Help! My Child Is Struggling in School

---

There are very few pieces of paper with the power to ruin a perfectly decent Tuesday quite like a note from your child’s teacher.

Your child is not reading at grade level.

Or:

We are concerned about attention.

Or:

Your student is having difficulty completing assignments.

The teacher may have written three perfectly reasonable sentences.

Parent Brain reads:

Your child will never graduate. College is out. Employment looks questionable. They will live in your house forever. Everyone at the school knows you have failed.

Parent Brain is exceptionally dramatic.

I know because I have one.

I also have an M.Ed., decades of experience with children and education, personal experience with learning differences, and six children who have repeatedly demonstrated that humans do not develop according to tidy little charts.

And still, when one of my own children struggled in school, I worried.

Because credentials do not cancel motherhood.

Your Child Is More Than the Measurement

Schools have to measure things: reading levels, math fluency, test scores, processing, assignments, benchmarks.

Those measurements can help identify where a student needs support.

The trouble starts when a measurement becomes an identity.

There is a huge difference between:

“Reading is difficult for this child right now.”

and

“This child is bad at school.”

A kid who struggles with reading may be extraordinary at spatial reasoning. A student who forgets every worksheet ever handed to them may explain complicated ideas beautifully. A teenager who looks completely unmotivated may actually be anxious, overwhelmed, embarrassed, or exhausted.

A grade tells us something.

It does not tell us everything.

Ask What Is Getting in the Way

When a student is struggling, my first question is not:

How do we make this kid try harder?

It is:

What is getting in the way?

Do they understand the material but struggle to organize it?

Do they need movement to concentrate?

Are they so anxious about getting the answer wrong that they cannot begin?

Are multi-step directions disappearing somewhere between the teacher’s mouth and the notebook?

Is the backpack currently functioning as an archaeological site?

That information matters.

Sometimes the issue is academic. Sometimes it is executive function, attention, anxiety, confidence, or a combination of all four having a small convention inside one nervous system.

Once we understand the problem, we can actually work on it.

Please Keep Your Sense of Humor

I am serious about education.

I am considerably less serious about pretending learning must be miserable.

Sometimes the assignment makes no sense.

Sometimes everyone has spent forty minutes searching for the worksheet that is underneath the laptop.

Sometimes the printer senses weakness.

Laugh when you can.

Not at a child for struggling. Never that.

But with them.

Humor communicates something important:

This is frustrating. It is not catastrophic. We can figure it out.

That distinction matters.

Make Home the Place Where the Label Gets Smaller

ADHD, dyslexia, anxiety, executive-function challenges, learning disabilities—labels can be incredibly useful when they help us understand what support someone needs.

But the label should never become larger than the child.

Your child is not a reading level.

They are not an IEP.

They are not a missing-assignment count.

And they are definitely not the grade glaring at you from the parent portal.

They are a whole human being learning how their particular brain works.

That process can be messy.

Frankly, raising humans is already a poorly supervised experiment.

Some of them simply require different instructions.

At The Nest in Kailua, that is where I like to begin: not with What is wrong with this student? but with What does this learner need in order to succeed?

Through SOAR Study Sessions, I work with teens, college students, homeschoolers, and other learners who need support with academics, ADHD and anxiety, executive function, study skills, and test preparation.

Struggling with school does not mean a student is incapable.

It means we have something to figure out.

And that is a much better place to begin.

Text 808-997-2122