My Child Shows Signs of Dysgraphia. Are Dyslexia and ADHD Next?

Does one struggle cause the next?

The video with this post tells it as cause and effect. Reading struggles come first, and dysgraphia follows as a result. It is an easy story to believe. In 2025, van Bergen and colleagues tested stories like it.

They looked at how reading, math and attention struggles overlap. Handwriting was not part of the study. One model said one struggle causes another. The other said the struggles share some genetic influence. The cause-and-effect models fit worse. One link did look causal. It ran from reading to spelling. Handwriting and composing still need their own teaching.

This fits Pennington’s multiple-deficit model. In that model, learning struggles have many causes, and some of them overlap. So two struggles showing up together is expected. It is not one problem spreading into the next.

The overlap is real. Researchers followed a group of kids born in Rochester, Minnesota. Writing problems showed up more often in kids who also struggled with focus. Those kids were born long ago. The study also counted all writing problems, not only handwriting. Still, one struggle is not a promise of the whole set. A big twin registry in the Netherlands looked at reading, math and focus. The most common picture there was one struggle, not several. We wrote more about reading and writing struggles that show up together.

Whatever shows up together, one thing holds. Your child isn’t broken. Their brain is learning differently.

Is a child who talks well but writes little being lazy?

The video names a pattern many parents know. A child tells a great story out loud. Then you ask for it on paper, and it stalls. Spelling turns into a fight, and the page stays half empty.

It is natural to wonder about effort. The presenter asks the same thing and answers no. We agree. Nothing in that pattern looks like laziness to us. Calling it lazy only means the effort has not met the right method yet.

Writing asks a child to do several jobs at once. Your child has to think of the idea and hold the sentence. They also have to spell each word and form each letter. Bourdin and Fayol found children recall fewer words when writing than when speaking. Writing being slower was not the reason. Later studies made writing less automatic for adults, and the same gap showed up.

So the words are there. How much attention the writing itself takes is one of the things loading your child.

Which label is it, and does that matter?

The video sorts dysgraphia into three types: motor, spatial and language-based. Those words help you describe what you see. Know what they are, though. They are long-standing clinical convention, not research-validated categories. They trace back to a 1995 paper by Deuel. Of the three, the spatial type has the weakest support.

Writing gets less attention in general. One research team called it “the forgotten learning disability” (Katusic et al., 2009). Dysgraphia is not a category in DSM-5 or ICD-10. In our view, schools look for reading struggles far more than writing ones.

So the hunt for one right label tends to go in circles. The useful question is which writing skill to teach next. Work on handwriting, spelling and putting ideas into sentences side by side. Waiting has never taught a child to write. Teaching does.

The video gets one thing right. When struggles overlap, guessing at home only goes so far. A professional evaluation is the only route to an IEP or 504 plan. It is also the step to take if you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause. If you are sorting signs at home, this chart of which signs point to reading helps.