When words don’t stay still, and learning breaks before it begins
I have a seven-year-old son who entered Primary One at the beginning of 2025.
For years, my husband and I carried a quiet suspicion that he was slower in learning and reading, and that he might have ADHD. It was never an accusation, never a label — just an instinct, the kind that lingers at the back of a parent’s mind when something doesn’t quite fit the usual developmental pattern.
Even so, we believed, in our own naïve optimism, that a structured environment would help him grow out of whatever was holding him back. That once he entered a traditional, strict Chinese primary school — a high-performance school just a short walk from our home — everything would somehow align and stabilise.
We were wrong.
When School Began, Everything Fell Apart
The moment school started, all our assumptions collapsed almost overnight.
He struggled with everything. Not mildly, not gradually, but in a way that was unmistakably visible from the first week.
He couldn’t sit still.
He wandered around the classroom.
He couldn’t copy from the whiteboard — the letters slipped away from him.
He didn’t complete homework because he didn’t even know where to begin.
He didn’t understand what “school behaviour” meant in the first place.
It wasn’t stubbornness.
It was confusion.
Every day, his homework book returned with large, red remarks — sharp, heavy strokes that reflected frustration more than understanding:
“Parents please take note, student is lazy.”
“Student is not listening.”
“Student refuses to complete work.”
To a teacher handling forty children, this looks like disobedience.
To a parent observing closely, this is a child drowning.
What I Thought I Had Already Fixed
Before he even began primary school, I had already suspected ADHD, convergence insufficiency, maybe even dyslexia or dysgraphia.
I started interventions early — acupuncture, movement regulation, sensory work, supplements, structure — trying to bring down the overwhelm in his nervous system.
And it worked.
He became calmer.
More regulated.
More grounded.
But nothing prepares a parent for the realisation that calming ADHD is only one part of the picture.
It stabilises a child.
It does not teach a child how to learn.
It does not magically build the foundation of reading and writing he never had.
It does not fill the developmental gaps that school demands immediately from a seven-year-old on Day One.
A Mother with a Clinical Lens
I am a pharmacist by training. My instinct is to think clinically — to map causes to effects.
But I am also a Southeast Asian mother, raised in a culture where healing is not only biological, but sensory, emotional, and environmental.
So my approach became a fusion:
Western neurodevelopmental science.
Eastern regulation.
Nutrition.
Movement.
Breath.
Acupuncture.
Cultural intuition.
Relentless observation.
That fusion eventually became the foundation of my book Different, Not Less.
And yet — I still did not have the full picture.
The First Misleading Breakthrough: Convergence Insufficiency
Before school began, we discovered that he had convergence insufficiency at the end of age six.
At the time, I believed this explained everything.
His eyes could not sustain near focus.
Text drifted.
Words doubled.
A single word had to be repeated dozens of times before it would “stay still.”
After six months of targeted intervention — visual exercises, structured reading distance, sensory reinforcement — his convergence insufficiency was corrected by around age seven and a half.
Copying from the board improved dramatically.
Tracking text stabilised.
But his English reading did not move.
That was the moment I realised:
Even without visual barriers, something deeper was blocking him.
When All the Pieces Finally Aligned
The real breakthrough came when I stopped looking for a single cause.
My son was not dealing with one condition.
He was dealing with ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, and convergence insufficiency — all at once.
Each one alone can derail learning.
Together, they turn a classroom into a battlefield.
ADHD Is Not Just “Attention”
For my son, ADHD was not a simple attention problem.
It was a problem of neurological timing.
His mind moved in rhythms the classroom did not accommodate. His ideas ran faster than his hands. His body acted before instructions landed.
The more the environment demanded control, the more his system rebelled — not out of misbehaviour, but out of neurological overload.
Even when his ADHD was regulated, the learning blocks remained.
That was the clue.
Why He Loved Stories but Couldn’t Read Words
Dyslexia explained what teachers could never understand.
Why he loved stories yet hated reading.
Why he could grasp emotional nuance but fail spelling lists.
Why broccoli, sausage, pencil meant nothing to him.
Dyslexic children rely heavily on context to process language. When language is stripped down to isolated phonics or single words, their brains disengage.
This was my son.
Give him a story — he lights up.
Give him a list — his brain refuses.
A single word is dead to him.
A sentence is alive.
The Invisible Weight of Dysgraphia
Dysgraphia showed up the moment he held a pencil.
He could explain ideas fluently, but writing them down was torture.
Letters floated.
Strokes reversed.
His grip changed constantly.
This was not laziness.
It was neurological miscommunication between vision, motor planning, and execution.
The more he was forced to copy, the more his frustration grew.
Why Teachers Thought He Was Inattentive
Convergence insufficiency is one of the most overlooked contributors to so-called “inattention.”
Words blur.
Lines drift.
Focus collapses.
Children disengage not because they don’t care — but because their eyes cannot hold long enough to integrate information.
By the time this was corrected, the narrative was already set:
He is inattentive by personality.
When the Fog Lifted
When I finally placed all of it together — ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, convergence insufficiency — everything made sense.
Why he understood stories but not worksheets.
Why he inferred meaning but failed spelling.
Why he spoke intelligently but couldn’t copy.
Why he loved conversation but avoided writing.
Why he seemed bright yet continuously failed tests.
He was not behind.
He was blocked.
Blocked by a system that teaches to the average, not to the neurodivergent.
Where the Curriculum Breaks
Our school system relies heavily on phonics, sight words, and isolated vocabulary lists.
For neurotypical children, this works.
For ADHD-dyslexic children, it does not.
Single words are dead objects.
Sentences are alive.
Stories carry meaning.
Yet the system kept testing memorisation without comprehension.
“Reading at a Four-Year-Old Level”
At a Cambridge English centre, he was assessed as reading at a four-year-old level.
The solution was predictable: more phonics. More isolation.
Six months later, he was still failing English. Still scoring zero in spelling. Still unable to read lists.
Yet at home, he could:
- understand humour
- interpret emotion
- retell complex narratives
- make mature inferences
So how could he be delayed?
He wasn’t.
His brain simply does not learn in fragments.
Where This Reflection Ends
This is where Parenting Reflection 7.0 ends — not because the story is complete, but because the next part deserves its own space.
Parenting Reflection 7.1 will describe:
- the pedagogy that worked
- how we rebuilt reading from the ground up
- how sentence-first learning unlocked progress
- how English, Chinese, and Malay became integrated rather than separated
But before closing, I want to say this plainly:
My son did not fail the system.
The system failed to see him.