Mommy Intuition or School System Expectations?
In mid-January my daughter turned 7 and she still couldn’t read.
Knew her letters? Yes.
Knew the sound each letter makes? Mostly.
But reading? Nope. She knew a few words like ‘cat,’ ‘mom,’ and ‘dad.’
Even though I have chosen to ‘unschool’ with my daughter, meaning that I generally let her interests and abilities set the course of our unstructured and life-led learning days, I couldn’t help but wonder if I should be worrying. My intuition said she’ll get it when she is ready, like everything else I’ve worried about, but sometimes it’s hard to listen to intuition when society makes me think something is wrong.
However, NOW, at 7 years and two months, my daughter has entered the amazing galaxy of reading. She is now a reader. And not just a beginning reader either. She went from basically not reading at all to amazing us with the words she can read. ‘Employee,’ ‘dinosaur,’ ‘fossil,’ ‘favorite,’ ‘meeting,’ etc. Her use of context clues also blows my mind! I have worked with students much older than her who hadn’t mastered that skill to her current level.
Two months! And no, I didn’t do anything different. Her brain did.
Knowing Vs. Feeling
Why is it that saying “my 7-year-old can’t read yet” feels like I’m admitting to a dirty secret?
(I KNOW I’m not alone in this.)
There is NO reason to feel like a bad parent because my 7-year-old couldn’t read. None. Yet I had to actively work through that immediate reaction.
What do I mean? I mean that starting to read at 7-years-old – which would be halfway through 1st grade for most kids in the US – is totally normal.
Yup, I said it. Normal.
In fact, starting to read at age 8 or 9 isn’t even cause for alarm, as long as no ‘red flags’ have arisen (such as an inability to rhyme, seeing ‘fuzzy,’ ‘sparkly,’ or ‘jumping’ words, a limited verbal vocabulary, etc.)
Oh I can guess what you’re thinking:
‘What?! How can you say that?! Kids learn to read in Kindergarten! I would really worry if my child couldn’t read halfway through first grade! Their teacher would be concerned too!’
Yup. I hear that.
But it’s the system, not the child.
Let me explain.
An Education Arms Race
Did you know that in Finland students don’t start school until age 7? You know, Finland, the country widely recognized for having the best education system in the world? For over a decade?
Yeah, that Finland. Where NO reading instruction occurs until age 7.
Want to know how Finnish students, who start reading instruction two years after most US students, can score better in reading than countries teaching reading earlier? Well, let’s look to the research.
A study by Sebastian Suggate at the University of Regensburg in Germany, found that learning to read later allows students to more effectively match their knowledge of the world (comprehension) to the words they learn. “It makes sense,” says Suggate1. “Reading comprehension is language, they’ve got to unlock the ideas behind it.” Suggate2 has also found that learning to read early had no discernible benefits by the time students were age 15. In other words, by the time students are 15 there is no way to tell who learned to read before whom.
So why do we do we freak out if our child isn’t reading by Kindergarten? Why does the US school system make us think something’s wrong with US and/or our child if they aren’t reading at age 5 or 6?
Good freaking question.
You Have to Know My Daughter
My dear daughter is smart, quick witted, extremely verbal, active, imaginative, a handful of attitude, and a bundle of love who hams it up at least half of her waking hours.
As an educator who specialized in gifted education, if she were someone else’s child in a school system, I would have highly recommended they have her tested for gifted services the minute she started school.
Even though she couldn’t read.
My daughter is also a highly sensitive personality with sensory processing disorder (SPD) and inherited anxiety. If she was in a typical school system, her independent spirit and neurodivergence coupled with SPD and anxiety would find her either frustrated and ‘in trouble’ or squashing and molding herself to conform to expectations. The idea of either breaks my heart, as both her mother and an educator. Not just because I have witnessed it before but also because I experienced it myself.
nature vs. Nurture….uh…schooling
These are some of the very reasons I decided to unschool my daughter. As soon as her little independent spirit started to flourish after the ‘threatening threes’, toss in a helping of SPD and a generous dose of increasing anxiety, and honey, learning was on HER terms.
If she was interested in a topic she could focus for hours, soaking up everything. Even as young as 3!
Watching a documentary over and over and over again until she knew every word and integrated what she had learned into her imaginary play.
Wanting to look at books of her latest interest and have them read over and over until she knew every word and picture by memory (even knowing when to turn the pages).
