Nancy Young

are arriving at school with fine motor skills that aren't as developed because they're spending more time on screens and they're not playing usually.

So parents that time with Play-Doh and taking apart and putting together things, those skills are really important.

They actually will build muscles that will help a child hold a pencil and be able to write.

So that's the actual...

the motor skill of writing is different from generating ideas.

And some children have difficulty organizing their thoughts.

And again, children with ADHD, sometimes difficulty, they may be so bright and have so many ideas and they're so frustrated because they can't organize their thoughts.

And so in the book that Jan Hasbrook and I co-edited, and we actually wrote the chapter on writing,

We give some links that people and parents could go to and look at these steps.

And parents can support at home in following these steps so that the process is broken down so children feel confident and feel comfortable and comfortable.

And we've encouraged anybody using the book, teachers, parents, whoever, to use these particular recommendations because, in my opinion, they allow for flexibility and enjoyment, and they're not really rigid.

And we want children to enjoy writing.

We don't want them to feel like they hate it.

There could be some who do have a speech problem as well, but DLD itself is difficulty.

They may talk.

People may think they're typical, but when you look at it, they have more trouble producing sentences, more trouble explaining stories.

So it's a language issue that isn't specifically to do with making the sounds and words.

But there's also being found to be an overlap between dyslexia and DLD or difficulty learning to read and the language issues.

So a child might have difficulties in both.

And so that's where it's really important, again, for parents to be thinking, hmm, is this a red flag?