Dysgraphia: Beyond Bad Handwring, A Parent's Perspective

By J.S. Parent

If you are a parent or teacher of a child who struggles with writing and you think he or she is simply lazy, unmotivated, or defiant, you might be overlooking a learning disability called developmental dysgraphia and you should read this book.

Developmental Dysgraphia is a life-long, learning disability that adversely impacts a child's ability to write. Unfortunately, there is little awareness of this disability and as a result, children frequently go undiagnosed and unidentified, which can lead to emotional harm and academic difficulties/failures. Worse still, even when identified, children often continue to suffer as a result of a lack of understanding and awareness of the impact of the disability and the accommodations, supports, and services that are needed to address it. What is often misunderstood is that, while it can affect the neatness of handwriting, dysgraphia is not just a handwriting problem but is so much more than that.

In Dysgraphia: More than Bad Handwriting, the author shares some of her personal experiences and observations about dysgraphia and advocating for her two children with dysgraphia. She also obtained comment from one of her children as to how it feels to have dysgraphia and being told to try harder is not the answer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.S. Parent
• Release date: Feb 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386581727

Book preview

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Introduction

Chapter 2 – Hopes and Dreams

Chapter 3 – The Warning Signs

Chapter 4 – Why Don’t They Just Work Harder?

Chapter 5 – Getting an Evaluation

Chapter 6 – The CSE Meeting

Chapter 7 – Seeking Accommodations & Services

Chapter 8 – Sample Accommodations/Services

Chapter 9 – That Kid

Chapter 10 – That Parent

Chapter 11 – Raising the Bar

Chapter 12 – Dysgraphia and Math

Chapter 13 – Alternative Assessments/Grading

Chapter 14 – Physical and Mental Health Consequences

Chapter 15 – Hope for the Future

Chapter 16 – Helpful Resources

Closing Remarks

Dysgraphia:

Beyond Bad Handwriting

A Parent’s Perspective

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By:  J.S. Parent

(Just Surviving Parent)

Copyright and Notices

Copyright © 2017 by J.S. Parent. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This work does not express any views or opinions of any person or organization other than the author. 

Rev. 3/3/18

About the Author

J.S. Parent is a mother of two children, one a teen and one a pre-teen. By day, she works as an attorney. J.S. has also spent significant amounts of her time learning about dysgraphia and special education issues as she has two children with the disability and must advocate for them. 

Although well read, J.S. Parent is not a teacher, or medical expert. She is simply a parent who is hoping that sharing the experiences she has had while her children with dysgraphia have attended public school might offer some insight to other parents dealing with dysgraphia, or at least show that they are not alone in the struggle.

Chapter 1 – Introduction

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Why am I writing this book?

My purpose for writing this book is to raise awareness and understanding for dysgraphia, a learning disability that is largely unknown to the public and even to many educators and school administrators. In this book, I will share my experiences and impressions as a parent of two children with developmental dysgraphia to demonstrate how dysgraphia affects children and the families who love them. 

My hope is that increased public awareness will result in better and earlier recognition of the disability by parents and teachers, more understanding of the difficulties faced by these students, and better interventions to help these kids succeed in school. Early intervention and appropriate services should result in higher levels of self-esteem and opportunities for these kids. Unfortunately, in a lot of instances, children with dysgraphia are left behind, and the effects are devastating. 

Although I wrote this book to speak directly to parents, the intended audience is much broader. I hope that this book can help bring awareness to educators and school administrators as well. I would love to see the day that dysgraphia is universally known and understood in the most important place for there to be awareness – the schools.

What is dysgraphia?

Before going any further, it’s necessary that I explain the general meaning of the term dysgraphia. A general definition will give a framework for a basic understanding of dysgraphia with more detail to be filled in later in this work.

