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What Is Dyslexia? (Not What You Think)

By The Misfit Collaborative

Most people think they know what dyslexia is. They picture a child who reverses letters — b for d, p for q — or who reads words backwards. They imagine “saw” read as “was,” or “dog” as “god.”

These things can happen. But they are not what dyslexia is.

Letter reversal is common in young children and usually resolves as literacy develops. It is not a reliable sign of dyslexia, and its absence does not rule dyslexia out. The actual picture is both more fundamental and more interesting than the reversal myth suggests — and understanding it correctly is the difference between support that helps and support that doesn’t.

What dyslexia actually is

Dyslexia is a neurological difference in how the brain processes written language. Specifically, it is rooted in difficulties with phonological processing — the ability to hear, manipulate, and work with the sound units (phonemes) that make up spoken words.

Reading, in any alphabetic language, requires the reader to map written letters and letter combinations to the sounds they represent. This mapping process is called phonics. It’s not natural — humans evolved for speech, not for reading — and it requires explicit instruction.

For most children, that instruction takes hold reasonably quickly. The brain builds the neural pathway that connects print to sound to meaning, and reading becomes increasingly automatic.

For a child with dyslexia, building that pathway is genuinely harder. The phonological processing difficulty means the mapping doesn’t come easily — and when decoding (converting print to sound) remains effortful, the cognitive resources that should be going to comprehension are being consumed by the mechanics of reading instead.

The result is a child who reads slowly, makes errors that don’t look like careless mistakes, struggles to sound out unfamiliar words, and often can’t keep up with reading-dependent subjects at school.

What dyslexia is not

It is not a vision problem. The letter reversals are not because the eyes are seeing things incorrectly. They reflect the difficulty of holding and retrieving the correct letter-sound mappings — a phonological and orthographic issue, not a visual one. Vision therapy for dyslexia is not supported by the evidence.

It is not low intelligence. Dyslexia is entirely independent of IQ. Many highly intelligent people have dyslexia — engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, writers. In fact, many people with dyslexia develop significant strengths in areas that don’t rely on phonological processing: visual-spatial thinking, narrative reasoning, big-picture pattern recognition.

It is not laziness or lack of effort. A child with dyslexia trying to read is working harder than a non-dyslexic child reading the same text — and producing less. The discrepancy is not because of effort. It is because the underlying process is genuinely more demanding.

It is not something the child will grow out of. Dyslexia is lifelong. With excellent instruction and support, reading accuracy and fluency can improve significantly. The underlying phonological processing difference remains. Adults with dyslexia develop workarounds and often read competently — but it continues to take more effort than it does for most people.

What it looks like at different ages

Early childhood (4–6): Difficulty learning nursery rhymes, persistent trouble with rhyming, slow to learn letter names and sounds, struggles to blend sounds into words.

Primary school (6–10): Significantly slower reading development than peers, frequent errors in reading that don’t reflect carelessness (reading “house” as “horse,” for instance), poor spelling that doesn’t improve with practice, avoidance of reading tasks, difficulty copying from the board.

Middle school (10–14): Reading fluency significantly below grade level, or reading fluency achieved but at significant effort cost — the child reads accurately but slowly, and comprehension suffers because the decoding is using too many cognitive resources. Spelling remains a persistent difficulty. Written work reflects less of the child’s knowledge than verbal responses do.

Adolescence and adulthood: The gap between verbal intelligence and written performance remains. Exam formats that privilege timed written output are disproportionately challenging. Adults with dyslexia often gravitate toward careers that leverage their other strengths and minimise reading demands — or develop compensatory strategies that work but cost energy.

How dyslexia is identified

Psychoeducational assessment — typically by an educational psychologist — is the route to identification. Assessment looks at phonological processing, reading accuracy, reading fluency, spelling, and the relationship between these and broader cognitive ability.

In India, dyslexia falls under Specific Learning Disabilities in the RPwD Act 2016. Students with a formal diagnosis are entitled to accommodations in board examinations — including extra time, use of scribes, and reader provisions. Access to diagnosis varies enormously by geography, school type, and family resources.

What actually helps

The single most important thing: structured literacy instruction.

Structured literacy is explicit, systematic phonics instruction that teaches the letter-sound relationships that dyslexic readers cannot acquire incidentally. It’s taught directly, in sequence, with repetition and multisensory reinforcement. The most well-known approach is Orton-Gillingham; there are many programmes derived from it.

This is not the same as “reading practice” or “re-reading the book.” Exposure to text does not build the phonological processing skills that dyslexia affects. Targeted, systematic instruction in phonics does.

Other things that help:

Extra time in assessments, which allows the additional processing time that reading requires
Audio support — audiobooks, text-to-speech technology — which allows access to curriculum content without the bottleneck of decoding
Typing over handwriting where spelling and text production is assessed separately from physical writing
Explicit vocabulary and comprehension instruction alongside decoding — dyslexic readers often have significant comprehension strengths that are masked by decoding difficulty

The strengths side of the picture

This matters and is worth saying clearly: dyslexia is associated with a set of cognitive characteristics that are genuinely useful.

The Eide brothers’ research (see our Dyslexia Books list) identifies consistent strengths in visual-spatial reasoning, big-picture thinking, narrative reasoning, and dynamic reasoning — the ability to predict how systems and situations will unfold over time. Many people with dyslexia are exceptional at exactly the kind of thinking that competitive examinations don’t measure.

This is not a consolation prize. It is neuroscience. Understanding the full profile — the difficulty alongside the strength — produces better outcomes than understanding either half alone.

A note on India

In Indian schools, reading load is heavy, class sizes are large, and the adult-to-child ratio rarely allows for the individual attention that identifying early reading difficulty requires. Many dyslexic children arrive at secondary school having never been formally identified — having instead accumulated years of being told they’re not trying, not concentrating, or simply not academic.

Those years matter. The research on early intervention in dyslexia is clear: the earlier it happens, the better the outcomes. Children who don’t receive structured reading instruction until secondary school can still make significant progress — but the window of easiest intervention has passed.

Knowing what to look for is how you catch it early.

Wondering what dyslexia identification and support could look like in your school? We’d love to talk.

The Misfit Collaborative works with Indian schools and families on building real understanding and practical support for dyslexia and other specific learning differences.

Why So Many Learning Differences Travel Together

By The Misfit Collaborative

Here is something that surprises a lot of parents when they start learning about their child’s profile: the learning difference their child was diagnosed with is often not the only one.

