At Western University's Mary J. Wright Child and Youth Development Clinic, I work on a team training future school psychologists. In our work, we encounter parents concerned about their children's learning on an almost daily basis.
When I started my training almost 15 years ago, I was less confident about how to respond to these concerns. Might caregivers be over-worried and under-informed?
However, my own research and ongoing experience have taught me that caregiver concerns about reading most often point to meaningful learning needs.
For example, in a study conducted by myself and my colleagues, we found that when community parents were concerned about their Grade 2 children's reading, almost half of their children performed substantially below age expectations on a standardized word reading test. An additional number of children showed language problems.
