Roadmap to Transfer Advocacy Power from Parent to Child (aka How We Get Ourselves Fired)

Too busy to read? Here's a short video on the topic:How To Get Yourself Fired as You Child's Advocate

 I know many of you may still be in the thick of raising small children, but if you are raising a child with dyslexia or other learning disability, I want you to step back for a moment and think about the long game. We have have to get these little learners to young adulthood and teach them how to advocate for themselves.

Here is a general roadmap of your role as a parent advocate in school:

Elementary school: Pretty straightforward. You only have to communicate with one main teacher plus a reading specialist and/or special education teacher. Elementary teachers expect to get communications (emails, calls, etc) from parents.

Middle school: Your child now has 5-6 teachers for each of the different subject areas plus a special education teacher and/or reading specialist. Teachers are now encouraging kids to take on more responsibility (using a planner, etc) and to advocate for their own needs a little more. At this stage your child should be invited to attend their IEP meeting (though this should be considered on a case-by-case basis).

High school: Your child still has 6+ teachers for their various classes and electives, and they are expected to do the majority of advocating for themselves at this point. They should definitely be attending their own IEP meetings in high school and be involved in decision-making. Parents should no longer be emailing or calling before the teen has tried at least once for themselves. 

College and Employment:  Your young adult will now need to be able to 100% advocate for themselves (with maybe some behind the scenes support from you). 

So this means you need to start communication with your child about their dyslexia early and ease them into advocating for themselves in age-appropriate ways over the years. There is nothing to gain from avoiding the topic of their dyslexia until they are in their teens or later. The sooner they own it, the better. 

If you need tips on talking to your child about dyslexia, check out my mini-course:Explaining Dyslexia to Kids

On a little bit of a side note, I highly recommend the book How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims. This book has nothing to do with dyslexia, but talks about the failure of parents to pass the torch of responsibility and accountability to children and teens as they grow. This book inspired me to turn more daily tasks over to my children for their own good.  A positive switch for all (though my kids didn’t agree at the time).  

OK...back to our road map:

During middle and high school there needs to be a plan to gradually turn advocacy in school over to your child.  In middle school, that might mean having your child write an email to a teacher to ask for help rather than the email coming from you. You can help your middle school child write the email, but once they are in high school they should draft the email themselves and have you check it before they send it. Then, once they get comfortable, they do it with out ANY oversight from you.  All of this so that, when they are in college or on the job, they won’t shy away from asking for help when needed.  

As my daughter gets older,  I will need to teach her more about dyslexia. Sadly, she is going to encounter high school teachers, college professors and employers who won’t know much about dyslexia (or worse have misconceptions about it), and it may fall on her to explain how dyslexia affects her. She will also need to learn about IDEA and her rights, but this can probably wait until late high school. 

Hopefully this roadmap helps you make a plan for the various ages and stages, but as with everything with kids, you need to find a path that works best for YOUR child. Factors like maturity, anxiety and organizational skills need to be taken into consideration when thinking about their ability to advocate for themselve. This means that you may have to make the switch to independence more gradually and provide more support for longer, but independence is still the goal regardless.  Remember, our primary goal as parents is to get ourselves fired because they don't need us anymore 🥲

Now go watch Failure to Launch so you can have a laugh about how it can all go wrong while watching Matthew McConaughey 😜.