ADHD and dyslexia frequently co-occur. Dyslexia and dyspraxia travel together. Autism and ADHD — once thought to be mutually exclusive in the diagnostic framework — are now known to co-occur in a significant portion of people. Sensory processing difficulties show up alongside almost everything.

This is not a coincidence. It reflects something real about how neurodevelopmental differences are distributed in the brain — and understanding it changes how you think about assessment, support, and the child in front of you.

Why do learning differences co-occur so often?

The short answer is that neurodevelopmental conditions share genetic and neurological roots. They are not separate categories that happen to bump into each other occasionally. They are overlapping expressions of the same underlying differences in brain development.

Research on what’s sometimes called the “p factor” in psychiatry — a general factor underlying many neurodevelopmental and mental health conditions — suggests that a significant amount of what we label as separate diagnoses reflects different presentations of the same underlying neurodivergence, filtered through different cognitive profiles, different environments, and different life experiences.

This doesn’t mean the distinctions are meaningless. ADHD and autism are meaningfully different profiles in many ways. But it does explain why they co-occur so frequently — and why finding one should prompt looking for others.

Common co-occurring pairs (and clusters)

ADHD and dyslexia. Co-occur in approximately 30–40% of people with either diagnosis. Both affect reading fluency and sustained attention, and they can be difficult to disentangle without careful assessment. The working memory and processing speed difficulties in ADHD contribute to reading difficulty in ways that can look like dyslexia — and vice versa.

ADHD and dyspraxia (DCD). Co-occur in around 50% of DCD cases. Both affect executive function and motor planning, and the combined profile creates significant challenges with handwriting, organisation, and self-management.

ADHD and autism. Until 2013, the DSM explicitly excluded co-diagnosis of ADHD and autism. The DSM-5 removed that exclusion, reflecting overwhelming clinical and research evidence that the two co-occur in a substantial proportion of autistic people — estimates vary from 30–80% depending on how autism is defined. The combined profile looks different from either alone and requires a more nuanced approach to support.

Autism and anxiety. Co-occur in up to 50% of autistic people. Anxiety is sometimes a feature of autism (the sensory demands of navigating a world not designed for you are inherently stressful) and sometimes a co-occurring condition. The distinction matters for treatment.

Dyslexia and dyspraxia. Share a significant genetic overlap and frequently co-occur, particularly in children who have phonological processing difficulties alongside motor coordination difficulties.

Sensory processing difficulties and autism/ADHD. Sensory differences are now included in the DSM-5 autism criteria and are extremely common in ADHD as well. For many neurodivergent children, sensory processing difficulties are as significant as any labelled condition — and often go unaddressed because they’re not the diagnosis.

The assessment problem

Most psychological assessments are designed to identify one or two specific conditions. A referral for “dyslexia assessment” typically produces information about dyslexia — not necessarily about the ADHD that’s also there, or the DCD that’s also there, or the anxiety that’s driving half the school refusal.

This creates a partial picture. Parents leave with one piece of the puzzle and wonder why the support for that piece isn’t working as well as they hoped.

Comprehensive psychoeducational assessment — looking across the full range of possible learning and developmental differences — is more expensive and more time-consuming than targeted assessment. In India, where specialist assessment is already limited and expensive, comprehensive evaluation is often not accessible. Many children are assessed for the most visible or most academically impairing difficulty and the rest goes unidentified.

This matters because the co-occurring profile changes the intervention. A child with dyslexia alone responds differently to reading intervention than a child with dyslexia and ADHD. A child with autism alone needs different support than a child with autism and anxiety and sensory processing difficulties. Getting the full picture is not bureaucratic over-identification — it’s necessary for understanding what will actually help.

The presentation problem

Co-occurring profiles can mask each other in ways that complicate identification.

A highly anxious autistic child may appear to have ADHD because the anxiety is driving distractibility and avoidance that looks like inattention. A child with dyspraxia may appear to have ADHD because the executive function difficulties in DCD overlap so significantly with ADHD. A 2e child (gifted and neurodivergent) may appear to have none of these things because their intelligence is compensating for all of them.

Getting this wrong isn’t a failure of effort — it’s a consequence of diagnostic systems that were designed to identify conditions in isolation and are now being applied to people whose profiles are rarely that clean.

What this means in practice

For parents: if your child has been diagnosed with one learning difference and is still significantly struggling despite appropriate support, it’s worth asking whether there’s more to the picture. A co-occurring profile that hasn’t been identified is often what’s in the gap.

For schools: support plans built around a single diagnosis often fail children with co-occurring profiles. A child who has dyslexia accommodations but no support for the ADHD that’s also present is not fully supported.

For clinicians and assessors: a comprehensive developmental history, broad assessment across domains, and willingness to consider multiple simultaneous profiles produces better outcomes than diagnostic parsimony applied to conditions that are neurologically linked.

For neurodivergent adults making sense of their own history: the multiple things you’ve always known about yourself — the reading difficulty, the coordination challenges, the sensory sensitivities, the social differences — may all be parts of the same picture. Finding language for each of them separately is useful. Understanding that they’re related is often a deeper relief.

A diagnosis is not a ceiling — it’s a doorway. Getting the right diagnosis, or the right combination of them, opens access to understanding and support that changes what the rest of school (and life) looks like.

If you’re trying to build assessment and support processes that account for co-occurring profiles, we’d love to work with you.

The Misfit Collaborative works with Indian schools and families on building nuanced, whole-child understanding of neurodivergent profiles — including the complex ones.

What Is PDA? The Autism Profile That Looks Like Something Else

By The Misfit Collaborative

Pathological Demand Avoidance — PDA — is a profile within the autism spectrum that is still not widely known among parents, educators, or clinicians. When it is known, it’s frequently misunderstood. And when it’s misunderstood, the children who have it are often managed in ways that make everything significantly worse.

This is a post about what PDA actually is, what distinguishes it from other presentations of autism or oppositional behaviour, and why the standard approaches to managing “difficult” children tend to backfire spectacularly with PDA children.

What is PDA?

PDA was first described by psychologist Elizabeth Newson in the 1980s, based on her clinical observations of a group of children who were clearly autistic in some respects but responded very differently to typical autism interventions — and who showed a specific, extreme, and anxiety-driven need to avoid and resist demands.

The core feature is an overwhelming drive to avoid ordinary demands and expectations — and a sophisticated, flexible repertoire of strategies for doing so. This is not the same as noncompliance or defiance in the conventional sense. It is an anxiety response: the demand triggers an internal threat signal, and the avoidance is an attempt to manage that threat.

