Possible Root Causes of Reading Struggles

Reading is a complex task that requires a variety of skills in order to happen efficiently. If your child faces reading struggles, there are many possible root causes. What’s important to note is that reading issues won’t just go away with more tutoring, more practice, or just reading to your child more often. If there are one of these skill weaknesses impacting your child’s ability to read, it’s important to address them at the root so you can build confidence and success down the road.

First, Which Area of Reading Does Your Child Struggle With?

Just saying your child has reading struggles doesn’t give a full picture of what’s going on. It’s helpful to determine exactly which skill within reading is causing their issues, because that can help point to which underlying skills might be weak.

Here are some of the key reading skills to look at:

• Decoding/sounding out new words (the ability to attack an unfamiliar word and sound out its phonetic parts and blend them together)
• Recognizing common words or remembering them after figuring out the word (remembering a word next time it appears on a page & quickly recognizing common words or sight words)
• Fluency and quick reading (the ability to read without stops and starts)
• Vocabulary and understanding of language (trouble with context clues, figurative language, and grasping new vocabulary)
• Comprehension and visualizing what they’re reading (building a mental image of the scenes they’re reading and the ability to apply it to prior knowledge or understand what’s going on)

While some students struggle in all of these areas, others may only have 1 or 2 areas that are causing their hangups with reading. But beyond looking at these areas of reading, it’s important to dig deeper.

Cognitive skills form the foundation of all learning and reading, and weaknesses in one or more of these skills is often the real root cause of reading struggles

4 Possible Root Causes of Reading Struggles and What They Look Like:

While every cognitive skill has an impact on a child’s ability to read, these are some of the most common ones that we see:

Slow Processing Speed

What it looks like:

• Takes an extended amount of time to complete reading assignments.
• Struggles with keeping pace during classroom reading activities.

Possible implications:

• Difficulty in absorbing information quickly, which can impact comprehension.
• Frustration and loss of interest in reading due to the time-consuming nature.
• Poor reading fluency and choppy reading.

Problems with Auditory Processing

What it looks like:

• Difficulty in distinguishing individual sounds in words.
• Struggles with phonemic awareness and blending sounds.

Possible implications:

• Challenges in accurately decoding words, especially for those with irregular spelling patterns.
• Potential impact on spelling, reading fluency, and overall language development.

Weak Working Memory

What it looks like:

• Difficulty in holding and manipulating information in one’s mind.
• Forgetting earlier parts of a sentence or paragraph while reading.

Possible implications:

• Affects the ability to comprehend complex sentences or follow intricate plots.
• Hinders the integration of information from different parts of a text.

Poor Visual Processing Skills

What it looks like:

• Struggles with following a line of text, identifying letters and words, or building a mental image of the story/text.
• Difficulty in distinguishing similar-looking words (i.e. frequently switching b/d or reading words out of order)

Possible implications:

• May lead to frequent misreading or confusion of visually similar words.
• Challenges in forming mental images while reading, impacting comprehension.
• Frequently losing their place while reading or skipping words/lines.

Every Brain Is Unique: the Value of Understanding Your Child’s Cognitive Skills

Recognizing that each individual possesses a distinct cognitive profile is crucial to addressing reading struggles. By understanding your child’s specific strengths and areas that require attention, targeted interventions can be implemented. Addressing these root causes lays the groundwork for improved confidence and proficiency in reading.

If you go at your child’s reading struggles without a root cause approach, you might spend lots of time and energy (and frustration) on building something that doesn’t have a solid foundation. This is why many kids hit mid-elementary school and suddenly fall far behind in reading. Maybe they’ve been able to get by up to that point, but when learning to read becomes reading to learn, you realize they don’t have this solid foundation in place.

Not sure which skills your child struggles with? We have a FREE brain quiz (here) that can get you started on the journey to uncovering your child’s cognitive profile and unlocking easier reading and learning!