What I Learned Working With A Struggling 10-Year-Old In Rural China: Parenting Tips For Invisible Learning Struggles
The blackboard in our after-school program is cracked down the middle, and on humid October afternoons the whole room smells like chalk dust and the instant noodles the kids buy from the cart outside the gate. Last month, I noticed Xiao Ming hunched in the back row, his math workbook open to the same page it had been on 20 minutes earlier. He didn’t scratch out answers, didn’t look around for someone to copy from. He just rested his chin on his hand and stared at the wall. His grandma had pulled me aside after class the week before, twisting the corner of her blue apron, and said, “Please help this kid. He used to love going to school, now he says his stomach hurts every morning before class.”
His homeroom teacher told me he was just lazy. Didn’t do homework, wouldn’t answer questions, never turned in essays. Other kids called him “slow” and stopped asking him to play basketball at recess. I sat down next to him the first day, asked him what he was stuck on. He just stared at his scuffed sneakers and mumbled so quiet I couldn’t make out a single word. I didn’t push. I just pulled out my own notebook and sat next to him for the rest of the hour, grading other kids’ work, no pressure.
That went on for three days. On Thursday, I brought a pack of strawberry Pocky I’d picked up in the town’s only supermarket, and offered him a stick. He took it, and when I asked him if he liked the stray cat that hangs around the program gate, he nodded, and said he fed it fish scraps every week. That was the first full sentence I got out of him. A week later, we started working on his Chinese reading homework one on one after class. That’s when I saw it: he mixed up similar characters like 木 and 目 every single time, got confused when three-character words sat next to each other, and said the words “moved around” on the page when he tried to read. I’d read before that this is a common sign of dyslexia, but there’s no child psychologist within two hours’ drive from here, let alone anywhere that does formal learning disability screening. No one here has ever heard of this, really. Everyone just assumes if you can’t read well, you’re not trying hard enough.
That’s the pattern I see over and over, working with kids in this part of China. The popular story around Chinese education focuses on high test scores and relentless cramming, so when a kid falls behind, there’s no room for any explanation other than “you didn’t put in the work.” But the blocks to learning aren’t always about effort. A lot of the time, they’re invisible, and no one stops to look for them.
What we started doing was small, no fancy tools or expensive therapy needed. First, I stopped making him read out loud in front of the other kids. When we work one on one, I let him read silently first, and only ask him to read the parts he feels comfortable with. If he gets stuck on a word, I just tell him what it is, instead of making him sound it out over and over until he wants to stop trying. That one shift took all the pressure off, and he stopped clamming up the second I pulled his textbook out.
Second, I cut a light blue piece of plastic from an old report folder I had, and had him lay it over the page of text. A lot of people who experience blurry or moving text with dyslexia find colored overlays help calm the visual distortion. He tried it, looked up at me, and said, “They don’t jump anymore.” That was it—just a scrap of plastic from a folder I was going to throw away, no cost, no extra work.
Third, when I grade his work, I always mark the right things first, before I talk about mistakes. If he gets three out of five math problems wrong, I circle the two he got right with a red pen first, write “Great job remembering the formula here” before I point out where he went wrong. Before, all he ever saw was red marks covering his entire paper, so he just assumed he was bad at everything and stopped trying. Small shifts in how you give feedback make a huge difference.
It’s been two months now. Last week, he raised his hand for the first time in our group class, to answer a question about what shape a basketball is. He said “sphere” loud enough for everyone to hear, and when I said that was correct, he grinned so wide his dimples showed. After class, he ran outside to play basketball with the other kids, and no one called him slow that I could hear. His grandma brought me a bag of oranges from their small family grove last week, said he doesn’t complain about a stomach ache before school anymore. He still doesn’t want to read out loud at family dinners when his uncles come home from the city and ask him to show off how he’s doing. I always step in and say “He’ll share when he’s ready” instead of pushing, which is the one small habit I wish more adults would pick up.
He’s still getting Cs on most of his tests. He still struggles with longer reading assignments, and we take it one page at a time. No one here can give him a formal diagnosis, or the specialized long-term support he’d get in a bigger city. But right now, that doesn’t feel like the most important thing. The biggest change is that he doesn’t sit in the back staring at the wall anymore. He participates, he plays, he doesn’t think he’s a bad kid who can’t do anything right. A lot of the time, helping a kid who’s struggling doesn’t need big interventions or a lot of money. It just needs someone to stop assuming they’re lazy, and look for the small thing that’s getting in the way. Some days that’s all you can do, and that’s enough for now.
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