How My Son Learned to Read — After His Brain Was Finally Ready
After my son’s first-term exams, the numbers arrived quietly — but they landed like a blow.
English: 13 marks.
Mathematics: 23 marks.
The rest followed the same pattern.
He had failed almost everything.
I remember sitting with those results in my hands — not angry, not even surprised — just hollow. We had suspected for years that something was different. ADHD had hovered at the edge of our awareness like an unspoken truth. We had hoped, naïvely, that a structured, high-performance school would somehow organise him into alignment.
Instead, it dismantled him.
That was the moment I stopped asking whether he could adapt to the system,
and started asking whether the system had any understanding of his brain at all.
Regulation Comes Before Learning
I knew then that no academic intervention would work unless his ADHD was first regulated.
Not managed.
Not suppressed.
Regulated — at the level of cognition, nervous system, and physiology.
What followed were three months of work that never appeared on report cards.
I began acupuncture.
I introduced consistent supplementation — probiotics, omega fatty acids.
I rebuilt his nutrition from the ground up.
I protected deep, regular sleep.
I used massage and somatic calming.
I slowed his world deliberately.
All of this is documented in detail in my book Different, Not Less — Bridging Western Science and Eastern Philosophy in Parenting a Hyperactive and Inattentive Child.
At the time, however, I was not writing.
I was watching.
Gradually, the chaos softened.
His emotional volatility reduced.
His attention stretched — not dramatically, but measurably.
His frustration threshold rose.
Only then did something crucial happen:
his brain began to have spare capacity.
Before regulation, there was no room for learning.
Every task consumed his entire neurological budget.
Only after the internal noise quieted could anything else enter.
The Afternoon That Changed Everything
It was during this period — not before — that the afternoon at the noodle shop happened.
One casual day, having lunch with my husband at our familiar neighbourhood noodle shop, my eyes wandered to a small shelf by the wall. A few children’s books were stacked there casually, meant to occupy young diners.
That was when I saw them.
Among the mismatched titles were several thin readers from the Peter and Jane series.
Not the full set — only fragments.
7A. 6B. 9A.
I had never read Peter and Jane as a child. I only began reading seriously later, in upper primary, largely without guidance. When reading finally took hold of me, it was Enid Blyton that captured me. Phonics, early readers, systematic literacy — these were not part of my childhood.
Like my son, however, English was my primary language.
Language itself never frightened me.
But Peter and Jane had a reputation. I had heard, repeatedly, that it helped children learn to read — especially those who struggled.
I was curious.
The restaurant owner knew I had a young son. When I asked if I could borrow one of the books, she smiled immediately and encouraged me to take it home.
That night, I picked 6B and tried it with my son.
Painfully Slow — But Different
It was slow.
Painfully slow.
We managed only two pages at a time. Sometimes less. It took nearly two weeks to finish that one slim book.
Each night, I worried — again — that my son simply could not read.
And yet, something was different.
The words repeated.
The scenes were familiar.
The rhythm was predictable.
Despite the struggle, he kept coming back.
What I did not realise then — but understand clearly now — is that this attempt succeeded only because it happened after cognitive regulation.
Reading is not a standalone skill. For a child with ADHD and dyslexia, it is a compound neurological task requiring sustained attention, working memory, sequencing, and inhibition — all functions impaired when ADHD is unregulated (Barkley, 2015).
Dyslexia adds another layer: difficulty mapping sounds to symbols (Shaywitz, 2003).
Before regulation, my son could not access any of this.
After regulation, the door cracked open.
Why Peter and Jane Worked
Sentences — especially repetitive, meaningful ones — reduced the cognitive cost.
Context stabilised attention.
Familiar structure lowered working-memory demand.
Meaning anchored decoding (Snowling, 2019).
I watched my son do something revealing:
He did not read letter by letter.
He recognised words as visual blocks.
Patterns either held together — or collapsed.
Peter and Jane allowed recognition, prediction, and confirmation,
instead of forcing fresh decoding at every line.
People asked me what I would do about spelling.
Of course I thought about it.
But I also understood something fundamental:
confidence is neurological.
A brain that associates text with failure cannot learn from it. Dyslexic readers already expend more energy decoding. When that effort is paired with repeated correction and timed drills, dopamine drops and attention collapses.
I chose reading confidence first.
Spelling could wait.
Fear could not.
When School Confirmed What I Already Knew
At school, language remained fragmented.
Vocabulary lists appeared without narrative.
Spelling tests rewarded memorisation.
Worksheets trained exam formats, not communication.
My son, however, loves stories. He infers meaning easily. He understands narrative flow.
His barrier was not language.
It was access.
After his second-term exams, his teacher told me he was more regulated than before — but he still failed because he could not read.
That was the final confirmation.
Reading is the gatekeeper — not only for English, but for mathematics, science, Chinese, and Malay.
My son later admitted that during the one-hour-and-fifteen-minute paper, he drifted — not from boredom, but from a lack of confidence to even approach the text.
Starting Where He Was
This is the unmasking effect of ADHD. Once the noise reduces, the true learning profile emerges (Barkley, 2015).
In my son’s case, what remained was dyslexia, dysgraphia, and later, confirmed convergence insufficiency.
Writing exhausted him.
Letters floated.
Copying fractured his attention.
What was labelled as behaviour was, in truth, visual strain and motor overload (Scheiman & Wick, 2014).
I had to ask myself the hardest question:
Where do I start?
The answer required humility.
I accepted that my seven-year-old’s reading level was closer to that of a four-year-old — a three-year gap.
I chose not to be ashamed.
I chose to start where he was.
Sequence, Not Miracle
I applied the Peter and Jane principle across languages — English, Chinese, Malay — all beginning at early reading levels.
I stripped learning back to its foundations:
repetition
predictability
narrative
time
I also made another decision.
He needed one-to-one calibration.
I stepped away from work and took him out of daycare so I could observe, repeat, slow down, and adjust — in real time.
Within a month and a half, we reached 5B of Peter and Jane.
We climbed from:
Here is Peter. Here is Jane.
to full pages of small text, stories, and paragraphs.
Not because he suddenly became “normal.”
But because his brain was finally ready — and the method finally matched it.
The Order Matters
This was not a miracle.
It was sequence.
Regulation first.
Capacity next.
Reading after.
When the order is right, learning does not need force.
It simply begins to flow.