Guest post by Daniela Feldhausen

If your child struggles with reading, it’s tempting to look for one explanation and stop there. “He’s just not focused.” “She’ll catch up once she settles down.” For families who already have an ADHD diagnosis in hand, that explanation is especially easy to reach for. It’s familiar, and in the moment, it feels like it accounts for everything from the wiggling in the chair to the resistance at homework time.

But reading struggles and attention struggles don’t always come from the same place, even when they show up in the same child. Dyslexia and ADHD overlap far more often than most parents realize. Knowing what dyslexia actually looks like, separate from ADHD, can be the difference between a child who gets the right support early and one who spends years being told to try harder.

How Often Do ADHD and Dyslexia Really Show Up Together?

More often than you might think. According to the International Dyslexia Association, about 30 percent of children with dyslexia also have ADHD. That’s roughly one in three kids with a reading-based learning difference who are managing attention challenges at the same time.

Part of the reason they get tangled together is that they can look similar from the outside, even though the underlying cause is different. A child with dyslexia may lose focus during reading because decoding words takes so much mental effort that fatigue sets in fast. A child with ADHD may lose their place on the page, skip words, or drift off mid-sentence because sustaining attention is the harder task, not the decoding itself. Two very different root causes, but to a teacher or parent watching from across the room, both can look like “not paying attention.”

This is exactly why reading struggles in a child with ADHD deserve a close look.

What Early Signs of Dyslexia Actually Look Like

Dyslexia isn’t about how hard a child is trying, and it isn’t about intelligence. At its root, it’s a difference in how the brain processes the sounds inside spoken words, which makes connecting those sounds to letters on a page much harder to do automatically. Here’s what that tends to look like in daily life, well before it shows up as a report card:

Rhyming and sound games don’t click. Preschoolers who struggle to complete simple rhymes (“What rhymes with cat?”) or who show little interest in playful language like tongue twisters may be showing an early sign of weak phonological awareness, a foundation of fluent reading.

Sounding out words takes visible effort. Where a same-age peer blends /c/ /a/ /t/ into “cat” without thinking about it, a child with dyslexia often has to work hard for that same blend, or gives up and guesses based on the first letter or a picture on the page.

Spelling looks like a puzzle, not a pattern. Words come out spelled the way they sound rather than the way they’re actually built, so “said” becomes “sed” or “night” becomes “nite,” long after classmates have moved past that stage.

Reading out loud gets dodged. A sudden stomachache at reading time, a request to go to the bathroom, or a flat refusal can be less about defiance and more about avoiding a task that feels exhausting and embarrassing in front of peers or parents.

Letter reversals stick around. Flipping b and d, or writing letters backward, is common and expected in kindergarten and early first grade. When it’s still happening consistently in second or third grade, it’s worth paying attention to.

It runs in the family. Dyslexia has a strong hereditary component. Is there a parent, sibling, or grandparent who also struggled with reading or spelling?

Why These Signs Get Missed in Kids With ADHD

In a child without ADHD, these signs tend to stand out fairly clearly. Reading looks hard because reading is hard, and there’s usually not another obvious explanation competing for a parent’s attention.

In a child with ADHD, the picture gets murkier. Once a diagnosis is already in place, it’s natural for every new struggle to get filed under that same label. Refusing to read aloud becomes “he’s being avoidant” instead of “reading is genuinely difficult for him.” Guessing at words instead of sounding them out becomes “she’s rushing because she’s impulsive” instead of “she hasn’t learned to blend sounds reliably yet.” The ADHD diagnosis, while accurate, can end up masking the signs of dyslexia.

This is one of the reasons dyslexia in kids with ADHD often gets caught later than it should, sometimes not until third or fourth grade or even later, when reading demands increase and a child can no longer rely on memorization and context clues.

If Your Child Has Both, You Have to Treat Both

Here’s the piece that’s easy to miss: treating ADHD does not treat dyslexia, and treating dyslexia does not treat ADHD. They have separate root causes, and each one needs its own targeted support.

Medication, behavioral strategies, and executive function coaching can meaningfully improve a child’s ability to focus, plan, and manage impulsivity. What none of that does is teach a child’s brain how to break words into sounds and map those sounds onto letters. That skill has to be taught directly and systematically, through structured, phonics-based reading instruction designed specifically for how a dyslexic brain learns to read.

The reverse is true too. A strong reading intervention plan will move slowly if a child’s attention needs aren’t also being supported during those sessions. This is where an instructional approach built around both ADHD and dyslexia at once, rather than treating them as competing priorities, tends to get families the furthest the fastest.

The earlier both pieces get addressed, the better. Research on early dyslexia intervention consistently points to the same conclusion: kids who get the right support sooner build stronger reading skills with less struggle along the way, and that holds true whether or not ADHD is part of their picture.

Where to Go From Here

If some of this sounds familiar, the best next step is to bring what you’ve noticed to a professional who can look at the full picture, ideally someone equipped to assess both attention and executive functioning and phonological and reading skills. Many families end up needing support for both pieces, in whatever combination works best for them.

Kids Up Reading Tutors helps students in grades 1 through 12 throughout DC, Maryland and Virginia become fluent readers, good spellers and confident students. About half of the students we work with also have ADHD. If you’re a Northern Virginia parent trying to figure out where the reading piece fits in alongside an ADHD diagnosis, Kids Up Reading Tutors’ dyslexia program for Virginia families is built around exactly this kind of student: bright, capable, and juggling both ADHD and dyslexia.

Your child isn’t lazy, and they’re not failing to try hard enough. They may simply be dealing with two different challenges that both deserve the right kind of help.