especially happens in school I think, but as an adult, I do that too, but that comparing, you know, one’s performance to another’s performance, it’s a moment in time, and I think it’s important for everyone to remember that – parents, educators, the dyslexic child themselves. And you also noted this, like learning more about others journeys, like hearing from those people and reading up about those people who are now adults with dyslexia, you know, how they got there, and I’m sure that for most people with dyslexia, like they had similar journeys through school, especially. So, there’s all kinds of people out there who think differently and those people with dyslexia who have these brilliant minds.
Dr. Fernette Eide:
Yeah, I would say, especially for dyslexics the progress is nonlinear in that it may proceed by a lot of spurts at certain time periods. And so I remember when I was pregnant for the first time, that book, What to Expect When You’re Expecting and then I had another book, What to Expect the Toddler Years, but it’s not like that. I mean it seems like there could be the quiet period where you’re like worried because you’re one year behind, you’re two years behind, and then suddenly, you know, bam, there’s one little spurt that seems developmental that happens around 10 or 11. You’re like, wow, you can do that now. And that’s kind of how it is and then there’s other spurts that occur in high school. And then often in the early years, like in the twenties. And if you just, if you, you hear about that and you know about that hopefully that’ll help you not worry. I mean you will not always see the output when things are going in. But if you’re observant, you’ll see that they often know much more than they can easily express. And that’s why the technology is so important because you’re trying to allow that to come closer together, but still there’s this developmental pattern that can be very inconvenient if you’re thinking that things are going to proceed in a step like fashion, but then when you experience some of these neurodevelopmental spurts it’s kind of exhilarating, exciting, and you realize all the effort that you put in early on and also the positive, you know, psychological development that you encouraged is paying off. And that’s what you really want to aim for.
Dr. Brock Eide:
I would say too, just briefly that while you’re involved in the education process in the middle of your education, either a parent with a child or the child themselves, the pressure to take on this sort of value system of the system itself is really overwhelming, and it’s hard for anybody to completely escape. And you begin to feel like the kinds of rewards and the kinds of demerits that are awarded on the basis of academic work have some kind of unique, almost moral value in determining who’s a worthwhile and who’s not a worthwhile person, but it’s really important to struggle against that value system for dyslexic kids and for parents of dyslexics. And that doesn’t mean to reject the importance of trying to learn as much or as well as you can. We’re totally in favor of that, but to assume that getting a C on a paper means that you’re somehow less valuable or less intelligent or less worthy than someone who gets an A, just may not be the right conclusion to draw.
It’s really common for us when we’re talking to some of these incredibly brilliant, accomplished people to see how often they feel like they weren’t even the bright person in their family. So, for example, the man in the book that we interviewed who created the compact disc system, you know, he commented at one point, you know, well, my sister was really the smart one in the family. And so we’ll how so, so he said, well, she was a nurse, and she had straight A’s in college. And, you know, she was administrator for her hospital. And we’re like, well, you had, you know, 80 patents. You’re listed in the book of most important inventors of the 20th century. And, you know, those are good things too, but, you know…
Dr. Fernette Eide:
But she helped him with math and things like that and science. So, I mean, that’s what he remembers, you know, but, but it’s like, you don’t have to be well-rounded. You can be uneven and be wildly successful. You know and that’s really what it is. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to be successful.
Dr. Brock Eide:
It’s important to look for other signs of your success. You know, while she was getting A’s in high school, he built his own AM radio station and sold it to a local entrepreneur. So it’s just, you know, we really need to take a broader view of talents and abilities and how sometimes child age interests go on to become adult success. And we really do a poor job of that. We’ve run into so many people in journalism and in the media that, you know, before the cameras go on and things will say, you know, when I was in second grade, I was diagnosed with dyslexia or ADHD. I was always in trouble because I was talking all the time and I wouldn’t be quiet and now their whole job every day is just having conversations with people. And there are so many examples of ways that childish interests in storytelling or listening to stories or acting in, or creating games for friends or whatever have manifestations in adult livelihoods, but just don’t have much application in formal schooling. And we really need to do a better job of understanding how sometimes childhood interests and abilities connect with adulthood and to nourish those strengths when you see them.
Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, as you were talking, you know, flashback of so many students who are now adults, right? I’ve been in education for a long time, so they’re adults now and just how they have found their niche and are successful where they are. And so as we wrap up our conversation today, I’m wondering, what’s the most important advice you’d like our listeners to hear from you today?
Dr. Brock Eide:
I think the most important advice for parents of dyslexic children is to understand that they’re heading in a different direction by a different route than the majority of students. And I think understanding dyslexia, understanding most cases of ADHD is sort of a specialization and a different kind of reasoning process. These are kids that are not made to do the things that become automatic and simple with a lot of practice, but they’re meant to be the creators. They’re meant to be the discoverers, they’re meant to be the explorers and they’re the kind of the tip of the spear for the human community going out into the great unknown. And, when you’re 13 years old and you have two hours of homework, the great unknown is an inconvenient place to be focusing your attention. But, you know, when you’re an adult and you’re the first person to discover a new opportunity or something that other people have missed and haven’t taken advantage of it can be really handy. So it’s just very important to try to understand where it is that these kids are developing to. And I think, especially in the most recent update of our book, we really tried to focus on helping people understand what dyslexic minds are trying to become and I think having that kind of sympathy and that kind of understanding for these different minds is really, really critical.
The only thing I would add, I absolutely agree with everything Brock said, and I guess my thought is something good is coming, or something good is already here, and that’s really the bottom line, and it is a wonderful time of discovery, and you have a wonderful chance of just, you know, enjoying this very different, often very different mind, and seeing where it goes, it’s very exciting, and these are wonderful opportunities in little human beings.
Cindy Lopez:
Thank you Brock and Fernette for spending this time with us and to our listeners, thank you for listening in, and I hope our listeners have been encouraged today around raising kids with dyslexia. Remember that you’re raising, as Brock just said, those creators, discoverers and explorers and be excited with them about that.
You’ll find a lot of resources on our podcast website, including links to Brock and Fernette’s book, Dyslexic Advantage, their website at NeuroLearning.com, which is where the screener is, so thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you, Brock and Fernette.
Visit us online at podcasts.chconline.org. Make sure to subscribe to Voices of Compassion so you never miss an episode, and we’d love it if you’d leave us a rating and review. Have a question? Send us an email or a voice memo at podcasts@chconline.org. We’re here for you when you need us.
