A survey highlights the difficulties surrounding the daily lives of “dys” children

As with Marie and her daughter Anna, detecting and monitoring children with neurodevelopmental disorders can seem like a real obstacle course, according to the French Dys Federation.

More frequent repetition, difficult access to care, cost of medical monitoring… Children who suffer from a neurodevelopmental disorder (dyslexia, dysorthography, dyspraxia, dyscalculia or attention deficit disorder) are not well supported at school. They repeat more than average and have difficulty finding suitable health professionals, concludes a survey on “the health journey of dys children in 2024”, conducted by the French Dys Federation and the medical application Poppins.

This survey was conducted among more than 1,200 families affected by these disorders that impact the family life, schooling and well-being of these children, estimated at nearly a million in France. franceinfo met Anna, 9 years old, and her mother who had to fight to help her daughter.

It was Anna’s mother who noticed that she was having difficulty learning to read in first grade.
“It was difficult, sometimes I was off on a dizzying journey and then I didn’t understand anything anymore.”recalls Anna, a little girl with dyslexia who, like 80% of these children with a neurodevelopmental disorder, also has another disorder, attention deficit.

Before putting a name to these disorders, Marie, her mother, nevertheless fumbled. “As there was this intuition of two disorders, we tried to have appointments in a public hospitalshe relates. We had these appointments… but a year and a half later. Since we didn’t want to wait and fortunately had the capacity to finance them, we opted to carry out tests with neuropsychologists specializing in these disorders.”Marie specifies.

And he confided: “It still required us to deploy a fairly gigantic amount of energy. To find the speech therapist who ended up accompanying Anna, I had to call more than 90.”

In this survey conducted by the French Dys Federation and the Poppins application, families describe an obstacle course. For a third of them, care is complicated. They need financial assistance to cover the bills of child psychiatrists and speech therapists.

They also denounce the lack of support at school: nearly two out of ten children do not receive any support and when they do, it is considered insufficient and difficult to implement. Parents denounce the lack of teacher training. These dyslexic children also repeat more than average and have a lot of trouble doing their homework. They are also children who suffer more than others from anxiety. For Anna, it is not easy every day.

She also has to deal with the effects of the medication she takes for her attention deficit disorder. “On Mondays, often when I come home from school, I feel anxious, I cry and I want someone to call my mother. The medicine that I take every morning makes me less sleepy and I am also less hungry,” the little girl specifies. In every class in France, there are one or two students like Anna.