Will strengthening my child’s core help them read? Some version of that gets typed into a search box at eleven at night. Often the parent asking has already paid for a movement program, while their child still struggles through a sentence. The worry under it is honest. So is what set it off. A child who fidgets, slumps and knocks into the furniture is working hard to find their own body in space. Your child is not broken. Their brain is learning differently, and that includes how it maps the body it lives in.
FROM THE VIDEO
Key moments from Proprioception’s Impact on Learning:
- 05:55A plain, accurate definition of proprioception: how the body senses where it is, how hard to grip a pencil, how to stay balanced.
- 07:03Why a child who fidgets, slumps and bumps into things is working to locate their own body, not refusing to try.
- 08:02Simple, low-cost movement ideas to try at home: deep pressure, trampolines, climbing, modelling clay and big hugs.
Common questions from parents
Will core or coordination exercises improve my child’s reading?
My child is clumsy and struggles to read. Are the two connected?
Should I stop the movement activities, then?
What actually helps my child read?
A stronger core, better balance, more coordination are all good for your child. None has been shown to make them read faster. Reading moves somewhere else entirely.
The clumsiness is real, and it has a name
You have seen it for years. Your child grips the pencil like it might escape, trips over flat ground, and slides out of the chair by the third page of homework. That sense of where the body sits in space, how much force to use, how to stay upright, has a name: proprioception. It is a real system, and in children who find learning hard it often works in its own way.
This part of the video gets it right. A child who fidgets and bumps into things is not being defiant. Their body is truly working to locate itself. If that pattern sounds like your child, a parent’s guide to dyspraxia walks through where these differences come from. Naming the difference is a relief. It lifts the blame off a child who has been trying the whole time.
Strengthening a child’s body reliably strengthens the body. It has never been shown to strengthen the reading, and the studies that tested that promise directly came back empty.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Where the promise quietly breaks
Here is the leap to watch for. Because the body difference is real, it feels obvious that fixing the body will fix the reading. The video makes that jump when it claims a stronger core makes a child read faster. No study backs that claim. Coordination and school skills do go together. A 2024 review in Sports Medicine found the link real but small (Bao et al., 2024). Going together is not the same as one building the other.
Researchers have tested the stronger version head on, and it does not hold. Body-training programs were measured against reading and writing. The results came back null (Meijer et al., 2020). A separate review of 92 studies covering more than 25,000 children found the same thing. How enriching an activity was did not predict better schoolwork (Vasilopoulos et al., 2023). Training the body reliably improves the body, and what improves reading is practising reading. That gap between a skill and the thing it is supposed to unlock is the same reason brain-training games rarely move real learning.
Key takeaways
- The clumsiness is real: A child who bumps and fidgets is locating their body, not defying you.
- Body and reading only go together: The link is small and never showed one builds the other.
- Teaching reading moves reading: Explicit, systematic teaching is the lever the trials keep pointing to.
What actually moves the reading
So put the trampoline where it belongs, in the good-for-every-child column. Then ask the harder question. What has been shown to move reading? The answer is plain. Researchers reviewed 22 randomized reading trials. One approach reached significance: explicit, systematic instruction in the sounds and structure of words. Motor exercises did not (Galuschka et al., 2014). Phonological processing sits at the root of most reading trouble. Reading still leans on several systems at once, so a single method rarely tells the whole story. Dyslexia is best seen that way, as learning differences across several brain systems rather than one broken part.
- Explicit, systematic teaching of letter-sounds and word structure, taught directly rather than guessed at.
- Enough practice with real reading that decoding becomes automatic.
- Movement and play kept in the day because they are good for your child, not as a stand-in for teaching.
This matters because an industry has sold movement as a reading cure before. The Dore program, marketed as an exercise-based fix for dyslexia, fell apart under review and took a journal’s editors down with it (Bishop, 2007). France’s INSERM reviewed proprioceptive treatments for dyslexia in 2016 and found the studies too weak to draw any conclusion. The pattern repeats because a movement plan is easier to sell than the slow work of teaching. If you recognise your child in all of this, a free dyslexia screener is a low-cost way to see where to start. A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations like an IEP or 504 plan, a professional evaluation is the route to those supports. The same goes if you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause.
Do the trampoline because jumping is good for your child. Do not do it because someone promised you it would teach them to read.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
You want your child to read, and you want their body to feel like a place they are at home in. Both are worth having. The frustration is an industry that keeps repackaging good movement as a reading cure, because a trampoline is easier to sell than the slow, unglamorous work of teaching reading, and every month spent chasing the promise is a month the actual instruction did not happen. You do not need a credential to be the most important teacher your child will ever have. The people who spend the most hours watching your child struggle and succeed are not the ones writing the programs. They are the ones reading this sentence right now.
A reading struggle rarely travels alone. Many children working hard to find their body in space are also wrestling with attention, working memory or the sounds inside words, and each of those responds to being taught, not trained around. See the full set of tools built for the whole child.
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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.
