When Words Don’t Stay Still, and Learning Breaks Before It Begins
I have a seven-year-old son who entered Primary One at the beginning of 2025.
For years, my husband and I carried a quiet suspicion that he was slower in learning and reading than his peers, and that he might have ADHD. It was never an accusation, never a label we hurried to place upon him—just an instinct, the kind that lingers quietly at the back of a parent’s mind when something doesn’t quite fit the usual pattern of development.
Even so, we believed, perhaps rather naively, that a structured environment would help him grow out of whatever was holding him back. We thought that once he entered a traditional, academically demanding Chinese primary school just a short walk from our home, everything would somehow fall into place. The routines would shape him, the discipline would ground him, and the gaps we had been noticing would gradually disappear.
We were wrong.
When School Began, Everything Fell Apart
The moment school started, all of those assumptions collapsed almost overnight.
He struggled with almost everything. Not mildly, and not gradually, but in a way that became unmistakably obvious within the first week. He couldn’t sit still for long. He wandered around the classroom. Copying from the whiteboard seemed almost impossible because the words simply refused to stay where they were. Homework rarely came home completed, not because he was unwilling, but because he genuinely didn’t know where to begin. Even the unwritten expectations of being a pupil—remaining seated, following routines, understanding what “school behaviour” meant—seemed completely foreign to him.
It wasn’t stubbornness.
It was confusion.
Almost every day his homework book came home covered in large red remarks, written with the frustration of someone trying to manage forty children at once.
“Parents please take note, student is lazy.”
“Student is not listening.”
“Student refuses to complete work.”
To a teacher managing a crowded classroom, these observations were understandable. Looking at one child among many, it is easy to conclude that the problem is attitude or discipline. Yet from where I stood as his mother, watching him every day outside the classroom, I wasn’t seeing a child who refused to learn.
I was watching a child who was drowning.
What I Thought I Had Already Fixed
Long before he entered Primary One, I had already begun wondering whether ADHD was only part of the story. I suspected convergence insufficiency. I wondered about dyslexia and dysgraphia. Rather than waiting for school to tell us something was wrong, I started intervening early through the means available to me—acupuncture, movement-based regulation, sensory work, nutritional supplementation and building more structure into his daily life. My intention was simple: reduce the constant overwhelm his nervous system seemed to be living with.
Those interventions helped.
Over time he became calmer, more emotionally regulated and far less reactive than before. He appeared more grounded in his own body, and I remember thinking we were finally moving in the right direction.
What I did not yet understand was that regulating ADHD is only one part of the journey.
It can calm a child.
It cannot teach a child how to learn.
It does not automatically build the reading and writing foundations that never developed in the first place, nor does it fill the developmental gaps that a Primary One classroom assumes every child already possesses.
A Mother with a Clinical Lens
My professional training is in pharmacy, so my instinct has always been to think clinically. When faced with a problem, I naturally begin mapping causes to effects, looking for mechanisms that might explain what I am observing.
At the same time, I was raised in Southeast Asia, where healing has never been understood as something purely biological. It includes the body, emotions, movement, food, sleep, breath and the environment in which a person lives. Rather than seeing Eastern and Western approaches as competing with one another, I gradually found myself drawing from both.
Our journey eventually became a combination of Western neurodevelopmental science, Eastern methods of regulation, nutrition, movement, breathwork, acupuncture and, perhaps more than anything else, relentless observation. Much of what we learnt during those early years later became the foundation of my first book, My Child Is Not Naughty—Just Different: Raising an ADHD Child Through Eastern Wisdom and Modern Science.
Yet despite everything we had done, I still didn’t have the full picture.
The First Misleading Breakthrough: Convergence Insufficiency
Before school began, we discovered that he had convergence insufficiency towards the end of age six. At the time, I genuinely believed we had finally found the answer to everything.
His eyes struggled to sustain near focus. Text drifted across the page, words seemed unstable, and sometimes they even appeared to double. A single word had to be repeated over and over before it would finally “stay still” long enough for him to recognise it.
After six months of targeted intervention through visual exercises, structured reading distance and sensory reinforcement, his convergence insufficiency improved significantly by around seven and a half years of age. Almost immediately, I noticed changes. Copying from the whiteboard became easier. Tracking lines of text was far more stable than before.
Yet something still wasn’t right.
His English reading barely improved.
That was when I realised that even after removing the visual barrier, another obstacle remained.
When All the Pieces Finally Aligned
The real breakthrough came only when I stopped looking for a single explanation.
My son was not dealing with one condition. He was living with ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia and convergence insufficiency at the same time. Each of these conditions alone can interfere with learning. Together, they create difficulties that are far greater than the sum of their individual parts.
For a long time, I had been trying to understand each diagnosis separately. Only later did I realise that they constantly interacted with one another, making it almost impossible for teachers—or even parents—to see the whole picture.
ADHD explained why he struggled to regulate his attention, not because he lacked intelligence or motivation, but because his brain processed information differently. His thoughts often moved faster than his hands. His body responded before instructions had fully settled. The more the environment demanded prolonged control and sustained attention, the more overwhelmed his nervous system became. Even after his ADHD became considerably more regulated, however, the learning difficulties remained. That was my first clue that attention alone had never been the whole story.
Dyslexia answered another set of questions. It explained why he loved stories but disliked reading individual words, why he could understand emotional nuance in conversations yet consistently fail spelling tests, and why isolated vocabulary such as broccoli, sausage or pencil seemed to carry so little meaning for him. His brain was constantly searching for context. Give him a meaningful story and he became completely engaged. Present him with disconnected word lists and his interest disappeared almost immediately.
Dysgraphia revealed itself whenever he picked up a pencil. He could explain ideas fluently, yet translating those ideas onto paper was exhausting. Letter formation was inconsistent, strokes were often reversed and his pencil grip changed constantly. The problem was never a lack of effort. It was the complex neurological coordination between visual processing, motor planning and written execution.
Looking back, I also realised how much convergence insufficiency had shaped everyone’s perception of him. When words blur, lines drift and sustained focus becomes physically difficult, children naturally disengage. Unfortunately, that disengagement is often mistaken for laziness or inattention. By the time his visual difficulties had largely resolved, the label had already been attached to him.
Only when I stepped back and viewed all four conditions together did everything begin to make sense. Suddenly I understood why he could discuss stories intelligently yet struggle with worksheets, why he inferred meaning so naturally but repeatedly failed spelling tests, why conversation came easily while copying remained painfully difficult, and why a bright, curious child appeared to perform so poorly in school.
He had never been incapable of learning.
He was learning through multiple developmental barriers at the same time.
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