A very basic, surface-level definition of dysgraphia is that it’s a neurological (brain-based) disability that hinders a person’s ability to communicate thoughts through written expression. What that looks like in each person will vary from individual to individual. For instance, messy handy writing is most often the symptom that gets attention for a person with dysgraphia, but the handwriting could appear to be neat for some with dysgraphia. Thus, if one were to assume that dysgraphia requires a person to have messy handwriting, then some children will be missed and not diagnosed.

Similarly, some children will write in a slow, labored manner, and it will be relatively easy to see that writing is difficult. However, other children will write excessively fast in order to try to keep up with thoughts coming out faster than the hand can keep up with. 

Please note, that I recognize that many of us can’t keep up with our thoughts when we write by hand. However, children with dysgraphia who are racing with their writing might also be fighting against working memory problems. These children have a diminished capacity to hold information in their minds long enough to get it down on the paper. Those thoughts, when lost, might not come back as easily for kids with dysgraphia as it might for those of us without dysgraphia. Of course, the faster writing doesn’t mean that the writing comes out well. Rather, it’s likely to be littered with mistakes such as poorly formed letters, reversed letters, illegible letters, failure to properly capitalize, spelling errors, sentence constructions that don’t make sense/are incomprehensible, spacing errors, and other readability errors.

Thus, if one assumed that a diagnosis of dysgraphia requires that writing be slow and labored, then the poor children whose hands can’t keep up with their thoughts will be missed and not diagnosed. Worse, still, these kids who sometimes write like speed demons might get labeled as careless or sloppy. And ultimately, they might get labeled with what I think of as the worst label of all — that they are not trying hard enough.

There are many other examples that I could give. However, this is just an introductory chapter. Thus, in a later chapter, I will go into more detail and provide some of the warning signs and red flags. But keep in mind that although for a particular child, there might be warning signs and red flags evidenced in his or her writing, ultimately, it takes an expert and appropriate testing to diagnose dysgraphia. As I am not an expert, you might think of this as somewhat of a layman’s guide for taking notice that there might be a problem that requires an expert’s analysis. You might think of these red flags as providing an informal screening guide.

Developmental vs. Acquired Dysgraphia

Please also note that I also used the term developmental above to distinguish the type of dysgraphia that this book addresses from another type of dysgraphia — one that is acquired.  Should you search for research studies to help you understand your child’s dysgraphia, you will need to be aware of the distinction because the research pertaining to acquired dysgraphia is not likely to be relevant to developmental dysgraphia. As research can be time-consuming, you very well may want to weed out the research that is likely not to be helpful.

Acquired dysgraphia is dysgraphia that is caused by an injury to the brain as a result of an event, such as a head injury or a stroke. In acquired dysgraphia, an individual who previously did not have a disability in writing later acquires the disability as a result of a particular event. 

In contrast, developmental dysgraphia is not the result of an event but is a consequence of the way the child’s brain has developed. In fact, developmental dysgraphia has been found by some researchers to be a difference in the way the manner of brain functioning of a child with dysgraphia as opposed to the manner of brain function of a child without dysgraphia. These details will be addressed in a later chapter, but if you wish to research the issue for yourself, you may do an Internet search using the terms fMRI and dysgraphia.

Unfortunately, there is no known cure for developmental dysgraphia. As discussed further herein, there are only accommodations and services to teach the children how to work around or cope with the disability. Additionally, although children can improve their skills with the use of accommodations, such as computer software, children with dysgraphia will always have dysgraphia. It will just be a matter of how much improvement the child has made.

Now that you understand the type of dysgraphia about which I am writing, I will drop the word developmental for the rest of this book and refer only to dysgraphia. Thus, everything from here on will concern developmental dysgraphia only. No part of this book will address acquired dysgraphia anyway because that is not my experience and I have no knowledge to share on that topic.

Dyslexia Distinguished

This book also concerns dysgraphia without dyslexia. Although, I understand that writing difficulties can run with dyslexia and thus, some children with dyslexia are also sometimes diagnosed with dysgraphia, too, my experience is limited to dysgraphia without dyslexia. As such, I cannot comment as to dyslexia with dysgraphia or writing difficulties from other sources. I like to think of the dysgraphia that I am writing about (where the child does not also have dyslexia) as pure dysgraphia.

