Abstract
Mothers of dyslexic children take on additional responsibilities such as interacting with their children’s educators as a means to support their children’s education. While this allyship is seen as beneficial to the well-being and academic outcomes of the children, these parent-school interactions can often be fraught with challenges. This paper reports on semi-structured interviews with 10 Australian mothers of dyslexic children and the microaggressions that were evident in their interactions with their children’s educators. Employing qualitative content analysis, the study determined that many of Keller and Galgay (Citation2010) domains of ableist microaggressions were communication to parents and conveyed messages that demeaned either the children or the mothers. The findings indicate that mothers experience ableist microaggressions both vicariously through their children’s experiences and as a primary adjacent experience as part of their allyship to their child.
Points of interest
- Mothers of dyslexic students act as allies to their children when interacting with their educators.
- When acting as allies, mothers were subjected to a range comments that demeaned or devalued them or their children.
- These comments conveyed messages that the dyslexic children were considered to be less capable than or valued less than their peers, and that the mother’s allyship was not welcomed.
- The mothers experienced these comments, also known as ableist microaggressions, either first hand, or when their children shared stories of what had been said to them.
