Why Is My Child Struggling to Read?

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Frequently Asked Questions: This optional section addresses the most common questions that interested parents and educators have when looking for the information on this page.

• Why is my child struggling to read even with tutoring and extra practice?
  • In most cases, the core issue is not effort or motivation. It is weak phonemic awareness, which blocks orthographic mapping and prevents words from becoming automatic.
• Are vision problems the main cause of reading difficulties?
  • Vision issues should always be ruled out, but they do not explain most persistent decoding and fluency failures in alphabetic reading systems.
• What is orthographic mapping in simple terms?
  • It is how the brain stores a word by linking pronunciation, spelling, and meaning so the word can be recognized instantly instead of decoded every time.
• Why do many children look better at first, then fall behind later?
  • Early tasks can be passed with broad phonological skills, memorization, or guessing. Later text exposes missing phonemic precision and weak mapping.
• Can most struggling readers catch up with the right instruction?
  • Yes. With explicit, mechanism-level intervention, the evidence indicates that roughly 90-95% of children can reach grade-level reading.
• What is the best reading program for struggling readers?
  • The best program is one that targets the root cause of reading difficulties, which is weak phonemic awareness and orthographic mapping. Pictures Are For Babies is built on this understanding and is designed to produce durable, automatic reading skills.

If your child is struggling to read, you are likely getting explanations that sound plausible and are mostly wrong. The common script is predictable: maybe it is vision, maybe it is memory, maybe your child is not motivated, maybe they just need more exposure, maybe they need a more "multisensory" program.

Some of these factors can matter at the margins. None of them explain the majority of persistent decoding and fluency failure. The core bottleneck is usually simpler and less marketable: the child has not developed the phonemic proficiency required for orthographic mapping, so words are not being stored correctly for automatic retrieval.

Most Diagnoses Are Backward🔗

Parents are routinely told their child has a "memory problem" because the child forgets words from one week to the next. In most cases, this is not forgetting. It is failed storage. When a word is correctly mapped, retrieval is durable. When a word is never properly mapped, retrieval is fragile and disappears under pressure.

The same mistake appears in visual explanations, other than visual impairments that are easily fixed with glasses. However, visual accounts do not explain why the strongest predictors of reading outcomes are phonological and phonemic (that is, the ability to manipulate individual sounds in words), not visual tracking speed or visual pattern recognition in isolation.

Many reading interventions market themselves as effective because of their inclusion of multisensory activities. Touching letters in sand, tracing with fingers, clapping, and similar formats can be fine as activity wrappers. But format is not mechanism. If the instruction is not building phonemic precision and linking sounds to print in a way that produces automaticity, you are just adding choreography to weak pedagogy.

The Nature of Reading Acquisition Is Phonological, Not Visual🔗

The main predictor of reading success is phonemic awareness, the ability to fluently identify and manipulate individual phonemes in spoken words. Through this cognitive skill, students can link the sounds of words to their spellings and meanings, which is the basis for orthographic mapping, the permanent storage of words in long-term memory for instant retrieval. When this process is working, students build a large, rapidly retrievable word bank. Reading speed increases, effort drops, and comprehension improves because cognitive resources are no longer spent on effortful decoding.

When this process is not working, students compensate. They guess from context, memorize visual fragments, over-rely on pictures, or decode letter by letter with exhausting effort. All of these compensating strategies can produce short-term progress reports while the underlying system remains broken. That is why many interventions look productive in lesson logs and fail in real reading.

Effective intervention targets the bottleneck directly by developing phonemic awareness explicitly, then links it to decoding and spelling with enough intensity to produce automatic performance. For struggling readers, this includes instruction on more advanced tasks, not just the basic tasks of segmenting words into individual phonemes and blending them back together, but also in:

• Substitution: changing one sound in a word to make a new word.
• Deletion: removing a sound from a word to make a new word.
• Reversal: reversing the order of sounds in a word to make a new word.

Children who receive this kind of instruction can make significant progress in a matter of weeks, even if they have been struggling for years. The evidence on this is strong: with correct instruction, roughly 90-95% of children can reach grade-level reading outcomes. A small percentage remain severely impaired due to broader neurological, language, sensory, or cognitive constraints. Those students need specialized support, but they do not invalidate the main conclusion that most reading failure is preventable.

The Practical Decision for Parents🔗

When you shop for literacy products for your struggling child, you should be asking whether the program is built on top of an evidence-based understanding of how reading develops and how the phonological nature of reading is the cause of the vast majority of reading difficulties. A program that fails this check is simply unsuitable for this population and mildly effective for the rest.

Pictures Are For Babies is built on this understanding. It trains the mechanism that fluent reading depends on and uses mastery criteria that require automatic performance rather than checkbox completion. If your child is struggling to read, the next step is not more of the same with better marketing. The next step is evidence-based instruction that targets the root cause of the problem.