A child who finds reading hard is not a child who isn't trying. Reading is a genuinely difficult skill that the human brain was never specifically built for, and difficulty with it has causes — several of which need identifying by someone qualified rather than guessing at home.
First: this might not be a reading problem
Before anything else, rule out the ordinary physical explanations, because they're common and easily missed.
Vision. A child who can't see the page clearly will struggle, and children rarely report blurred vision because they assume everyone sees that way. School screenings don't catch everything.
Hearing. Learning to read depends on hearing the sounds in words. Intermittent hearing loss, including from repeated ear infections in early childhood, affects this and often goes unnoticed.
Both are worth checking properly before concluding anything about reading.
What to do if difficulty persists
Ask the school for an assessment, and ask specifically rather than generally. Dyslexia and other specific learning difficulties are common, identifiable and well understood, and a child who has one needs structured, specialist teaching rather than more of the same.
This is not something an article can determine, and it isn't something a tutor diagnoses either. If anyone offers to identify a learning difficulty without a proper assessment, that's a reason for caution.
Earlier identification leads to better outcomes, which is the main argument for asking sooner rather than waiting to see.
Decoding and comprehension are different problems
Worth distinguishing, because they need different help.
Some children can't convert letters to sounds reliably — the words themselves are the obstacle. Others decode accurately and don't take in the meaning.
A quick way to tell: read a passage aloud to them and ask about it. If they understand it fine when heard and not when read, the difficulty is in decoding. If they don't understand it either way, comprehension or vocabulary is the issue.
What helps at home
Reading aloud to them, a lot. The single most useful thing. It keeps their vocabulary, comprehension and appetite for stories developing while the decoding is still hard, which stops the gap widening.
Audiobooks. Not cheating. For a child whose decoding is behind, audiobooks are how they stay in the world of books, and comprehension from listening is broadly comparable to reading.
Short, frequent, calm. Ten minutes is plenty. A long session with a frustrated child teaches them that reading is where things go badly.
Easier books than you think. Reading should be mostly successful. A book where a child stumbles on one word in twenty builds fluency; one where they stumble on one in ten builds avoidance.
Taking turns. You read a page, they read a page. Keeps the story moving and reduces the load.
What to stop doing
Correcting every error, which turns reading into a test. Making them read aloud in front of siblings. Comparing them to a sibling or classmate. And visible disappointment, which children detect instantly and which converts difficulty into shame.
The thing worth protecting
A child's belief that books are for them. Decoding can be taught at eight, ten or fourteen. A child who has concluded that reading is something they're bad at is a much harder problem — and that conclusion comes from how the difficulty was handled, not from the difficulty.
A note on this article
This is general information for parents, not an assessment. Persistent difficulty with reading warrants a conversation with your child's school and, where vision or hearing may be involved, with a doctor or optometrist.