…After His Brain Was Finally Ready
After my son’s first-term examinations, the results arrived quietly, but they landed like a blow.
English: 13 marks. Mathematics: 23 marks. The remaining subjects followed much the same pattern. He had failed almost everything.
I remember sitting with those results in my hands—not angry, not even surprised, but simply hollow. For years, my husband and I had suspected that something about his development was different. ADHD had lingered quietly at the edge of our awareness, an unspoken possibility that neither of us was ready to confront. We had hoped, perhaps rather naïvely, that a structured, academically demanding Chinese primary school would somehow organise him into alignment. Instead, it dismantled him. That was the moment I stopped asking whether my son could adapt to the system and began asking whether the system had any understanding of how his brain actually worked.
Regulation Comes Before Learning
I realised then that no academic intervention would succeed unless his ADHD was first regulated—not simply managed or suppressed, but regulated at the level of his nervous system, cognition and physiology. The following three months produced nothing that could be measured on a report card. We began acupuncture, introduced consistent supplementation with probiotics and omega fatty acids, rebuilt his nutrition from the ground up, protected his sleep and incorporated massage together with other forms of somatic calming into his daily routine. I deliberately slowed the pace of his world. Much of this journey is documented in detail in my book Different, Not Less — Bridging Western Science and Eastern Philosophy in Parenting a Hyperactive and Inattentive Child. At the time, however, I was not writing. I was simply watching.
Gradually, I noticed small but meaningful changes. His emotional volatility softened, he could sustain his attention a little longer than before, and frustrations that once overwhelmed him became easier to recover from. None of these changes were dramatic enough for anyone else to notice, but together they told me something fundamental was happening. Only much later did I understand what it was. His brain had finally developed some spare capacity. Before regulation, every task consumed almost everything his nervous system had available. There was simply no room left for learning. Only after the internal noise began to quieten could anything else begin to take root.
The Afternoon That Changed Everything
It was during this period that an ordinary lunch unexpectedly changed the course of our reading journey. One afternoon, while having lunch with my husband at our familiar neighbourhood noodle shop, my eyes wandered towards a small shelf against the wall. A handful of children’s books had been left there to occupy young diners. Among the mismatched titles were several slim readers from the Peter and Jane series. Not a complete collection—just scattered volumes: 7A, 6B, 9A.
I had never grown up reading Peter and Jane. I only became an enthusiastic reader much later, during upper primary school, largely on my own. When reading finally captured me, it was Enid Blyton that opened that world. Early readers, systematic literacy and phonics had never really been part of my childhood. Like my son, however, English had always been my primary language, so language itself had never frightened me. I had often heard that Peter and Jane helped children who struggled to read, and curiosity got the better of me. The restaurant owner knew I had a young son. When I asked whether I could borrow one of the books, she smiled immediately and encouraged me to take it home. That evening, we opened Book 6B together.
Painfully Slow, Yet Different
It was painfully slow. Some evenings we managed only two pages. Sometimes even less. It took almost two weeks to finish that one slim reader. Night after night, I found myself wondering whether my son simply could not learn to read. Yet something about this attempt felt different from every previous one. The words repeated. The situations became familiar. The rhythm of the stories was predictable. Although reading remained difficult, he kept coming back.
Looking back now, I realise the timing mattered just as much as the books themselves. This attempt succeeded because it came after months spent regulating his nervous system. Reading is not an isolated skill. For a child with ADHD and dyslexia, it depends on sustained attention, working memory, sequencing and inhibition—functions that are often compromised when ADHD remains unregulated. Dyslexia adds another layer by making it difficult to map sounds to written symbols. Before regulation, my son simply could not access these processes consistently. After regulation, the door finally opened a little.
Why Peter and JaneWorked
Only much later did I begin to understand why those books suited him so well. The repetitive sentences reduced the cognitive effort required to process each page. Familiar contexts stabilised his attention, predictable structures lowered the demands placed on working memory, and meaning itself anchored the process of decoding. Rather than approaching every line as something entirely new, he was able to anticipate what might come next, recognise familiar patterns and confirm what he had already begun to understand.
