Dyspraxia. The Clumsy Child…

Yep, sometimes it’s embarrassing. Things get broken, lost, mislaid. It’s hard to join in sports. It’s often hard to make friends. Perhaps as a family you’d rather be very active, but your child just can’t fit in, even if they try hard.

People with dyspraxia can learn motor skills through endless practice. Practicing and learning any single skill takes a surprising amount of effort and often they still have to think about it to achieve it.

With handwriting, if you have to spend too much attention on the act of writing, you can’t think about the content.

Even young children are often depressed or despondent.

Other parents often criticise. They really don’t understand what you’re dealing with.

But there’s more than that. There’s the confusion. And often falling behind with schoolwork. They may struggle to keep up with peers unless they receive specialist dyspraxia support tailored to how they learn.

Dyspraxia support in school is often inconsistent – which is why many families seek targeted help outside the classroom.

You’re not alone – and with the right guidance, your child can find new ways to succeed. Oxford Specialist Tutors can help you discover what works.

Your child is probably just as frustrated as you are.

Often children just give up. They lose the belief in the possibility of success. Nobody seems to understand them. They tire easily and often get accused of being lazy. At school, when they know the answer, they often get accused of guessing because people don’t understand how their intuitive thinking works.

It’s hard to see anything positive in a situation like this.
You’ve probably already followed the traditional, well-intentioned advice. Checklists, doing it with them, doing it for them.

It’s not your fault – you’ve been doing all you can to help them. The effort you put in gets you from day to day but it’s often hard to imagine a time when they are completely independent.

Without addressing the underlying issues, many dyspraxic children struggle to build confidence or develop the skills needed to thrive in the classroom. Difficulties often persist into adulthood. What they need is a gentle, respectful, non-judgmental approach – and a neurodevelopmental program that addresses their senses, balance, muscle tone and coordination. They also need learning strategies that support their dyspraxic, intuitive thinking style.

Here’s the reality…

There’s an alternative, a more efficient, kind way to go about it. It’s time to make a change.

It’s a mistake to think that they are “just learning disabled”. Often they think and learn differently.

It’s important for them to understand how their thinking works. It’s not guesswork, it’s intuition, sometimes thought of as “gut feeling”. They can learn how to explain their ideas effectively. As they get older this paves the way for academic thinking and critical analysis.

It is important to show your child how to take advantage of the thinking processes that are natural to them. They do not need to focus on what they cannot do.

Searching for practical dyspraxia strategies?

With the right dyspraxia tutor and a personalised neurodevelopmental program, your child can build lasting confidence – and start developing strategies that actually work for them. They need help to become lifelong independent learners who can eventually thrive in the workplace.

For those with Dyspraxia, there are specific secrets to succeeding in school… and in life.

Here are some of them:

They need to develop automaticity of learned motors skills by first working with the underlying body-brain connections.
They do better when sitting on the floor, or any other surface they can’t fall off of, so that they don’t worry about their stability when they focus on their work.
They need to improve stability through their neurodevelopmental program to make it easier to focus and concentrate, and to reduce anxiety (being off-balance can and often does cause anxiety).
They need to capitalise on the ability to think intuitively by addressing learning from the big picture inwards instead of chunking it into meaningless little portions that are hard to remember in sequence.

These insights shape the dyspraxia coping strategies, study skills for dyspraxia, and classroom strategies we use every day – helping students grow more confident in school and beyond.

If what you’ve been working with hasn’t given you the results you wanted, it’s time to try something different.

Many families come to us after trying general academic help that didn’t address their child’s unique needs. Our dyspraxia support is grounded in how children actually learn and how they can succeed, even if they have other overlapping labels.

We suggest you use these four steps to achieve success with your dyspraxic child:

Investigate with us what’s really going on.
Develop your child’s true learning potential through an individualised neurodevelopmental home program, which is designed to support dyspraxia at its root – improving coordination, processing, and confidence through tried and tested methods.
Work with a specialist dyspraxia tutor who actually understands how dyspraxia affects learning, to develop strategies for success.
Apply what you’ve learned to help your child become an effective, independent lifelong learner.

If you would like to talk with one of our experts to discuss what would be the best approach to support your dyspraxic child, book a free Dyspraxia Support Consultation today.

Book a Dyspraxia Support Consultation