What makes PDA different from “typical” autism?

Children with a PDA profile often:

Have relatively strong social communication and social motivation compared to other autistic profiles — they can be very socially attuned, even charming, particularly when they’re not under demand pressure
Are highly imaginative and often engage in elaborate fantasy play
Use social strategies to avoid demands — humour, negotiation, distraction, role play — rather than simple refusal
Fluctuate significantly: they can appear to be managing well in low-demand contexts and completely dysregulated in high-demand ones
Have an extreme sense of needing to be in control of their own actions and environment

The demand avoidance in PDA is not selective in the way that typical oppositional behaviour often is. It extends to demands that most people don’t register as demands at all — being asked to eat, being told what time to leave the house, receiving praise (which creates an implicit expectation of continued performance). It is pervasive and anxiety-driven, not strategic or calculated.

What PDA looks like in practice

The PDA child in a school or home context may:

Refuse tasks that they clearly understand and are capable of
Escalate very quickly from apparent compliance to complete shutdown or meltdown when demand pressure increases
Use very sophisticated avoidance strategies: becoming chatty, changing the subject, creating distractions, developing sudden symptoms, negotiating endlessly
Be described as “controlling” or “manipulative” — though what looks like manipulation is usually an anxiety-driven attempt to manage the environment
Respond very poorly to reward-and-consequence behaviour management systems — often appearing to prefer a negative outcome to compliance with a demand
Be very rule-focused in their arguments while simultaneously refusing to follow rules — particularly the rules that feel externally imposed
Have significant co-occurring anxiety, emotional dysregulation, and fatigue
“Save it” for home — appearing to manage at school through enormous effort, then collapsing in the safest environment available

What makes PDA harder to identify

Because PDA children often have relatively strong social skills and can appear to be managing when demand pressure is low, they may not be identified as autistic at all — or may be identified as autistic without the PDA profile being named.

They are also frequently described in ways that attribute their difficulties to character: “manipulative,” “controlling,” “doesn’t want to cooperate,” “tests boundaries.” These framings lead to approaches that increase demand pressure — which for a PDA child is the exact opposite of what’s needed.

PDA is not currently included as a formal diagnosis in DSM-5 or ICD-11, which creates an additional layer of complexity around recognition and support access.

Why standard approaches don’t work

Most school behaviour management systems and most parenting advice is built around a simple premise: clear expectations, consistent boundaries, appropriate consequences. For many children, this works.

For a child with PDA, it usually makes things worse.

Here’s why: the entire premise of standard behaviour management is that a child will comply with an external demand structure in exchange for positive outcomes (or to avoid negative ones). A child with a PDA profile experiences external demand as an intrinsic threat, regardless of the attached consequences. The consequence — positive or negative — is less salient than the demand itself.

Increasing the consequence doesn’t reduce the avoidance. It increases the anxiety and the intensity of the avoidance.

What actually helps

Reducing demand pressure. Not by eliminating all expectations, but by framing, timing, and flexibility — presenting necessary tasks as choices, giving advance notice, allowing indirect routes to required outcomes.

Working collaboratively rather than directively. PDA children often respond better to “I need your help with something” than “you need to do this now.” The framing changes the internal experience of the demand.

Giving genuine control where possible. The need for control in PDA is anxiety-driven; reducing the anxiety means giving real (not token) autonomy wherever it can be offered.

Low demand, low arousal approaches. In crisis, the priority is safety and de-escalation, not compliance. Adding demand to a PDA child in distress escalates rather than resolves.

Flexibility on non-essentials. Picking battles carefully and consistently — identifying which demands are genuinely non-negotiable and releasing the ones that aren’t — reduces the overall demand pressure and preserves the relationship for the things that actually matter.

Understanding, not managing. The most important shift is from “how do I get this child to comply?” to “what is driving this behaviour and what does this child actually need?” These lead to very different responses.

A note on India

PDA is not widely known among clinicians in India, and many children with this profile receive diagnoses of oppositional defiant disorder, attachment difficulties, or behaviour problems without the underlying autism profile or the demand-avoidance pattern being identified. The family is given behaviour management advice that doesn’t work, tries it anyway because they don’t know what else to try, and is told to be more consistent when the child continues to refuse.

The result, often, is a family that is exhausted, confused, and quietly convinced that they are doing something wrong. They are not. They are working with the wrong framework.

If something in this post resonates with your child’s profile, we’d encourage you to seek assessment from a clinician familiar with the full autism spectrum. Get in touch with us if you’d like support navigating that in an Indian context.

The Misfit Collaborative works with Indian families and schools to understand neurodivergent profiles in their full complexity — including the ones that don’t look like the textbook descriptions.

The Twice-Exceptional Child: Gifted and Struggling at the Same Time

By The Misfit Collaborative

The twice-exceptional — or 2e — child is gifted and neurodivergent. They have advanced intellectual capability in at least some areas, alongside a learning difference that creates genuine difficulty in others. They can write a story at two grade levels above their class and still not be able to get it onto paper without falling apart. They can hold a complex argument about something they’re passionate about and still fail to submit a basic homework assignment. They are, simultaneously, too much and not enough — depending on which system is doing the measuring.

Twice-exceptional children are one of the most underserved populations in education. And in India, where giftedness and disability are almost never considered together, they are especially invisible.

What 2e actually means

Twice-exceptional is a term that captures a specific co-occurrence: intellectual giftedness and a neurodevelopmental difference, existing in the same person at the same time.

The learning difference might be ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, autism, dyspraxia, sensory processing differences, or any combination of these. The giftedness might manifest as advanced verbal reasoning, exceptional creativity, unusual depth of knowledge in specific areas, rapid acquisition of complex concepts, or the capacity for original thinking that other children don’t access until much later.

These two things do not cancel each other out. They coexist — which is what makes the 2e profile so easily missed.

Why 2e children get missed

The giftedness hides the learning difference. A bright child can compensate — through effort, through verbal workarounds, through sheer force of intelligence — for a processing difficulty that would be more visible in a child with fewer cognitive resources. The result is average or above-average performance that conceals significant underlying struggle. Nobody refers “the smart one” for a learning assessment.

The learning difference hides the giftedness. A child who can’t write legibly, who struggles to organise their thoughts on paper, who loses homework and fails to meet deadlines, looks underperforming. If the school is focused on the performance gap, the intellectual capability beneath it may never be identified or valued.

