Before You Call Dyslexia a Gift, Ask What the Label Replaces

Montana State Celebrates the Strengths of the Dyslexic Mind

On October 22, Montana State University brings its Dyslexia and Innovation Symposium to Inspiration Hall in Bozeman, running from 5 to 8 p.m. and livestreamed for families who are not on campus. The free event is co-founded by Jeffrey Conger, a professor of graphic design, and Sarah Pennington, an associate professor of education, and it returns each year with the same purpose: to present dyslexia as a difference with strengths rather than a disability to be corrected. This year’s speakers are drawn from design, mentoring, and the arts.

Organizers describe the day as one that spotlights the unique strengths of the dyslexic mind. It is a framing the symposium has carried for years. Speaking about the 2021 edition, Conger put the goal plainly:

The goal of this 100% virtual event is to shine the light on dyslexia in a new and positive way.

That year, Conger pointed to a list of dyslexic strengths compiled by Made By Dyslexia, a UK advocacy non-profit. It is worth noticing where that framing comes from: a movement of accomplished dyslexic people and the organizations that champion them, rather than research on how a label shapes a developing child. That distinction is the whole story.

The Question Is Not Gift or Deficit. It Is What the Label Replaces.

The public conversation about dyslexia tends to get stuck on one question: is it a gift or a deficit? Both framings share a hidden assumption, that the label itself is the thing that shapes a child. The research on children and young people who carry a dyslexia label points to a more useful question: what did the label replace?

A 2021 systematic review by Gibby-Leversuch and colleagues, pulling together nineteen studies of how children with reading difficulties see themselves, found that for many of them a diagnosis did real good. Where a child had been carrying the sense that others saw them as unintelligent or lazy, a name for the difficulty offered an alternative picture of themselves. The review also found the risk these children face is specific rather than sweeping: a knock to how they see themselves as learners, not to their overall sense of worth. It is worth seeing what dyslexia is under the current definition before you weigh any of this.

The same review is careful about the other side of the ledger, and this is the part the celebration framing tends to skip. That improvement in overall self-concept, it found, appears to arrive as a trade-off, alongside declines in how children rate themselves academically and a pull toward seeing the difficulty as beyond their own control. Whether the right support reduces that cost is, in the review’s own words, as yet unclear. A 2025 review of the field by Knight reaches the same honest conclusion: the evidence on what a dyslexia label does to a child’s self-perception is genuinely conflicting, protective in some studies and costly in others.

So the takeaway is not that a label is good, and it is not that a label is harmful. The evidence does not support either blanket claim, and anyone who hands you that certainty is selling something the research does not have. What the evidence does support is that a diagnosis is an act of identity formation, and that its effect turns almost entirely on what it displaces and the language wrapped around it. A name that replaces “I’m stupid” with “my brain reads differently, and there is a way to work on it” does one kind of work. A name that arrives with no hope attached, quietly lowering what everyone in the room expects, does another. A diagnosis describes where your child is today. It does not predict where they will be after a year of the right kind of practice.

What This Means If You Are Weighing a Label for Your Child

If your child is somewhere on the road toward a dyslexia evaluation, this research hands you a better set of questions than gift-or-deficit. Ask what the label would replace for your child right now. A child who has already decided they are lazy or slow stands to gain from a name that says otherwise. Ask what language will surround the label once it arrives, because the same diagnosis reads as a door or a ceiling depending entirely on the words attached to it.

There is a real gap most families fall into: you sense something is making reading harder, but the only path anyone offers ends in a clinical label, so you wait, and the struggle continues. You do not have to wait to start helping. 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.

None of this is an argument against the celebration in Bozeman. A child who sees accomplished dyslexic adults on a stage and thinks “people like me do interesting things” has been handed something worth having. The point is that a warm story about strengths and an honest reckoning with what a label does are not in competition. Your child deserves both: the belonging, and a name given deliberately, wrapped in language that keeps a door open.