As I watched him read, I noticed something even more revealing. He did not naturally read letter by letter. Instead, he seemed to recognise words as visual patterns. Either the entire pattern held together, or it collapsed. Peter and Janehappened to support exactly this way of learning. The repeated vocabulary, recurring sentence structures and familiar narratives allowed recognition, prediction and confirmation to work together, rather than forcing him to decode every single word from the beginning each time he encountered it.
Many people later asked whether I worried about spelling. Of course I did. But I also understood something that, at the time, felt more urgent. A child who begins to associate written language with repeated failure eventually stops wanting to engage with it altogether. Dyslexic readers already expend far more cognitive effort simply trying to decode text. If every reading session is immediately followed by correction, spelling drills and another reminder of what they cannot yet do, reading quickly becomes something to avoid rather than something to enjoy. I decided that confidence had to come first. Spelling could wait because it can always be taught later. Fear, once deeply attached to reading, is much harder to undo.
When School Confirmed What I Had Begun to Understand
Meanwhile, school continued presenting language as disconnected fragments. Vocabulary lists appeared without stories. Spelling tests rewarded memorisation. Worksheets trained examination formats rather than communication. Yet at home I was seeing a completely different child. My son loved stories. He understood humour. He could infer meaning remarkably well and followed narratives with surprising ease. His difficulty had never been language itself. It was accessing written language in the way school expected him to.
After his second-term examinations, his teacher told me that although he appeared far more regulated than before, he was still struggling because he simply could not read well enough. That conversation confirmed something I had already begun to suspect. Reading is not merely another subject. It is the gateway to every subject. Without it, English becomes difficult, but so do Mathematics, Science, Chinese and Malay. Sometime later, my son quietly admitted that during the one-hour-and-fifteen-minute examination paper, he drifted—not because he was bored, but because he lacked the confidence to even begin reading the questions.
Starting Where He Was
This was what I now think of as the unmasking effect of ADHD. As the neurological noise gradually settled, the underlying learning profile became much clearer. What remained were dyslexia, dysgraphia and, later, confirmed convergence insufficiency. Writing exhausted him. Copying fractured his attention. Behaviours that had so often been interpreted as laziness or inattention increasingly revealed themselves to be the combined effects of visual strain, language-processing difficulties and the enormous motor effort required simply to write.
Eventually I had to ask myself the hardest question of all: where do I begin? The answer required a great deal of humility. I accepted that my seven-year-old was reading at approximately the level expected of a four-year-old. There was no benefit in pretending otherwise, and certainly no shame in acknowledging it. The only meaningful place to begin was exactly where he was. From that point onward, I applied the same principles across English, Chinese and Malay, always beginning with the earliest reading levels. Learning became less about pushing forward and more about rebuilding foundations through repetition, predictability, meaningful stories and, above all, time.
I also made another decision. He needed one-to-one teaching. I stepped away from work and took him out of daycare so that I could observe him closely, repeat lessons whenever necessary, slow the pace and adjust continuously according to how he responded. Within a month and a half, we had reached Book 5B of Peter and Jane. We had travelled from Here is Peter. Here is Jane. to pages filled with paragraphs and complete stories.
Looking back now, I don’t think Peter and Jane was the miracle. Had I introduced those books three months earlier, I suspect they would have failed just as every previous attempt had failed. What changed first was not the reading material but my son. His nervous system had finally become quiet enough to receive what those books were offering. That experience fundamentally changed the way I think about learning. We often spend enormous effort searching for better schools, better programmes or better teaching methods, when sometimes the first question should simply be whether the child’s brain is ready to learn at all. For my son, regulation came before reading. Reading built confidence, and confidence made further learning possible. Looking back, I believe the sequence mattered far more than any single intervention.
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