Both get partially recognised but neither gets fully addressed. The child is sometimes identified as “bright but lazy” — which acknowledges the potential and attributes the gap to attitude. Or they’re placed in remediation support that addresses the learning difficulty without any acknowledgment of the giftedness — which addresses neither properly.

What 2e looks like in a classroom

The 2e child may:

Participate brilliantly in discussion and fail tests
Produce exceptional work occasionally and nothing at all the rest of the time
Know far more about a topic than the curriculum covers, and still fail the standard assessment of it
Be extraordinarily focused on topics of interest and completely unable to attend to anything else
Have very advanced reasoning and very poor organisational systems
Argue with teachers from a position of genuine knowledge — which is often read as defiance
Be easily bored, distressed by repetition, and resistant to covering ground they’ve already covered
Have significant emotional intensity, perfectionism, and sensitivity to criticism

The picture is one of profound inconsistency. On good days, in the right context, they are remarkable. On other days, in the wrong context, they appear not to be trying at all. Neither of these impressions is accurate.

What 2e children need

Both halves of the picture addressed simultaneously. Remediation alone — support for the learning difference without acknowledgment of the giftedness — produces boredom, resentment, and usually doesn’t stick, because the child’s intelligence resists approaches that feel beneath them. Challenge alone — enrichment without support for the learning difficulty — leaves the child unable to access or demonstrate their capability.

Differentiation that goes in both directions. Tasks that are challenging enough for a gifted mind and supported enough for a child with a learning difference. This is a more sophisticated ask than most schools are set up to deliver — which is why most 2e children are not well served.

Strengths-based framing. The school’s relationship with a 2e child should begin with what they can do, not with what they can’t. Starting from the learning difficulty produces a child who understands themselves primarily as someone who struggles. Starting from the giftedness produces a child who has a foundation.

Autonomy and self-knowledge. 2e children often develop a profound need to understand themselves. Given accurate information about their own profile — that their brain works differently in specific ways, that the giftedness and the difficulty are both real, that this combination has a name — many 2e children experience significant relief and become more able to engage with support.

Adults who believe the profile is real. The most common thing 2e children hear is some version of “you could do this if you tried.” It is also the most damaging. The twice-exceptional profile is not a choice or a performance — it is a neurological reality that requires a different response.

In India

India’s educational culture places enormous value on academic performance — specifically the kind measured by competitive examination. For a 2e child, this creates a particular bind: the intellectual capability to achieve in these systems, and the specific processing differences that can make the standard routes to achievement inaccessible.

The child who is brilliant in a classroom discussion and blank on a three-hour written exam is not inconsistent. They are being assessed in a format that is specifically disadvantaging for their profile.

India’s broader culture also tends to frame “gifted” and “needing support” as mutually exclusive categories. The family that is told their child is gifted does not expect to then be told they need learning support. The school that has identified a child as a struggle case does not typically look for giftedness. These assumptions mean 2e children spend their entire education in the wrong box — or in no box at all.

Building genuine understanding of the 2e profile in Indian schools is part of what we do. Get in touch to find out more.

The Misfit Collaborative works with schools and families to understand and support children across the full spectrum of learning difference — including the children who are simultaneously far ahead and significantly behind.

What Is Masking — And Why It’s Exhausting Even When It Works

By The Misfit Collaborative

Masking is what happens when a neurodivergent person learns to perform neurotypicality well enough that the people around them stop noticing the difference.

It looks like success. It feels like survival.

It is often both of those things at once — and it comes with a cost that the people watching rarely see.

What masking actually involves

Masking (also called camouflaging, especially in autism research) refers to the conscious or unconscious strategies neurodivergent people use to appear more typical. It’s not pretending, exactly. It’s more like running a continuous background programme — one that’s always on, always monitoring, always adjusting.

Depending on the person and the context, masking might involve:

Scripting. Pre-planning what to say in conversations — rehearsing likely exchanges, preparing responses to anticipated questions — because improvising in real-time social interaction is genuinely difficult.

Mirroring. Watching how others behave and copying it: their body language, their facial expressions, their tone of voice, their pace of speech. Using other people as a model for how to perform being in a room.

Suppressing self-regulatory behaviour. Stims — the physical movements (rocking, hand-flapping, finger-tapping, pacing) that regulate a neurodivergent nervous system — are often suppressed in public because they attract attention. But they exist for a reason; suppressing them removes the regulation without removing the need for it.

Forcing eye contact. Many autistic people find eye contact uncomfortable or distracting. Forcing it to appear “engaged” takes active effort and is often described as genuinely unpleasant.

Managing sensory responses. Not reacting visibly to the fluorescent light that is causing genuine discomfort. Not covering ears at a sound that is genuinely overwhelming. Performing tolerance of sensory environments that are actually painful.

Constantly monitoring performance. Am I talking too much? Not enough? Did that land wrong? Did I miss something? Is my face doing the right thing? This is the background processing that never stops — even in conversations the person is genuinely enjoying.

Who masks, and why

Masking is most studied in autistic people, particularly autistic women, but it occurs across neurodivergent profiles — people with ADHD mask, people with anxiety mask, people with dyspraxia mask. The motivation is usually the same: the real behaviour got a bad response, so a different behaviour was learned.

Children mask because the feedback from the social environment is immediate and powerful. Flapping your hands gets stares. Not making eye contact gets labelled rudeness. Moving around the classroom gets you told to sit still. Being too honest gets you into trouble. The lesson is clear: certain behaviours are not safe to show.

For girls specifically, masking is often learned and reinforced through socialisation before any neurodivergent profile is identified. The expectation that girls be quiet, regulated, agreeable, and socially attuned shapes how girls learn to present — and makes their ADHD or autism invisible for much longer.

The cost of masking

Here’s the problem: masking works just well enough to prevent support, and not well enough to prevent harm.

The child who masks successfully through school doesn’t get identified. Doesn’t get accommodations. Doesn’t get understood. Gets told they’re fine — or told they’re choosing to behave the way they do — because from the outside, they look fine.

And then they get home, or they get to university, or they hit a period of stress or change, and the mask comes down — not as a choice but as a collapse. The energy it took to maintain the performance runs out, and what’s underneath is usually exhausted, often anxious, and frequently very confused about why everyone else seems to find ordinary life so much easier.

This is sometimes called autistic burnout — though the experience of depletion after sustained masking is not exclusive to autistic people. It looks like withdrawal, shutdown, inability to perform the tasks that seemed manageable before. From the outside, it can look like depression, or a sudden regression, or a personality change.

