Detect If Your Child Has a Specific Learning Disability

Identifying a specific learning disorder in your children will allow you to obtain an early diagnosis. Furthermore, you'll prevent your children from becoming frustrated or failing at school, when it shouldn't be the case.

At first, parents may feel confused when identifying a specific learning disability in their children. In fact, sometimes they think their children have problems because they don’t put enough effort into what they do. However, this is, in fact, a neurobiological disorder.

Specific learning disabilities are related to the acquisition and management of literacy and math skills. Besides, they’re included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Notwithstanding, these disabilities are difficult to identify. This is because children don’t present specific or serious neurologic problems. Therefore, it’s very important to obtain an early diagnosis. When this happens, these disabilities can be corrected, because there’s no vision, hearing, emotional or mental problems.

Children with a specific learning disability

Children with a specific learning disability are children with normal intelligence. Actually, they only have problems in certain aspects of their academic performance, but they’re specific and perceptible.

In order to identify whether children have a specific learning disorder or not, it’s very important to analyze each child with poor school performance.

In this case, we should take into account literacy and math. This is because failing these subjects may affect their overall performance.

If you don’t identify this disorder on time, your children may suffer from several problems, such as social exclusion, lack of proper socialization, emotional disorders, lack of motivation, depression, low self-esteem, etc.

The importance of early diagnosis

An early diagnosis and a quick intervention will be essential to work with the child and their family, in both a social, and school context. As a result, it’ll be easier to find the best solution.

Don’t forget that within the school context, there can be an adaptation process. Therefore, children get the chance to have social accompaniment throughout the whole process.

For example, an early diagnosis is very important in the case of childhood dyslexia, which is a very common disorder in children. Furthermore, it affects children’s school performance greatly, and it’s quite frustrating for them. This is because, even though they’re as intelligent as their peers, they don’t get to learn in the same way.

Therefore, family members and professionals must pay attention to the possible signs children may present, such as:

• They learn to read slowly.
• Children find it hard to understand texts.
• They learn to write slowly.
• They make spelling mistakes, even when they copy texts.
• Kids find it hard to learn foreign languages.

Other important aspects

Let’s see the other important aspects that family members and professionals should consider in order to identify these problems. Take notes:

• Check if your children invert the order of letters or numbers, even when they copy something.
• Look for spelling or grammar mistakes when they write or talk.
• Check if they’ve got problems beginning sentences with capital letters and ending them using a period.
• Look for possible problems when they spell out words.
• Pay attention to possible problems memorizing basic things, such as the days of the week.
• Verify they don’t have problems when dealing with basic math operations, such as addition and subtraction.
• Analyze their mental calculation skills.
• Ask them to count backward.
• Pay attention to see if they’ve got problems learning series and symbols, such as multiplication tables.
• Pay attention to see if they choose the right operations when solving math problems.
• Analyze if they’ve got problems following instructions.
• Check their short-term memory skills.
• Check if they’ve got problems when talking about spatial perception and distances. Make sure they don’t confuse left and right and pay attention to their musical and rhythm understanding.
• Try to identify if your children lack interest in school subjects, because that may cause their poor school performance and failure.

About a specific learning disability

Finally, it’s very important to identify a specific learning disability in order to prevent your children from having low self-esteem or a negative perception of themselves. Remember that they’re as intelligent as their peers, and their problems have nothing to do with inability, laziness, or lack of effort.