51-year-old singer Gwen Stefani has opened up about how she and her three sons cope with dyslexia.
When speaking to Zane Lowe for his At Home With conversation series, Stefani revealed that she only found out that she herself suffered with dyslexia, when her children started having trouble reading.
Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that can cause problems with reading, writing and spelling. However, unlike a learning disability, intelligence isn't affected. The exact cause of dyslexia is unknown, but it often appears to run in families.
“One thing that I've discovered through having kids is that I have dyslexia — everyone has things that happen and mine was that,” Gwen confessed.
“I feel like a lot of the problems that I have had or even decisions that I've made for myself stem from that, because now the children — obviously, it's all genetic — they have some of those issues,” she explains.
Gwen is the proud mother of three boys, 14-year-old Kingston, 12-year-old Zuma, and six-year-old Apollo, all of whom she shares with ex-husband Gavin Rossdale.
“I was a good girl. I didn't do any bad stuff,” the mum-of-three explains, recalling her school days, and the unknowing effect dyslexia had on her back then. “It was just really hard for me to function in that square box of school that everybody was supposed to be understanding. And my brain didn't work like that; it still doesn't. But it works in different ways that are probably a gift that other people can't do.”
Going on to describe how her kids are coping with dyslexia now, Stefani, reasons, “But now they get all these benefits. They have these incredible teachers and schools and they don't have to have shame about it. They understand that their brain functions in a different way. All of our brains do.”