Masking and late diagnosis

One of the significant barriers to late identification of neurodivergence — particularly in women and in people from communities where difference is stigmatised — is that the professionals doing the assessing sometimes see the mask, not the person.

“They made good eye contact.” “They were very articulate about their experience.” “They seemed perfectly able to manage the social demands of the assessment.”

These observations, made in good faith, can result in a neurodivergent person not meeting the threshold for diagnosis — not because they don’t have the profile, but because they’ve spent decades learning to perform differently in assessment contexts. The cost of that performance is invisible.

What helps

For children: creating environments where the real behaviour is safe to show. A child who doesn’t have to mask at school is a child spending all that energy on learning instead. This requires adults who are not responding to stims with correction, who are not requiring eye contact, who are building in sensory accommodation as standard rather than as exception.

For families: understanding that the meltdown at home after a fine day at school is often a direct consequence of successful masking. The child has held it together all day. Home is the place where the effort finally stops. This is not a behaviour problem to be managed. It’s a sign the school environment is costing too much.

For late-diagnosed adults: processing the history. Understanding that the exhaustion was real and the cost was real, and that the performance was genuinely impressive even when it was also genuinely harmful. Many late-diagnosed people spend significant time in therapy working through what decades of masking took from them — and what they might allow themselves to be now that they know what they’re working with.

The goal is not to make neurodivergent people better at masking. It’s to build environments where they don’t have to.

Want to think about what it would look like for your school to be a place where neurodivergent children don’t need to mask to get through the day? We can help.

Why ADHD in Girls and Women Gets Missed — And What That Costs

By The Misfit Collaborative

The diagnostic criteria for ADHD were developed primarily from studies of young boys. This is not a conspiracy — it’s a research history. Boys with ADHD tended to be loud about it: hyperactive, disruptive, impossible to ignore. Girls with ADHD tended to be quieter about it: inattentive rather than hyperactive, internalising rather than externalising, compensating through effort and people-pleasing until the whole scaffolding collapsed.

The result is a generation of women who were never diagnosed as children, who spent decades believing something was fundamentally wrong with them, and who are only now finding out what that something actually is.

In India, where girls’ difficulties are additionally likely to be attributed to emotional sensitivity, family stress, or not being academically gifted, the gap between girls with ADHD and girls with a diagnosis is wider still.

How ADHD presents differently in girls

ADHD has three presentations: predominantly inattentive, predominantly hyperactive-impulsive, and combined. Girls are more likely to present with the inattentive type — and the inattentive type is the one most likely to be missed.

Where a hyperactive boy disrupts the class, an inattentive girl sits quietly at the back and disappears into her own head. She’s not causing problems. She may even appear compliant. The teacher doesn’t flag her, because she’s not flagging herself.

What she is doing:

Daydreaming. Not as a choice, but as the default state of an under-stimulated brain seeking input.

Losing things. Constantly. Keys, pencils, books, the form she was supposed to return. Not carelessness — working memory and object-permanence difficulties.

Starting but not finishing. A trail of half-completed projects, brilliant beginnings that never made it to submission.

Hyperfocusing on the things she loves. For hours, without noticing time passing — which confuses the people who’ve been told she can’t concentrate.

Emotional sensitivity and rejection sensitivity. The ADHD brain processes social rejection intensely. Many girls with ADHD describe a terror of getting things wrong socially, a hypervigilance around how they’re being perceived, a devastation at criticism that feels completely disproportionate to others.

Exhaustion. Compensating — through effort, through people-pleasing, through working twice as hard to produce the same output — is tiring. By adolescence, many girls with undiagnosed ADHD are clinically burnt out.

What masking looks like

Girls are socialised to mask. From early childhood, girls receive feedback that regulates their behaviour: be quieter, be tidier, don’t interrupt, be helpful, be agreeable. This socialisation doesn’t cause ADHD, but it does shape how ADHD expresses — and it produces a performance of neurotypicality that can be convincing to everyone, including sometimes to the person doing it.

Masking looks like:

Watching others carefully and mirroring what they do
Developing scripts for social situations
Overcompensating on organisation (colour-coded planners that take more energy to maintain than they save)
Getting very good at apology and self-deprecation to pre-empt criticism
Pushing through exhaustion rather than disclosing difficulty

The problem with masking is that it works just well enough to prevent diagnosis — and not well enough to prevent the cumulative cost. The girl who masks successfully through school often collapses in university or early adulthood, when the external structure disappears and the internal scaffolding reveals itself as entirely borrowed.

The late-diagnosis experience

Many women are diagnosed with ADHD in their thirties, forties, or fifties — often triggered by their child’s diagnosis, or by burnout, or by coming across a description of ADHD that finally sounds like them.

The response to late diagnosis is rarely simple. There is often grief — for the years of unnecessary struggle, the relationships damaged by misunderstanding, the potential not realised because the support wasn’t there. There is anger. And, very often, profound relief: a framework that finally explains a lifetime of experiences that previously made no sense.

In India, adult ADHD is barely on the diagnostic radar at all. Many GPs and psychiatrists are not trained to identify it in adults, let alone in adult women. The route to diagnosis is long, expensive, and dependent on finding a specialist who knows to look.

What actually helps

Early identification is the obvious answer — but the systems that enable early identification (trained teachers, informed school counsellors, awareness of inattentive presentation) are not consistently in place.

In the meantime:

Know the signs — particularly the inattentive and emotional presentation, which doesn’t look like the ADHD most people imagine
Take girls’ struggles seriously — “she’s just a worrier” and “she’s very sensitive” are not sufficient explanations for children who are clearly struggling
Push for assessment — a psychoeducational assessment is the route to understanding; a diagnosis is the route to support
Read widely — the books in our ADHD reading list include specific titles on women and girls, including A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD and You Mean I’m Not Lazy, Stupid or Crazy?!

The late-diagnosed woman who finally understands what she’s been dealing with isn’t failing to cope with ordinary life. She’s been coping with ADHD without a map, without support, and usually while being told that whatever she was experiencing was her own fault. Understanding that reframes everything — including what support she deserves going forward.

If you’re trying to build better identification and support for girls with ADHD in your school, we’d love to work with you.

The Misfit Collaborative offers training for Indian schools on identifying and supporting ADHD across genders — not just the presentations that are easy to see.

What Is Executive Function — And Why Does It Matter So Much for Neurodivergent Kids?

By The Misfit Collaborative

“Executive function” is one of those terms that gets used a lot in conversations about neurodivergence, and understood a lot less than it gets used.

