14 Comments

This is such a good guest Sarah. Thanks for sharing. When kids don’t fit the prescribed narrative it can be a real challenge to try other things.

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Jan 11, 2023Liked by Sarah Miller

Thanks for sharing, Alex, and thanks, Sarah, for this platform.

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Thanks for sharing this! My oldest was received a dyslexia diagnosis (among other things) during Covid. I had long suspected it and fortunately our school district has been amazing with intervention (he’s made a lot of progress this year!). Still, it breaks my heart that reading will always be challenging for him-- books have been such a big part of our life that it was his first word! Love the idea of the Kindle, hadn’t thought about that but it might be a way to make books more accessible to him.

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Thank you Sarah for sharing my words and this post with your community. I was so thrilled to connect with you last year and so grateful for the connection we made.

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Jan 11, 2023Liked by Sarah Miller

Thank you so much for sharing this story. It is so grounding and reassuring and emotionally resonant. Especially the part about giving up the beloved German school - the losses we grieve and the things we sometimes have to let go of, in our work to give our kids the support they truly need!

I can empathize so much with feeling like you are floundering when a kid's "journey into reading" doesn't look like you thought it would. In my case, it isn't dyslexia, but emotional issues like anxiety - my 8-year old struggles greatly to feel comfortable doing things on his own, and one of the smaller side effects of that is that I have had to grieve the time I thought he would have built into his day, to come to love reading on his own. I love reading to him and with him, but I also wanted him to have time to come to love reading for himself; and the reality is that he gets so anxious being alone that nothing he does in that time will feel very relaxing, let alone comforting, to him. In our case, finding a path forward has involved play therapy with a child psychologist and it does really feel like a light at the end of the tunnel, to have a professional just tell you that this is all going to be okay.

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This was an incredible story, and thank you Alex, for sharing. I don't have kids, am not a mother, but am in the middle of my own challenging health battle and learning to advocate for myself as an adult. It's amazing to see you fighting for your kid and being able to find wins and succeed, and even though I am not a mother or close to anything like it, I genuinely feel touched by your story and am rooting for you and your family. I also love that there ARE people out there ready to embrace kids and people as they are and help them navigate this world.

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