Three Siblings Who Struggle to Read Wrote Twelve Books Together

What happened in Colorado Springs

FOX21’s Justin Antweil, co-host of Loving Living Local, told the Kute siblings’ story on August 10, 2026. Dane, Savannah, and Ruby, of Colorado Springs, each have dyslexia, and each has become an author. What began with a book-writing class a few years ago has grown into Kute Kids Publishing, twelve titles in all, listed for sale on Amazon.

The publishing is one arm of a small family enterprise. On weekends the siblings sell 3D creature figures, “fairy sticks,” and food-design earrings at the Backyard Farmers’ Market and the Acacia Park Farmers’ Market. They have a plan for the earnings, too: save toward becoming motivational speakers in local schools, and give their creations free to other people with dyslexia. Savannah put the family’s working theory in one line.

“You can achieve anything you want as long as you have a good support system.”

The frame the science supports

The easy read of a story like this is that three children beat the odds. There is a quieter reading that matters more to your family. The belief that a smart child who fights reading is simply lazy, or a puzzle, is not a hard truth about children. It is a leftover from an old diagnostic model, and the field that owns that model has now retired it.

On October 22, 2025, the International Dyslexia Association adopted its first new definition of dyslexia since 2002, and it dropped the requirement that reading struggle be “unexpected” relative to a child’s intelligence. The revision paper that explains the change, Catts, Haynes and Joshi (2026) in Annals of Dyslexia, is blunt about why: diagnostic approaches that lean on a gap between general intelligence and word-level reading “lack predictive validity.” Put plainly, a capable child who struggles to read is not the exception the old model treated as a puzzle. It is the expected picture. Reading difficulty and intelligence were never the same wiring. Learn more about what dyslexia is and is not.

A diagnosis describes where your child is today. It does not predict where they will be in a year of the right kind of practice. The Kute siblings are a living version of that sentence, twelve books past the point where a label might have stopped them.

What it means for your child

None of this makes the road smooth. Reading is genuinely hard for a child who struggles with it, and it stays hard through a lot of practice before it eases. The Kutes are candid about that. Their mother, Amanda Kute, has written that her kids are not reading at grade level, and that the years of learning to read have been the hard part, not a charming detail. Name the struggle first, always, because a child living it knows when it is being papered over.

And then, only then, the other half is fair to say. Real strengths do emerge from that struggle. They are earned through it, not handed over in place of it. Here is the practical part for you. If your child is sharp and still stuck on reading, do not let anyone file it under lazy. That framing costs a year. Watch for the pattern the Kutes show, real capability sitting right beside real reading difficulty, and treat it as a signal to teach, not to wait. One caution worth knowing: the definition changed in 2025, but school practice moves slower than definitions, and some districts still reason from the old intelligence-gap model. If your child’s school does, you now know the field has moved on, and it is worth bringing that to the table. It is also the message the Kutes’ mother, Amanda Kute, gave her own children. She told the Colorado Springs Gazette in 2023 how she frames it for them:

“That means your brain is a superpower brain. You are creative, you can think outside the box, you can problem solve, but this reading thing, it’s going to be a hurdle for you for a little bit. It’s gonna be hard, but it doesn’t mean you’re not smart. It means once you tackle this reading, your superpowers are going to come out and you’re going to be able to tackle the world.”