It’s also one of the most important things to understand — because executive function difficulties explain a huge amount of what looks, from the outside, like attitude, laziness, or not caring. And once you understand it, you stop saying “they could do it if they tried” and start asking a more useful question: what kind of support actually helps?

What is executive function?

Executive function is a set of mental processes that happen primarily in the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for managing and directing your own thinking and behaviour. Think of it as the brain’s management system: not the work itself, but everything that makes the work happen.

The core skills include:

Working memory — holding information in mind while you use it. Following a three-step instruction. Doing mental arithmetic. Remembering what you were about to say in the middle of saying it.

Inhibition — stopping yourself from doing something impulsive. Waiting your turn. Not blurting out the answer. Pausing before reacting.

Cognitive flexibility — shifting between tasks or ways of thinking. Adapting when a plan changes. Recovering from interruption.

Planning and organisation — breaking a task into steps, ordering those steps, executing them in sequence, managing time across the whole thing.

Task initiation — starting. This one is underestimated. For many people with executive function difficulties, getting started on a task — even one they want to do, even one they know how to do — is the hardest part.

Emotional regulation — managing emotional responses in proportion to the situation. Not the absence of emotion, but the capacity to moderate it.

Goal-directed persistence — staying on track toward a goal across time and distractions.

What executive function difficulties actually look like

Here is the gap between what adults see and what’s actually happening.

Adult sees: The child starts their homework but stops after five minutes and starts doing something else. What’s happening: Task initiation got them started (a win). Sustained attention under low interest failed. This is not a motivation problem. It’s a regulation problem.

Adult sees: The child knew exactly how to do the assignment in class but turned in nothing, or something incomplete and disorganised. What’s happening: The classroom environment scaffolded them. The homework environment didn’t. Without external structure, executive function difficulties become visible.

Adult sees: The child has a meltdown over something small — a changed plan, a wrong food, a minor disappointment. What’s happening: Emotional regulation is part of executive function. When it’s dysregulated by accumulated demand, the response to a small trigger can be disproportionate. This is not manipulation. It’s depletion.

Adult sees: The child can’t manage their time, loses things constantly, can’t seem to pack their own bag after years of being shown how. What’s happening: Organisation and planning require working memory and cognitive flexibility working together. When those are inconsistent, so is the apparently “simple” task that depends on them.

Why executive function is particularly affected in neurodivergent children

Executive function difficulties are a central feature of ADHD — often more functionally impairing than the attention difficulties themselves. They are also significantly present in autism, dyspraxia, anxiety, and other neurodivergent profiles.

This is why so many neurodivergent children struggle across multiple areas simultaneously — not because they have multiple separate difficulties, but because executive function underpins almost everything the school day demands.

It’s also why the “they can do it when they want to” argument is usually wrong. Motivation and executive function are related but distinct. A child can be genuinely motivated and still unable to initiate. Emotional regulation can fail during a task they care about deeply. Consistency of performance does not reflect consistency of effort.

What doesn’t help (and why)

More reminders. Working memory difficulties mean the reminders don’t stick. Another reminder is another piece of information the child has to hold and loses.

Punishing inconsistency. “You did it yesterday, so I know you can do it.” Inconsistency is a feature of executive dysfunction, not evidence of selective effort.

Taking away the scaffold before the skill is built. “I’ve been helping them with this for months — when do they learn to do it themselves?” Executive function skills are late-developing, inconsistent under stress, and often need external scaffolding far longer than neurotypical development would predict.

Treating the symptom without addressing the system. If the homework environment has no structure, more consequences for unfinished homework won’t fix anything.

What actually helps

External structure as a substitute for internal regulation. Checklists. Visual schedules. Timers. Physical organisation systems. The goal is to put the scaffolding outside the brain, because the inside-the-brain version isn’t reliable.

Breaking tasks into smaller steps, explicitly. Not “do your homework” but “take out your English book. Open to page 43. Read the first paragraph.” The more specific, the more doable.

Starting together. Task initiation is often the hardest part. Beginning the task alongside the child — even for five minutes — removes the initiation barrier.

Building in transitions. Cognitive flexibility is limited; warnings before switches (“five minutes until we change activity”) reduce the cognitive cost of shifting.

Reducing demands on working memory. Write things down. Provide written instructions alongside verbal ones. Don’t add steps mid-task.

Treating emotional regulation support as part of academic support. These are not separate issues.

Executive function develops late — and later still in neurodivergent children

One piece of context that makes a real difference to how adults interpret what they’re seeing: executive function continues to develop into the mid-twenties, even in neurotypical individuals. In children with ADHD, developmental lag in executive function is typically 2–3 years behind neurotypical peers.

This means a fourteen-year-old with ADHD may have the executive function maturity of an eleven or twelve-year-old — in a system that expects fourteen-year-old independence, organisation, and self-regulation.

That gap is the whole story of why so many neurodivergent students are failing not at the academic content, but at everything required to access the academic content.

If your school or family is trying to build practical support for executive function difficulties, we’d love to be part of that conversation.

The Misfit Collaborative works with Indian schools and families to translate neurodivergence research into approaches that work in real classrooms, with real children.

What Is Auditory Processing Disorder? (It’s Not About Hearing)

By The Misfit Collaborative

The child passes a hearing test. The audiologist confirms their hearing is fine. And yet they can’t follow what the teacher says. They mishear instructions constantly. They need things repeated. In noisy environments, they seem to shut down entirely.

Auditory Processing Disorder — APD — is one of the most frequently missed and most frequently misunderstood learning differences, because the obvious explanation (“they can’t hear properly”) turns out not to be the explanation at all.

So what is it?

APD is a condition in which the ears work fine — the sound gets in — but the brain has difficulty processing what it hears accurately and efficiently.

Think of it like this: hearing is the hardware, auditory processing is the software. A child with APD has working hardware. The software has a bug.

Specifically, the brain struggles with one or more of these tasks:

Distinguishing between similar sounds — hearing “pin” and “bin” as the same, for instance, or mishearing “sixty” as “sixteen”
Understanding speech in noise — in a quiet room, fine; in a classroom with 30 children, the signal-to-noise problem becomes overwhelming
Following rapid speech — when someone speaks at normal speed, the brain can’t keep up with segmenting and processing each word
Locating where sound is coming from — auditory localisation difficulties mean a child can’t tell if the teacher is speaking from the front or the back of the room
Remembering what was heard — auditory memory difficulties, so verbal instructions vanish almost immediately

What does it look like in a classroom?

