Home And Family

Reading is of prime importance especially in a child’s life as first he or she learns to read and then reads to learn the lessons taught in the school. So if a child shows a disinterest in reading parents get concerned about the child’s performance.

And rightly so children today have to face so much competition in every aspect of their lives that if they are not up to the mark parents get worried. One of the main concerns of parents these days is the reading problems.

Understanding reading problems in children and correcting them at an early stage is imperative or else it will lead to lack of self confidence, poor performance in school, and a growing disinterest in studies.

So what are the common causes of reading difficulties in children and how can parents rectify them. Reading problems can be due to various reasons like

Poor vision

There is enough reading material at home. Parents are voracious reader; mothers have read aloud to the child and do the reading together yet the child shows the signs of reading difficulties. Then it is time to get the eyesight of the child as poor vision can be the reason why the child is not interested in reading.

The child may either be seeing jumbled words or may be missing small words and in order to correct these problems he may be putting on that extra effort with no results. Such a child is bound to avoid reading. A doctor can diagnose the problem and offer proper solution to the problem.

Poor comprehension

Poor comprehension means that whatever the child is reading he or she is not able to grasp the meaning of what is being read. It may be possible that however hard the child is trying to understand what he or she is reading; it is not being understood by his or her little mind. And he is not able to voice his or her problem to anybody since normally an adult won’t understand this problem and will only blame the child of making excuses to avoid reading.

In such cases either a teacher or a mother should sit with the child and try to read with him or her. Mothers can encourage child to repeat after her and reward the child with appropriate compliments. This will not only boost their morale would encourage them to make more dedicated effort to start reading on their own. Mothers can also introduce the use of a dictionary here and by finding the meaning of the difficult word together the child gains confidence.

Decoding difficulties

Decoding is the process of breaking a word into individual phonemes and then the word is recognised based on these phonemes. A child with reading difficulties is not able to hear these individual phonemes as a result is not able to decode the word and hence is not able to read the words properly.

In order to overcome this problem parents and teacher should make an extra effort with the child and break the words into individual for the child to understand. Often enough a dyslexic child has decoding difficulties so if the child is showing decoding difficulties it is recommended to handle the matter sensitively and with a positive attitude. Slowly and steadily a dyslexic child will catch up. In no circumstances should a dyslexic child be compared either with his or her siblings or with peers as it will only develop negative attitude in the child.

Poor retention

Poor retention means that the child is not able to retain what he or she has been reading hence he or she is not able to relate one sentence to the previous. The problem of poor retention can be rectified when the child starts comprehending what he or she is reading as understanding something plays a vital role in retaining something in the mind.