Online Kids Games Can Benefit Dyslexic Kids

Having a child diagnosed with dyslexia can be a traumatic experience for parents. If you are one of them, you have trawled through the internet hundreds of times and talked to teachers and therapists for ways to help your child overcome the condition. But wading through traditional dyslexia programs and treatments can be a bit overwhelming at times. And most kids tire of them after a while. 

That, of course, does not mean your child’s unique educational needs should be ignored – there are plenty of alternative options to help kids with dyslexia cope with it without being pigeon-holed. And the newest kid on the block, as far as dyslexia therapy is concerned, is kids games online. Yes, you read it right.

What Are the Benefits of Kids Games Online?

This may come as a surprise. Computer games have long been blamed for being a bad influence on kids, but recent studies find that they actually have a beneficial effect on those with dyslexia. In fact, it has been discovered that playing online kids’ games for a few hours daily could be more effective in treating dyslexia than months of conventional classroom teaching.

Dyslexic kids who played computer games for 12 hours saw a significant improvement in their reading speed and ability to concentrate. This is a significant finding because dyslexic kids read very slowly and constantly struggle with reading comprehension.

These results far exceed those achieved by dyslexic kids enrolled in highly grueling treatment programs. Kids are certainly going to love these findings!

Italian researchers say that action-based online games hold kids’ visual attention and enable them to extract more information from the environment. This allows kids to perform better on tests, probably because their minds are more focused after playing the game.

However, it is too soon to say whether online computer games are directly responsible for improving dyslexia in kids or how long the results might last. It is also unclear whether playing online games is a better treatment approach for dyslexia than conventional ones. In other words, playing online kids’ games without any kind of supervision or control is not advisable. Also, parents are cautioned against using online games as a DIY therapy for their child’s dyslexia, though it is perfectly alright to use it along with conventional therapies.

But if there ever was a therapy that dyslexic kids would definitely love, online kids’ games would be it!