A child with APD in school might:

Ask for instructions to be repeated frequently — and still get it wrong
Follow along fine in one-to-one conversation but seem confused in group settings
Do significantly better when information is written down rather than spoken
Appear distracted or “zoned out” in lessons that are primarily verbal
Have difficulty with phonics and reading that seems inconsistent with their general ability
Misunderstand social situations because they’ve misheard what was said
Become exhausted by environments that require sustained listening — like a full school day

The classic teacher response: “They hear what they want to hear.” Which is frustrating to hear if your child is genuinely working twice as hard as everyone else just to catch half the information.

How is it different from ADHD?

This is a common point of confusion, because the surface behaviour of a child with APD can look a lot like ADHD: difficulty following instructions, appearing distracted, inconsistent performance. The two can also co-occur.

The distinction is in the underlying cause. A child with ADHD has attention regulation difficulties — they can hear the instruction; holding attention on it is the challenge. A child with APD may have perfectly good attention — but what they’re attending to is a degraded or incomplete version of what was actually said.

Getting this wrong matters for intervention. Attention training won’t fix an auditory processing problem. And the child who is told to “listen more carefully” when they are already straining to hear is being failed.

How is APD identified?

APD is assessed by an audiologist — specifically, one trained in auditory processing evaluation, which is not all audiologists. Standard hearing tests are not sufficient. APD assessment typically involves a battery of tests in various listening conditions, looking at the specific pattern of processing difficulty.

Awareness of APD among paediatricians, school counsellors, and teachers in India is still limited. Many children who have it have never had the possibility raised, because the adults around them don’t know the term.

What actually helps?

Classroom acoustics matter enormously. Hard floors, high ceilings, and rooms full of children are the worst possible acoustic environment for a child with APD. Where possible: carpets, soft surfaces, reduced reverberation.

Preferential seating — close to the teacher, away from windows and doors, with a direct sightline for lip-reading cues.

Visual support for verbal information — writing key words on the board, providing written instructions alongside verbal ones, using visual timetables.

Reducing background noise — FM systems (where the teacher wears a microphone that transmits directly to a receiver near the child) are highly effective and used routinely in Western schools; they’re not yet common in India but are available.

Explicit teaching in verbal environments — pre-teaching vocabulary, chunking instructions, checking comprehension (not just “did you hear?” but “can you tell me what we’re doing?”).

Time — processing is slower; building in wait time before expecting a response reduces errors dramatically.

A note on India

Indian classrooms are loud. Large class sizes, tile floors, ceiling fans, open windows, and the ambient noise of a building full of children all compound the auditory environment that a child with APD is trying to navigate. The standard classroom layout — teacher at the front, rows of desks, verbal instruction as the primary mode of teaching — is not built for APD.

None of this is a reason to give up. Simple modifications make a real difference. But they require adults who know what APD is and why it matters — which is still far from universal.

Want to understand how your school’s environment affects children with auditory processing differences? Let’s talk.

The Misfit Collaborative works with schools and families across India on practical approaches to learning differences, from environmental design to classroom teaching.

What Is Dyspraxia? Understanding Developmental Coordination Disorder

By The Misfit Collaborative

Dyspraxia — formally called Developmental Coordination Disorder, or DCD — is one of the most commonly missed learning differences in schools. Partly because the name suggests it’s purely about movement (it isn’t). Partly because the children who have it often compensate so hard that the difficulty goes unnoticed for years. And partly because the things dyspraxia affects — organisation, handwriting, getting dressed, carrying a tray in the cafeteria — tend to be read as carelessness or immaturity rather than as a specific neurological pattern.

This is a post about what DCD actually is, what it looks like in children and adults, and why the “they’ll grow out of it” response is usually wrong.

What is Developmental Coordination Disorder?

DCD is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects motor coordination — but “motor coordination” covers much more than most people realise. It includes:

Gross motor skills — running, jumping, balance, sport, navigating physical space
Fine motor skills — handwriting, using scissors, doing up buttons, picking up small objects
Motor planning — the ability to organise a sequence of physical actions before and while doing them
Proprioception — the sense of where your body is in space

Children with DCD often know what they want to do. Their bodies don’t reliably do it. The disconnect between intention and execution is not about effort or attention — it’s neurological, and it’s consistent.

It’s not just about being clumsy

“Clumsy” is the word that gets applied most often, and it’s both partially accurate and significantly undersells what DCD involves. The children who have it aren’t just bumping into furniture. They may:

Take significantly longer than peers to learn to ride a bike, tie shoelaces, or catch a ball — and in some cases, never fully automate these skills
Have handwriting that is slow, painful, and illegible — not from carelessness but from the genuine difficulty of coordinating the mechanical process of writing
Struggle to follow multi-step instructions in PE, craft, or science lab — because sequencing physical actions requires conscious effort that others do automatically
Appear disorganised in the physical world — losing things, forgetting where they put objects, misjudging distances
Become exhausted by physical tasks that take others no mental energy at all — because for a child with DCD, those tasks are not automatic

Social consequences follow. Sport is difficult, which matters enormously in childhood peer dynamics. Physical tasks that seem basic to others become sources of shame. The child is teased or excluded, or learns to avoid situations where their coordination will be visible.

What about the non-motor aspects?

This is the part that surprises people: DCD frequently involves significant difficulties beyond movement.

Children with DCD often struggle with:

Working memory — holding information in mind while doing something else
Processing speed — taking longer to respond to information even when they understand it
Organisational and planning skills — the executive function side of motor planning generalises to tasks that aren’t physical at all
Attention — DCD co-occurs with ADHD in a significant proportion of cases

The result is a child who may be struggling academically not because of a reading or maths difficulty specifically, but because the combined weight of motor difficulties, slower processing, and working memory challenges is affecting everything.

How is it identified?

DCD is diagnosed through assessment — typically including standardised measures of motor skills (the most common is the Movement Assessment Battery for Children, or MABC) alongside broader developmental and educational history. An occupational therapist is often the key professional involved, with input from educational psychologists.

In India, DCD falls under the umbrella of Specific Learning Disabilities in the RPwD Act 2016. It’s less frequently diagnosed than dyslexia or ADHD, partly because specialist assessment is less available and partly because awareness is lower among the professionals who would typically refer children for evaluation.

Do children grow out of it?

Not reliably. Significant longitudinal research shows that DCD persists into adulthood for the majority of children who have it. Adults with DCD may find workarounds — they type rather than write, they avoid physical activities that expose their difficulty, they develop strategies for the tasks that don’t come automatically. But the underlying neurological difference doesn’t disappear.

