Every week in elementary school, the routine was the same. The teacher wrote the week's spelling words on the whiteboard, and each child copied the list, tucked it into a folder, and brought it home. Simple enough. Practice all week, test on Friday.
For my son Ian, it was anything but simple.
Ian has ADHD, along with a few other things, which means staying organized and finishing a task are genuinely hard for him. So the list rarely made it home. And you cannot practice spelling words you do not have.
I thought I could nudge him along with a little motivation. If he got the list home the first night, it was worth twenty-five cents. The second night, twenty. A little less each day, until by Friday it was worth nothing, but he would at least have had a day or two to practice. A small reward for a small win.
It did not work the way I hoped. The list still did not come home.
So I changed the plan. Since I picked him up from after-school care right there at the building, I would send him back to his desk to grab the list before we left. Problem solved, I thought.
Then I actually looked at the list.
I could not read it. Not "his handwriting is messy" could not read it. I mean I truly could not tell what words were on the page. And that stopped me cold, because if I could not figure out the words, how was I going to help him practice them?
That was the moment the real story showed itself. The missing list was never the whole problem. It was just the part I could see. Underneath it was something I could not: the copying itself was breaking down. This was not a boy being careless. This was dyslexia and ADHD turning a "simple" classroom task into an uphill climb. (Never assume. It is the title of my first book for a reason.)
The next morning I brought the list to his teacher and showed it to her. She was stunned at how it had come out. She walked me through how she set the words up on the board, and together we talked about Ian's dyslexia and his ADHD and what we could actually do to help him.
Here is what we landed on, and it is the part I most want you to hear.
She gave me the correct spelling list for the rest of the year, every week, in advance. That meant I always had the real words at home, so we could practice and Ian could walk into Friday's test ready.
But we did not stop there, and we did not let him off the hook for the skills he still needed to build. He kept practicing copying from the board. We kept working on getting the list home. So at any given moment, Ian was building two organizational skills, getting the list down and getting it home, plus the memory skill of the spelling itself.
By the end of the year, he was doing better. Not cured, not "grew out of it." Better. He still needed the accommodation of having the list at home so I could help him, and that was okay. The goal was a passing spelling test every Friday, and with that support in place, he met it.
I keep this story close because it holds a lesson I return to again and again, as a pediatrician and as a mom.
When a child keeps failing at something that looks easy, the behavior you can see is rarely the whole story. "He forgot the list again" was the visible piece. The invisible pieces, the dyslexia, the ADHD, the copying that fell apart at the board, were the ones that actually mattered.
Two things made the difference. First, I looked underneath the obvious problem instead of just pushing harder on it. Second, once I understood the why, we supported the outcome while still building the underlying skills. An accommodation is not giving up on your child. It is the bridge that lets them keep moving forward while their skills catch up.
So here is my question for you. Picture the moment your child keeps "failing" at something that should be simple. If you looked at it as a question instead of a verdict, not "why won't he just do it," but "what is getting in his way that I cannot see yet," what might he be showing you?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
Warmly,
Dr. Pat
Patricia McGuire, MD, FAAP
Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrician
P.S. The book that goes deepest on the school and homework side of this, the attention and getting-it-done piece especially, is The ADHD Student and Homework Problems. If Ian's mornings sound like your house, that is the one I would start with.
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