Parent-reported emotion regulation in children with dyslexia and/or developmental language disorder

Recent research has found that children with dyslexia have increased mental health problems. However, little is known about their emotion regulation, an ability that is crucial to psychosocial and academic well-being. Often, developmental language disorder (DLD) co-occurs with dyslexia, and importantly, DLD is also associated with increased mental health problems as well as poor emotion regulation. Neither line of research on mental health has accounted for the co-occurrence of dyslexia and DLD; thus, it is possible that difficulties with emotion regulation in either population may be attributed to the co-occurrence of these problems rather than to either dyslexia or DLD occurring in isolation.

We examined parent-reported emotion regulation in 278 second-grade children (M_age = 8;0 years; 124 female) with dyslexia, DLD, dyslexia+DLD or typical development (TD). Parents reported their children's emotion regulation using the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function-2, which asks parents to rate the general frequency and disruptiveness of behaviors thought to represent emotion regulation difficulties.

Results indicated that children with dyslexia were rated as having significantly worse emotion regulation difficulties on average compared to TD children, and that a higher proportion of children with dyslexia or dyslexia+DLD obtained ratings indicating elevated emotion regulation problems compared to TD children. Notably, we found no significant differences between children with DLD alone and TD children. When previous diagnoses of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder were considered, patterns of estimates for dyslexia and dyslexia+DLD were similar but no longer statistically significant.

For children of this age and grade level, our findings suggest that emotion regulation difficulties are more associated with dyslexia than DLD, although we cannot elucidate whether the symptoms are due to emotional processing difficulties, insufficient executive control, or other causal factors. We discuss the need for further research on the emotional challenges of children with dyslexia and children with DLD that considers the co-occurrence of reading, language, and attention problems.