Early intervention with occupational therapy makes a real difference — not to “fix” DCD but to build the strategies and adaptations that allow the person to function in environments designed for different nervous systems.

What actually helps?

Occupational therapy — targeted work on the specific motor and planning difficulties, with strategies for daily life
Removing the performance pressure — children with DCD often do better when they’re not being watched or assessed, because the anxiety of observation makes coordination worse
Extra time for written tasks — handwriting is so much slower and more demanding that timed tasks are genuinely unfair
Keyboard access — typing offloads the motor planning demands of handwriting and often reveals the intellectual capability that poor handwriting was obscuring
Explicit teaching of sequences — things that others learn implicitly (how to hold scissors, how to organise a bag) often need to be taught directly and systematically
Believing the child — when a child says they can’t do something that seems simple, they usually mean it

A note on India

Physical education in Indian schools often means competitive sport. Craft activities in primary school involve fine motor precision. Science labs require careful physical coordination. None of these environments are designed with DCD in mind — and none of the adults supervising them are typically trained to recognise when a child’s difficulty is neurological rather than behavioural.

The child with DCD in an Indian classroom is often the one who can’t write fast enough, can’t play well enough, and can’t keep their desk organised — and is told, repeatedly, that they would be fine if they just paid more attention.

They’re paying attention. Their nervous system just works differently.

If you’d like to know more about supporting children with DCD in your school or home, get in touch.

The Misfit Collaborative works with Indian schools and families to build understanding and practical support for children across the full range of learning differences.

What Is Dyscalculia? (And Why It’s Not Just Being Bad at Maths)

By The Misfit Collaborative

When a child struggles to read, we have a word for it — dyslexia — and a reasonably well-known body of research behind that word. When the same child struggles to understand numbers, the response is usually very different: they just need to practise more. Maths is hard for everyone. They’re not trying.

Dyscalculia is a specific learning difference that affects how the brain processes numerical information. It’s as neurologically real as dyslexia. It’s significantly less recognised. And in schools where maths performance is heavily weighted and timed calculation tests are the norm, children with dyscalculia are quietly being failed at scale.

So what exactly is dyscalculia?

Dyscalculia affects a person’s ability to understand and work with numbers at a foundational level — not just the ability to do complex maths, but the basic sense of what numbers mean.

This is the part that surprises people. It’s not about forgetting multiplication tables or making careless errors. It’s about a genuine difficulty with number sense — the intuitive, automatic understanding of quantity that most people develop without thinking about it.

A child with dyscalculia might not be able to immediately “see” that 7 is more than 4 without counting. They may struggle to understand what a number like 47 actually represents spatially. They may find telling the time, managing money, estimating distances, or following timetables persistently difficult — not because they haven’t tried, but because the neural processing that makes these things automatic isn’t working the same way.

What does it look like?

No two children with dyscalculia present identically, but common patterns include:

Difficulty with number sense. Can’t quickly estimate which of two quantities is larger. Has to count rather than recognise small groups (this is called lack of subitising).

Trouble with sequencing and order. Struggles to recall number sequences, months of the year, or multi-step instructions in order.

Problems with time. Frequently late or confused about schedules. Difficulty estimating how long things take. Analogue clocks remain confusing well into secondary school.

Challenges with money. Struggles to calculate change, estimate costs, or manage a budget — even with numbers that seem simple to others.

Extreme maths anxiety. The kind that is physiological — heart rate, avoidance, shutdown — rather than just nervousness about tests.

Inconsistency. May get something right one day and wrong the next, which adults often read as not paying attention, when it actually reflects inconsistent access to information that’s not fully embedded.

What it isn’t

Dyscalculia is not low intelligence. Many people with dyscalculia are highly capable in other areas — including other aspects of maths that are less dependent on number sense, like geometry or algebraic reasoning.

It is also not the same as maths anxiety, though the two often co-exist and reinforce each other. A child can have maths anxiety without dyscalculia, and dyscalculia without significant anxiety — though years of struggling and being told to try harder tends to produce anxiety eventually.

And it is not laziness or avoidance for its own sake. Avoidance is a logical response to repeated failure in a subject that the entire school system treats as a measure of intelligence.

How common is it?

Estimates vary, but dyscalculia is thought to affect around 3–7% of the population — roughly the same prevalence as dyslexia. It co-occurs frequently with dyslexia, ADHD, and dyspraxia.

Despite similar prevalence to dyslexia, dyscalculia receives a fraction of the research attention and a fraction of the public awareness. Most teachers have heard of dyslexia. Far fewer have heard of dyscalculia. Many families navigate their child’s maths difficulties for years without ever encountering the word.

How is it identified?

Dyscalculia is identified through psychoeducational assessment — typically by an educational psychologist or neuropsychologist. Assessment looks at number sense, working memory, processing speed, and mathematical reasoning, alongside broader cognitive profiling.

In India, dyscalculia falls under Specific Learning Disabilities in the RPwD Act 2016. Students with a formal diagnosis can access accommodations including extra time and use of a calculator in board examinations — though awareness of this, and access to diagnosis, varies significantly.

What actually helps?

The good news is that targeted support does make a real difference. What works:

Explicit instruction in number sense — not more practice, but different practice. Using concrete materials (counters, number lines, blocks) to build the foundational understanding that others develop intuitively.
Reducing cognitive load — allowing calculator use for computation so cognitive energy can go to understanding.
Spatial approaches to maths — many people with dyscalculia respond better to visual and spatial representations of numerical concepts.
Removing timed tests — timed calculation is one of the most anxiety-inducing formats for dyscalculic learners, and one of the least useful measures of mathematical understanding.
Separating maths skills from maths anxiety — addressing the emotional layer is often as important as the cognitive one.

A note on India specifically

Indian school mathematics is heavily focused on calculation speed and procedural accuracy. Times tables by rote, mental maths tests, and competitive examinations that heavily weight maths performance — all of these create a particularly punishing environment for children with dyscalculia.

The result is often a child who is bright, capable, and increasingly convinced that they are not — because the one measure the system cares about is the one they cannot access reliably.

Understanding dyscalculia doesn’t fix the system. But it does mean you can stop telling a child to try harder at something their brain genuinely processes differently. That’s a start.

If you’re an educator or parent trying to understand what your school can do differently, we’d love to talk.

The Misfit Collaborative works with Indian schools and families to build genuine understanding of specific learning differences — not just awareness, but the practical capacity to change what happens in the classroom.