Yes. I’ve had specialized training in working with clients who have attention focus challenges or hyperactivity. Through Attention Mastery, clients learn Davis tools to maintain focus and regulate their own energy, and they master life concepts like time, sequence, consequence, and order versus disorder — concepts that end up mattering just as much as the focus itself.

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I generally don’t recommend doing a Davis program while a child is on medication for attention focus challenges. Stimulant medications like Ritalin tend to interfere with a student’s ability to learn mental imagery control and techniques like dial-setting, which are central to Davis methods.

Some families choose to do the program during a school break, when a “medication vacation” is also possible — but that decision is always between you and your child’s treating physician, not something I can advise on myself. I’m happy to talk it through with your family either way.

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Absolutely — and it’s more common than people expect. Many dyslexic thinkers are strong visual-spatial thinkers: they can recognize written words just fine, but struggle to produce their own thoughts in writing (sometimes called dysgraphia), or with numbers (dyscalculia).

Rather than treating reading, writing, and math as separate problems needing separate fixes, I look at the same underlying thinking style behind all of them. Someone can absolutely be dyslexic and still read well — recognizing a word on a page is a different skill than generating your own words from scratch, and picture-thinkers often struggle with the second far more than the first. Symbol Mastery gives words a concrete connection to mental pictures, and Davis Orientation work supports the perceptual and motor skills tied to handwriting itself.

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In my experience, individuals age 7 and up with CAPD symptoms — sometimes called “auditory dyslexia” — do well with Davis methods.

CAPD is often diagnosed in people who have real trouble with listening: distinguishing sounds, understanding what’s been said, needing things repeated, confusing similar-sounding words, or seeming distracted or “checked out.” These individuals usually don’t have a physical hearing problem — the difficulty is in how the brain interprets what it hears.

These are also recognized symptoms of dyslexia. In my view, the two things driving both CAPD and dyslexia symptoms — disorientation, and difficulty thinking in words rather than pictures — significantly overlap.

One distinction worth knowing: dyslexia (as a reading difficulty) is hard to reliably identify before about age 6, since many young children simply aren’t ready to read yet. CAPD symptoms can show up much earlier, sometimes by age 3. If your preschooler shows real delays in speaking or understanding language, it’s worth getting evaluated by a speech-language therapist, along with a hearing check from a physician or audiologist.

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Dyspraxia (sometimes called “clumsy child syndrome”) shows up as chronic clumsiness, accident-proneness, and poor motor coordination — real difficulty holding a pencil, learning to ride a bike, or catching a ball.

In my experience, Davis Orientation work — the same perceptual tools described in The Gift of Dyslexia — genuinely helps with dyspraxia. The Koosh ball exercises that go along with it are especially helpful for large motor skills, balance, and hand-eye coordination. Many people tell me that after this work, it’s the first time in their life they’ve felt truly “in balance,” rather than subtly off-center. More detail on this is in Chapters 11 and 30 of The Gift of Dyslexia, if you’d like to read further.

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