Dyspraxia and Following Instructions: Louder Doesn’t Help. Smaller Does.

Why does the second step go missing?

Dyspraxia is a difference in how the brain plans and carries out movement. Its formal name is developmental coordination disorder, or DCD. For your child, putting on a shoe is not automatic. Each part of it takes thought. There is more in our parent guide to dyspraxia.

Now add a spoken list: shoes on, grab your bag, brush your teeth. Your child has several jobs running at once. They hear the words. They keep the steps in order. They plan the next move. Then they make the move. In our view, all four share one small space for holding things in mind. That space is called working memory, and it is one piece among several.

We see this again and again in children who find movement hard. The first step lands. By the time the shoe is on, the rest has slipped away. To us, that does not look like a child ignoring you. It looks like a child who was handed too much to hold at once. Plenty of children hit the same pile-up, with or without a name for it.

How many steps should my child be able to follow?

Parents ask us this a lot. Our honest answer is that there is no set number.

Best and Miller wrote a 2010 review in the journal Child Development. It looks at how these thinking skills grow. It also reports an earlier memory study by Luciana and Nelson. On one task, only the number of things to hold in mind changed. When there was little to hold, children kept up with teens and adults. The gaps showed up only as the amount to hold grew.

The same review says there is still no full map of how they grow. So we would not trust a chart that hands you a number of steps. The better question is how much you are asking them to hold now. A short ask at the kitchen table is one thing. The same ask while your child climbs the stairs is another.

It is tempting to try to make the memory bigger instead. Melby-Lervåg, Redick and Hulme (2016) looked across many memory-training studies. Training improved the trained tasks, but the gains did not reach everyday schoolwork. So we would not drill the memory. We would change the size of the ask.

What does a smaller instruction sound like?

Here is what we would try tonight. None of it needs special tools.

• One step, then wait. Say “Shoes on.” Wait until both shoes are on. Then give the next step.
• Wait for still hands. Give the next step between moves, not in the middle of one. A child tying a lace is already busy.
• Show it, do not only say it. Point to the bag. Or do the first step once while your child watches.
• Let your child keep their own system. A picture list on the door holds the steps for them. So does a checklist they made. Then their head is free for the moving.

Here is how that morning might sound. “Shoes on.” You wait. “Great. Now the bag.” You point to it by the door. “Now teeth.” Three short asks, and each one is done before the next begins. It feels slower at first. It is faster than the third trip upstairs.

When a step still goes missing, skip the louder voice. A louder voice adds no room to hold the step. Point to it, or show it again. To us, breaking it down is not babying. It is matching the ask to what your child is already holding.

School has the same problem. A missed step there sometimes gets written up as “does not follow directions.” That lands as a behavior note. Nobody looks at the size of the ask. Tell the teacher what works at home. One step at a time, shown, and written where your child sees it. For more on the dyspraxia struggles that are not about coordination, see this post. And here are four more ways to lighten the load of remembering directions.