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I have met many parents who feel guilty thinking that Dyslexia is genetic and then proved that it isn’t.
Let’s start with me, dyslexic and neither of my parents nor my brother was. In fact, they were excellent readers and spellers. Now I still have dyslexic traits but I learnt to spell and read a few years ago using my visual skills. Does this make me a reformed dyslexic? Then I met a pair of identical twins, and then a pair of non-identical twins, one highly dyslexic, the other with no signs at all. So how could this be genetic?
But what I did notice was that they all had highly visual parents, and seemed to have passed on their skills to their children – they had exceptional mental imagery and attention to detail, in fields of art, engineering, design, etc. Now if you have exceptional visual skills (memory, recall, thinking in pictures), and you are anxious then your mental images may start disappearing, fracturing or running around too fast to see. These are the same mental images you need for words, to enable you to recognise words and spell well in the English language.
So the aspect that may be genetic is thinking in pictures but it doesn’t have to lead to Dyslexia. And as I often quoted “learning differences should not lead to learning difficulties”.
The first thing to do is reduce the anxiety (we all know that we can’t remember anything when stressed) and then teach people to recognise words, just the same as recognising signs, your name, etc. It is really easy.
This is one of the blocks that is keeping dyslexics stuck in a “no hope” paradigm. There are many others so do come and join us for our free “Dyslexia for a new decade” series of teleseminars.
Alternatively, you can take a look at my latest book, The Elephants in the Classroom, and discover the 27 other contradictions that are holding back so many children.
#theelephantsintheclassroom #dyslexia #genetic #newdecadefordyslexia
Olivehickmott 