For our family, it's not an "either-or". During a meeting with a math teacher recently who had decided that she could "fix" my son's dysgraphia by refusing him an accommodation of using a calculator for the rote calculations of problems, the head of the special ed department made a comment about us that helped explain our philosophy. "They've always chosen to require their son to do things the hard way - until the hard way got in the way of doing it at all or doing it successfully. He's hit that point, so it's time to listen."
When my son was in third grade, he would come home and sit in our kitchen from the time he finished his snack until supper, because it took him that long to write out his homework. There were days I wanted to rescue him, but my husband reminded me I'd be cheating him out of the success of master something that was difficult. By letting him work through it, he finally got to the point that the work took him a couple of hours instead of all night (although it took his classmates maybe a half hour).
We push our son very hard to find solutions where there are barriers and to master tasks that seem impossible, because we want him to have every tool possible for success. But when the barrier is so great that it comes in the way of making progress or getting behind on a concept, that's where we draw the line. So when it's a research paper, he dictates or types. When it's a one-page essay, he writes it longhand.
It doesn't have to be and really shouldn't be either-or.
