This morning, your clock might as well display hieroglyphics. You mix up grams and kilos while following a recipe, and you get lost on the way home. A nightmare? No. It’s the everyday reality for more than 5% of the population. Just as common as dyslexia, dyscalculia is nonetheless far less well recognised. What does dyscalculia really mean? How can you spot the signs in an affected child? Which treatment should you choose to prepare a DYS child’s professional future?
Defining dyscalculia
Dyscalculia is a difficulty learning about numbers. This cognitive impairment belongs to the same family of disorders as dyslexia or dyspraxia. As with all other DYS disorders, and although it does play a role in academic failure, dyscalculia is not caused by a lack of ability or intelligence in the child. Difficulty performing simple calculations and recognising numbers, among other things, affects a child’s overall grasp of mathematics.
“In CP, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t count, I couldn’t learn my times tables. In fact, I still don’t know them, and I never will. It’s not a lack of willingness. It’s impossible. Numbers don’t mean anything, they just wander around the page as if they had no meaning.”
William, 20, former pupil at Lycée Saint-François-La Cadène in Labège (France)
The different causes of dyscalculia
Some studies agree that this disorder is caused by genetic factors. The figures also show a higher rate of dyscalculia among children born to mothers with alcohol problems, and among premature babies. As for cases of dyscalculia appearing in adulthood, they are generally the result of a brain injury following an accident or trauma. In short, it seems the causes are still unclear to researchers. What is beyond doubt is that this disorder is rarely isolated. Indeed, a child with dyscalculia often also has dyslexia, dysphasia, or dysorthographia.
What are the symptoms of dyscalculia?
Spotting the signs of the disorder
No, being bad at maths doesn’t necessarily mean you have dyscalculia. Neither does failing a maths test. However, weak performance in maths that sets in during primary school and continues into higher grades should put parents on alert. Among the most common signs are the following difficulties:
– laborious counting
– systematically relying on fingers to count
– reading and writing numbers is a constant source of confusion
– an inability to perform arithmetic operations
– learning times tables is laborious
– poor understanding of mathematical terms (sum, quantity, more than, less than, etc.)
– misinterpreting the wording of maths problems
– an inability to orient oneself correctly in space (geometry difficulties)
Making a diagnosis
While specific accommodations exist to make school life easier for pupils with dyscalculia (support plans, help from a classroom assistant, access to speech therapy and psychomotor therapy sessions, or extra time in exams), they all require a formal assessment first. Although the FFDYS (the French Federation of DYS Associations) campaigns hard for early screening to be encouraged (between ages 0 and 9), it isn’t always easy to find professionals available to carry out all these neurological, neuropsychological or psychomotor assessments, let alone near the child’s home. Once these assessments are done, parents still need to find a speech therapist able to complete the whole battery of tests with yet another assessment. Good news! The ORA platform is here to help parents and children find a speech therapist qualified in DYS disorders. With its network of online speech therapists, the ORA platform makes it possible to carry out assessments and speech therapy sessions remotely, from home, anywhere in the world. No more time wasted in waiting rooms, or appointments booked 6 months ahead. With online speech therapy consultations, follow-up is rigorous, convenient, and of the same quality as an in-person appointment.
Helping my child with dyscalculia
Treating the disorder
Admittedly, dyscalculia will stay with the child for life, but it can fade to the point of no longer being disabling if rehabilitation is properly carried out. Treating this dysfunction helps the child acquire the right methods and tools needed to work around their impairment. The most suitable healthcare professional for this rehabilitation is the speech therapist. For a child at primary school, the speech therapist will go back over the basics of calculation, mathematical language, and number knowledge. For secondary school pupils, rehabilitation will build on the mathematical concepts already acquired and target those still lacking. The goal is to build the pupil’s independence by giving them all the tools they need for both academic success and everyday life. Guided and supported, pupils become more independent and manage to express their full potential.
Everyday support
The urge to protect a child from the difficulties they face leads some parents to eliminate anything involving numbers from their environment altogether. That’s a mistake! Repeating simple, routine exercises works wonders for their learning abilities. Letting them handle small, recurring tasks that involve working with numbers will produce surprising results. Patience and consistency are the key words. Here are a few ideas for encouraging their daily participation and homework:
– ask them to count familiar objects and do small mental sums every day
– challenge them to sort their toys by size
– play shop with them, adding up prices and giving change
– favour games involving a dice and a board to move around to win
– use tools such as an abacus for their homework
– don’t stop them from counting on their fingers
– use the same colour code as school to tell units, tens and hundreds apart
– show them how to organise the multiple steps of a piece of homework
– ask them to restate the instructions for a piece of homework to make sure they’ve understood it properly
Self-esteem and professional success with dyscalculia
Working on self-confidence
After hearing over and over that they’re useless and don’t understand anything, a child with dyscalculia loses a huge amount of self-confidence. Unfortunately, these are the kinds of comments that punctuate a DYS child’s schooling. Trampled self-esteem and a sense of unease often follow. How can you rebuild the self-confidence of a child with dyscalculia? By showing them presence and support. After explaining their disorder to them, the focus should be on their intelligence, which is in no way impaired. The more a child feels supported, trusted, and that their ambitions are respected, the more their self-confidence will grow. Sport, art, or any other activity the child enjoys can also bring real satisfaction:
“What helps me enormously with my studies is athletics, which I practise regularly. I need to burn off physical energy, and it lifts my mood and my mindset. I thrive, I meet wonderful people when I take part in competitions. I feel like I belong and that I’m useful. The older athletes pass on their knowledge, and we in turn pass it on to the younger ones. It’s a great sport for people with dyscalculia, dyspraxia, dyslexia and hyperactivity!”
William, 20, former pupil at Lycée Saint-François-La Cadène in Labège (France)
What professional future for my child with dyscalculia?
Thanks to regular rehabilitation follow-up, a child with dyscalculia will acquire the resources and compensatory methods needed to overcome their impairment. From then on, the doors to higher education will be open to them, with any accommodations identified by the assessment put in place. Politician, physicist, mathematician, philosopher, alchemist, astronomer, theologian, publisher, writer, naturalist, inventor… If Winston Churchill, Isaac Newton, and Benjamin Franklin, all three of whom had severe dyscalculia, managed it, why not your child?
