“It’s a Battle!”: Parenting and Supporting a Child with Dyslexia

Abstract

Parents and carers supporting their children with dyslexia liken their experiences to battle, when trying to secure appropriate educational provision for their children. This chapter expands our understanding of parents’/carers’ experiences through exploration of both academic studies, reviews and gray literature since the Assent of the Children and Families Act 2014 in England. Using a Bourdieusian framework underpinned by Jenkins’ ‘levels of interaction’, this chapter studies parental/carers’ experiences of dyslexia and procurement of appropriate educational provision for their children with dyslexia. Parents’/carers’ internal sense-making of dyslexia is explored. Connections are made between this sense-making and the nature of parents’/carers’ interactions with their children and education professionals. These interactions, as underpinned by individuals’ understandings of dyslexia are then explored in the context of the social positions occupied by parents/carers relative to others within the field of education. Parents’/carers’ capacity to engage with professionals, and contribute meaningfully to decision-making processes through embodiment of necessary habitus is exposed through analysis of individual sense-making, interactional exchanges and institutional relationships. Practical and theoretical implications of parents’/carers/sense-making of dyslexia, their interactional experiences, and embodiment of habitus are then described in a ‘Who, What, When and How’ overview of parents/carers supporting a child with dyslexia.

Between Home and School: Exploring Parents’ Experiences of Educating in a Pandemic

“…The findings from this study demonstrate an overlap and interdependence between the levels of interaction. While this is not new and has been shown elsewhere [12,40], this analysis demonstrates the interdependence between levels both from individual towards institutional and vice versa. The levels are mutually constituting and self-(re)producing, which echoes Bourdieu's view of the self-propagation of social worlds [15].…”

“…COVID-19 has highlighted and brought to the fore the difficulty families face when supporting their children with SpLD. Families are untrained, often lacking the material and time resources in a pre-COVID-19 world [11,40]. COVID-19 has exacerbated these pre-existent difficulties and added to the burdens experienced by already-overstretched families.…”

“…Parents and young peoples' sense-making in education has been explored through the knitting together of Jenkins' 'levels of interaction' with Bourdieu's concepts of 'field' , 'habitus' and 'practice' into a single theoretical framework [11,12]. This framework provides a robust and effective way of bridging the subjectivist-objectivist gap perceived by Jenkins in Bourdieu's theoretical project [39], and allows for a thorough consideration of objective, external social structures as well as those (re)produced internally [40]. It also gives insight into how identity is constructed and how individuals make sense of the world around them.…”