Dyslexia or ADHD? How to tell what is going on

Dyslexia and ADHD are different difficulties that can look identical in a classroom. Dyslexia is a difference in how the brain processes the sounds inside words, so reading and spelling suffer first. ADHD is a difference in attention and self-regulation, so anything that needs sustained focus suffers. Many children have both. Where the struggle shows up tells you the most.

Why do the two get confused so often?

Because the classroom sees behaviour, not causes. Work left unfinished, spelling that looks careless, a child who loses her place mid-sentence, homework that takes three times as long as it should: every one of those can come from either difficulty. A teacher watching thirty children sees the output. She cannot see whether the child lost the thread because her attention drifted, or because decoding each word was costing her so much effort that nothing was left over for the meaning.

Parents get pulled both ways too. A relative says “she just needs to concentrate”. A teacher wonders about attention. An online checklist seems to fit, and then a different checklist fits too. That is not a failure of observation. The surface really is similar, and these early indicators of a learning difficulty genuinely travel together. Telling them apart takes a closer look at where and when the difficulty appears.

What does dyslexia look like?

Dyslexia is a brain based difference in processing the sounds of language. It is present from birth, unrelated to intelligence, and it runs in families. The difficulty is specific: it lives in print. Watch for a child who struggles to rhyme or play with sounds, whose letter-sound links will not stick despite being taught many times, who guesses words from the first letter, whose spelling lags behind everything else she does, and who reads slowly and with real effort long after classmates have picked up speed.

Away from print, the same child is often sharp, curious, and articulate. She follows stories read aloud, argues her case at the dinner table, and remembers everything about her favourite subject. The signs shift as children grow, and I have mapped them stage by stage in signs of dyslexia by age; the fuller picture is in all about dyslexia.

What does ADHD look like?

I want to be straightforward about my own lane here: I am a dyslexia therapist, not a doctor, and ADHD is a medical diagnosis made by a developmental paediatrician, a child psychiatrist, or a clinical psychologist. What I can tell you is what those professionals look for, and what I notice in my own sessions.

The core of ADHD is difficulty regulating attention, effort, and impulse, and the defining feature is that it shows up across settings. Not just at homework time: at meals, at play, in conversation, on outings. The child interrupts, loses things constantly, starts six activities and finishes none, drifts off mid-instruction even when the instruction has nothing to do with reading. Attention itself has several distinct types, and a child with ADHD struggles to hold and direct it even for things she cares about finishing.

One caution: every child attends better to what interests her. A child who watches cartoons for an hour but will not sit with homework is being a child. Fast-moving screens reward attention differently from a worksheet, so that contrast alone tells you very little either way.

The most useful question: where does the struggle live?

If you take one thing from this post, take this question. Dyslexia is print-specific. ADHD is everywhere.

Dyslexia shows up when print enters the room. ADHD shows up at meals, at play, in conversation, everywhere. Where the struggle lives is the clearest clue a parent has.

A child with dyslexia and untouched attention can build a Lego set for an hour, follow a long film, and sustain a game with rules. Put a book in front of her and she wriggles, yawns, needs water, needs the toilet. That is not an attention problem arriving; it is a sensible person avoiding what hurts. I meet many children referred to me for “not concentrating” whose real issue is that decoding costs them three times the effort it costs their classmates. I have written more about that pattern in why some children are not reading yet.

The reverse has its own signature. A child whose difficulty is attention can often read a short passage accurately when she is fresh and the room is calm, because her decoding is intact; what collapses is stamina, place-keeping, and comprehension over longer stretches. A child with dyslexia makes the same sound-level errors even in a quiet one-to-one setting with her full attention engaged. In my sessions this is one of the first things I look at: what happens to reading when every distraction is removed and the child is calm, rested, and supported. If the errors persist under those conditions, attention was never the whole story.

Can a child have both?

Yes, and it is common. Dyslexia and ADHD co-occur far more often than chance, so finding one should raise the question of the other rather than close it. This matters because each needs its own response. Support for attention, whether behavioural or medical, does not teach a child to decode. Structured literacy teaching does not settle attention that wobbles everywhere. When both are present and only one is addressed, progress stalls and everyone concludes the help “is not working”, when the truth is that half the picture was never seen.

Who can tell you for certain?

For ADHD: a developmental paediatrician, child psychiatrist, or clinical psychologist. They gather observations from home and school precisely because the across-settings pattern is the diagnostic heart of it.

For reading: the question is whether the difficulty sits at the level of sounds, letters, and words. At Flourishing Kids I start with an informal assessment: I sit with your child one to one, online, and look at exactly where reading breaks down, with distractions removed. It does not diagnose ADHD, and it is honest about that. What it does well is show whether the reading difficulty stands on its own, which tells you which door to knock on next, and it replaces months of worried guessing with something specific. You can read more about me and how I work.

What should you do while you work it out?

Spend a week watching where the struggle lives, and write it down: what happened, during what activity, at what time of day. Ask the class teacher the same question. Rule out hearing and vision, which are quick checks and muddy every picture while they wait. And do not put reading help on hold while the bigger questions get answered. Structured, explicit teaching like the Orton-Gillingham approach helps a struggling reader whatever the eventual label says, and a child who has both dyslexia and ADHD needs it just as much, delivered in shorter, more active bursts.

Above all, hold on to this: neither dyslexia nor ADHD is caused by parenting, and neither is laziness wearing a disguise. Both respond to the right support, and children with each, or both, grow into capable, confident adults every day. If you are unsure what you are looking at, tell me what you are seeing; a short conversation is usually enough to point you in the right direction.

Frequently asked questions

Can ADHD alone cause reading problems?

Yes. Attention difficulties can drag down reading stamina, place-keeping, and comprehension even when decoding is intact. The tell is the type of error: skipped lines and lost threads point towards attention, while persistent trouble with the sounds themselves, rhyming, blending, and spelling points towards dyslexia.

Can my child have dyslexia and ADHD at the same time?

Yes, and the combination is common. Each needs its own support: attention care does not teach decoding, and reading intervention does not settle attention. If your child has one diagnosis but progress has stalled, it is worth asking whether the other is also present.

Who diagnoses ADHD in India?

A developmental paediatrician, a child psychiatrist, or a clinical psychologist. Schools and therapists can share valuable observations, but the diagnosis itself is a medical one. Reading difficulty is assessed separately, and an informal reading assessment can clarify that side of the picture first.

My child focuses on games for hours. Does that rule out ADHD?

No. Games deliver constant novelty and instant feedback, which hold attention in a way worksheets never will, for every child. What professionals look at is whether a child can direct and sustain attention across ordinary, less rewarding situations, and whether that pattern shows up in more than one setting.

Dr. V.S. Gayathri is a Certified Dyslexia Therapist, an Orton-Gillingham trained literacy specialist, and the founder of Flourishing Kids. She has delivered over 4,000 hours of one-to-one reading and spelling intervention, helping children across multiple countries build stronger literacy skills. If you are unsure whether you are looking at dyslexia, attention, or both, get in touch for a free 15-minute conversation.