Although I may be wrong, it has at times appeared to me as if dyslexia with writing problems might be more common and better understood than the writing problems that can arise with pure dysgraphia. That said, in no way am I suggesting that dyslexia and its writing problems are well enough understood, or in any way that the dyslexics with writing difficulties have it easy. If I were to guess, I would think that not only are some people still not informed as to dyslexia and its challenges related to reading, but perhaps so much focus goes into the reading problem that some people may not understand the challenges that dyslexia can also pose to writing.

In any event, I would also guess that if writing problems associated with dyslexia were well understood, the life of a child with pure dysgraphia might be little easier than it is for most. At least from my own experiences, I posit that if the writing problems of the dyslexics were understood better, I probably wouldn’t have found myself feeling like I was paving the road at our school district for acceptance and understanding of the need to use assistive technology to address the difficulties caused by dysgraphia (computer word processing, word prediction, voice recognition software, etc.). 

That said, I also feel that but for the dyslexia organizations, dysgraphia wouldn’t really have a voice at all. So, I am very grateful for the advocacy efforts of the dyslexia organizations. In particular, in my home state of New York, the dyslexia groups were the driving force for legislation passed just last year that lays the groundwork for state recognition of dysgraphia. These groups are building further on those efforts and are seeking to pass legislation that would require that teachers be trained in dyslexia and related disorders (which includes dysgraphia), and that once a student is identified with such a disorder, the school district must provide a teacher trained to teach to that disability.

Regardless of which is understood more or less (dyslexia or dysgraphia), one thing is obvious as you start to research dysgraphia. Unlike dyslexia, which has organizations dedicated to representing the interests of the children with dyslexia, pure dysgraphia does not have any national organization representing it and only it. Rather, dysgraphia advocacy and awareness campaigns seem to fall under the umbrella of the general learning disability organizations and dyslexia organizations. Someday, maybe I will form one, but right now, I have my hands full just trying to get my kids through school. However, I wouldn’t be upset if someone beat me to it and formed a national organization representing pure dysgraphia, as long as it’s done well.

That said, I also feel that but for the dyslexia organizations, dysgraphia wouldn’t really have a voice at all. So, I am very grateful for the advocacy efforts of the dyslexia organizations. In particular, in my home state of New York, the dyslexia groups were the driving force for legislation passed just last year that provided for specific recognition of dysgraphia. These groups are building further on those efforts and are seeking to pass legislation that would require that teachers be trained in dyslexia and related disorders (which includes dysgraphia), and that once a student is identified with such a disorder, the school district must assign a teacher trained to teach to that disability as the teacher for the student.

One last difference to highlight is while there are various techniques that in pieces might help a child with dysgraphia, unlike dyslexia, there is no well-known program designed to address dysgraphia. For instance, there is no dysgraphia equivalent to programs such as Orton-Gillingham (OG), the Davis Method, and the Wilson System (I don’t know which of these are proven to work although I hear a lot about and have seen quite a few references to the OG method). This is yet one more problem that makes dysgraphia so incredibly frustrating.

The Fine Print

Finally, please also note that I am not a doctor, psychologist, occupational therapist, teacher, or other medical or educational expert. Thus, I cannot offer any medical or educational advice. I also cannot diagnose any child’s learning disability. Nor can I provide any specific recommendations for any particular child. For that, you need to consult the proper healthcare or education professional. 

Additionally, nothing in this book is intended to provide any legal advice. If you need legal advice, you should consult a private attorney in your area who specializes in special education issues. Such an attorney should know about the workings of the schools in your area and the laws of your state. Moreover, legal advice is almost always dependent on the specific facts at hand and cannot be given blindly or generally.

As I mentioned previously, I am writing this book simply to share my experiences, some of which include information about what I have read, services that I have tried, and disputes that I have had