Does my child have dyslexia?

The honest answer

No website can tell you whether your child has dyslexia, and any that claims to should be closed. What a page like this can do is help you judge whether the question is worth pursuing formally.

That is a lower bar than it sounds, and it is the bar that matters. The cost of evaluating a child who turns out not to have dyslexia is a few hours and some paperwork. The cost of not evaluating a child who does is measured in years of reading instruction that was never going to work for them, and in a child slowly concluding they are not smart.

The asymmetry is the whole argument. When in doubt, ask.

What genuinely raises the odds

These are the signals with the strongest research support behind them. The more of them you recognize, and the more persistent they have been, the more an evaluation is warranted.

• Difficulty hearing and playing with the sounds inside words: rhyming, clapping syllables, saying a word without its first sound.
• Slow, effortful learning of letter names and especially letter sounds.
• Reading that is inaccurate or laboriously slow, well past the point classmates became fluent.
• Guessing at words from the first letter or from the picture rather than reading through them.
• Spelling that is far weaker than everything else, including spelling the same word several ways on one page.
• A large gap between what your child can explain out loud and what they can read or write.
• A parent, sibling, aunt or uncle who found reading or spelling hard. This is one of the strongest single indicators there is.
• Avoidance: stomach aches at reading time, hiding books, becoming the class clown when it is their turn to read aloud.
• Exhaustion out of proportion to the work, because the effort is invisible from the outside.

What points somewhere else

Some patterns look like dyslexia and are better explained by something else. Recognizing them saves time, and none of them rule dyslexia out on their own.

• Decoding is fine, comprehension is not. A child who reads accurately and fluently but does not retain meaning may have a comprehension or language difficulty rather than dyslexia.
• Everything is hard, evenly. Dyslexia is defined by being unexpected. A flat profile across all areas points toward a different evaluation.
• The difficulty appeared suddenly. Dyslexia does not switch on in fifth grade. A sudden change points to vision, hearing, attention, anxiety or something happening outside school.
• Attention is the primary problem. If the child cannot stay with a task in any subject, attention may be the first thing to assess. Note that ADHD and dyslexia co-occur often, so this is a sequencing question rather than an either or.
• The child has not been taught to read yet. Below a certain age and stage the honest answer is that it is early, and a screening plus good instruction comes first.

What to do next, either way

• Write things down for two weeks. Specific moments with dates are worth more at an evaluation than a general impression.
• Rule out vision and hearing. Cheap, fast, and it removes an easy objection later.
• Ask the teacher two questions. Where is my child compared with the class in decoding, and what reading program is being used, by name.
• Request an evaluation in writing. An email is enough, and it starts the formal timeline.
• Do not wait for a grade level to pass. Students identified in kindergarten through second grade need substantially less intervention than students identified in fourth grade or later.