Almost every parent of a struggling reader has felt the same two-sided worry: something is making reading hard for your child, and no one has been able to tell you what. Jinger Duggar grew up inside exactly that gap. On the second episode of her new podcast Call Your Sister, released September 16, the former reality-TV star said she has dyslexia, and in the same breath said she has never been formally diagnosed with anything. She was homeschooled, and the difficulty was never caught or addressed. Her story is being told as a lifelong trait she learned to work around, but the more useful way to read it is as a reading difficulty that went unnamed for decades, and what the science now says about that.
Jinger Duggar says she has dyslexia and was never diagnosed. Here is what the science says about a reading difficulty named late, and how to use it if your own child is struggling.
Common questions
Was Jinger Duggar diagnosed with dyslexia?
Is dyslexia permanent?
How do I help my child if they were never diagnosed?
My child leans on audiobooks to keep up. Is that a problem?
Jinger Duggar says she has dyslexia and was never diagnosed as a homeschooled kid. The field’s 2025 definition says support helps at any age. A diagnosis describes today, not a ceiling.
Jinger Duggar Says She Has Dyslexia, and Was Never Diagnosed
On the second episode of Call Your Sister, the podcast she co-hosts with her sister Joy-Anna, released September 16, 2026, Jinger Duggar described setting out as a homeschooled child to read the Bible cover to cover in a short window and leaning on audio Bibles instead. “I [was] just determined to read it from start to finish within two months,” she said. “And somehow I relied on audio Bibles,” she added, “‘cause I have dyslexia.”
What she did not describe was a diagnosis. In the same conversation she said plainly, “Never been, whatever they say, diagnosed.” The difficulty she described is present-tense and adult, not a childhood phase she left behind. “But I know how hard it is for me to read out loud,” she said. “Now, reading aloud is different than reading it like looking at it,” she went on, “but it still is hard.” And then: “So my comprehension is terrible.”
She was educated at home, and by her own account the reading difficulty was never identified or worked on during that education. This account rests on Jinger Duggar’s own words on the podcast, as reported by The Hollywood Gossip; at the time of writing no second outlet had independently corroborated the disclosure. What is worth holding onto is the shape of it: a person who reached adulthood, wrote books, and hosts a podcast, carrying a reading difficulty that no one ever named or taught into.
Never been, whatever they say, diagnosed. — Jinger Duggar, on the Call Your Sister podcast
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
A Diagnosis Describes Today, Not a Ceiling
The coverage frames dyslexia the way most people still do: a permanent trait you cope around for the rest of your life. That frame is behind the times, and the field itself has moved. On October 22, 2025, the International Dyslexia Association adopted a new definition of dyslexia, its first revision since 2002. Gone is the old assumption that this is one fixed thing with one cause. In its place: “The causes of dyslexia are complex and involve combinations of genetic, neurobiological, and environmental influences that interact throughout development,” and underlying phonological difficulty is now described as “common but not universal.”
The part that answers Jinger Duggar’s situation directly is the clause about timing. The 2025 definition states that “although identification and targeted instruction are important at any age, language and literacy support before and during the early years of education is particularly effective.” Read that carefully, because it says two honest things at once. Support would have helped more when she was a girl, and it is not too late now. That is the difference between a ceiling and a starting line. It is worth seeing what dyslexia actually is under the current definition before you decide what a reading struggle means for your own child.
There is a second thing the coverage misses. An accomplished adult who struggles to read is not a contradiction to be explained away; it is the expected picture. The 2025 definition dropped the old 2002 line that reading difficulties are “unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities,” and Catts and colleagues, writing in 2026, give the reason: approaches that define dyslexia by a gap against IQ lack predictive validity. Struggling to read out loud says nothing about how sharp Jinger Duggar is. The two were never the same thing. A diagnosis, when it finally comes, describes where a reader is today. It does not predict where they land after a stretch of the right kind of practice.
Key takeaways
- Never diagnosed, never caught: Jinger Duggar says she has dyslexia but was never formally diagnosed or helped as a homeschooled child.
- The field moved in 2025: The IDA’s October 2025 definition calls dyslexia multifactorial and says support matters at any age.
- Compensation is not reading: Audio and picture workarounds stand in for decoding rather than build the skill underneath it.
What Jinger Duggar’s Story Means If Your Child Struggles to Read
The audio Bibles are the detail worth sitting with, because they are so easy to misread. Leaning on audio was a sensible workaround for a child who had no other way in, and there is no shame in it. But a workaround is not the same as the skill. Text-to-speech and audiobooks are meant to supplement reading instruction, not stand in for it, and the thing to watch for is a child who leans on them so completely that the decoding underneath never gets built. That is what appears to have happened here: the support carried her, and the reading itself was never taught.
This is where the reading science is blunt. Decades of eye-tracking work by Keith Rayner show that skilled readers process nearly every letter and rely more on letter-sound information as they get better, while guessing from context and pictures is what struggling readers do. Cognitive scientist Mark Seidenberg calls that guessing pattern “descriptive of how poor readers read.” Whether the compensation is guessing from a picture or leaning entirely on audio, it lets a person look like a reader while the skill of turning symbols into sounds stays untaught. Naming the difficulty is the first step toward teaching that skill instead of routing around it.
If your own child is somewhere in this territory, you do not have to wait for a formal label to start. A free parent screener asks what you are seeing at home and points you toward where to focus today, in language that builds your child up rather than boxing them in. A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis, and it is not meant to replace one. If your child might need formal accommodations at school, an IEP or a 504 plan, or you suspect a vision, hearing, or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports. What Jinger Duggar’s story argues against is not audio Bibles or coping. It is the quiet assumption that once a difficulty is unnamed for long enough, the moment to do anything about it has passed. The field’s own definition says otherwise, at any age.
You do not need a formal label in hand to start helping your child read, and you do not have to accept that a reading struggle is a fixed trait to be coped around for a lifetime. The adversary in Jinger Duggar’s story is not dyslexia. It is the frame that treats a reading difficulty as permanent and a workaround as good enough, so that no one ever builds the skill underneath. If you want to find where your child’s reading actually breaks down and start on it today, the seven-day All-Access trial opens an assessment that names where to begin.
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A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
References
- The Hollywood Gossip — Jinger Duggar Reveals Undiagnosed Dyslexia Made Her Struggle to Read the Bible as a Child
- Call Your Sister podcast (Episode 2) — Joy’s Secret First Crush Was… | Ep.2
- International Dyslexia Association — Definition of Dyslexia (2025 revision)
- Catts, Haynes & Joshi (2026), Annals of Dyslexia — Defining dyslexia: 2025 revision