Coming up with questions to “ask Google” when I didn’t know the answer.
Drawing pictures and building recreations with toys while verbalizing a story she was imagining to play out a new version of whatever she was interested in at the time.
She ate up information about volcanos, cats, dogs, dinosaurs, asteroids, color mixing, space exploration, Rube Goldberg machines, creation of the Earth, Marie Curie, dragons, and more.
HOWEVER…
If my daughter wasn’t interested in a topic, or was frustrated that she wasn’t easily learning something she wanted to learn, forget it. FOR. GET. IT!
Her little brain either truly could not process past that frustration (SPD and neurodivergence for the win) or it was simply going to be forced learning…learning this because I’m the ‘adult.’
There’s a reason NO best practice in teaching and learning research involves ‘do it because I said so.’
At best, this results in short-term memory learning. At worst, it can actually make it harder to ever learn that topic or skill.
With lots of reflection, more research, more reading, and lots of mulling over all I had ever learned and experienced in the field of Education, I made hard decisions over and over again. Why hard? Because my decisions often went against nearly everything I had been taught as an educator and student in our education system.
Hard because kids learn to read first and foremost in school and that should start at 5, right?
Hard because don’t kids need to learn to read ASAP?
Hard because kids need to ‘stay on track’ or they will be ‘left behind,’ right?
Hard because our teachers and administrators know what they’re doing or they wouldn’t be doing it, right?
No. The answer to each of those questions is actually a hard NO.
Schooling is Slow to Learn
A number of people have asked me why I got a PhD if I don’t ‘use’ it. *eyeroll for another time*
You know what I’ve told them? That no matter what I do or do not do with that PhD, no matter hard that degree was on me physically and emotionally, I would do it over again in a heartbeat because I wish every teacher could learn what I learned in that program.
Why? Because as a teacher I saw behind the curtain. I saw behind the great OZ.
I saw the wheels, the gears, the structures, the impediments, the leadership struggles, the decades-long delay in research implementation, the repercussions of political smoke and mirrors.
I saw the educational Matrix and it absolutely changed me as an educator.
What do I mean? Well, here’s an extremely frustrating example:
Current ‘best practices’ in most schools were best practices determined by researchers many years before they became best practices.
The pipeline from ‘in the field’ research to academic presentation/publication to school-level awareness to teacher implementation is LONG. YEARS long.
And that’s ONLY if it’s something interesting enough to catch attention, or something enough multiple researchers have concluded that it will saturate the field.
And then only ‘progressive’ or ‘daring’ or newly graduated teachers will try it first because it’s TOUGH implementing something new as a teacher: you have extremely limited time, resources, and administrative support. It’s simply easier to stick with what works in such a draining system.
Putting Faith in Little Brains
So what’s my point?
My point is that those hard decisions I made shouldn’t have been that hard. Our education system isn’t the end-all be-all. Reading does NOT have to happen at age 5. All growing brains are NOT at a place to ‘click’ with reading at 4, 5, 6 years old. And no, it is not necessary or even all that productive to force them to identify sight words, phonetic sounds, etc. every night until they can read.
As Ballard (2021) put so succinctly: “There are virtually zero studies that show proof that reading early actually helps kids succeed long-term.” Do some kids need support with phonics, sight words, and more? Absolutely. That might be how their brain learns best. But all kids? Or before they are ready and interested to read on their own? HARD no.
What was the hardest decision I had to make over and over again with my daughter and her reading?
To let her be.
To let her unique little brain show ME what she needed and when.
To let her little brain set the pace.
To not push.
To not force her to comply to fairly arbitrary expectations of our early schooling expectations.
To watch.
To listen.
To provide a variety of interesting opportunities.
To allow her to be HER and celebrate her for THAT.
It was MY anxiety that worried. It was MY expectations that made me chomp at the bit for her to read. It was MY learned fear that a late reader is at risk for problems or extra burdens. It was MY issue. And it was MY responsibility to NOT put that issue onto her.
THAT was my hard decision.
To celebrate her where she was when I was unsure.
Assure her we will do this at HER brain’s pace.
How was I able to let myself do that?
By trusting in the fact that nothing was wrong. [Remember those studies I mentioned?] I knew in the back of my head that research supports that MANY kids’ brains aren’t actually ready to read until age 7. The complicated decoding process just isn’t fully formed and ready to function like that until later for some kids.
Just sit and imagine being a child whose brain needs more time. Being forced to sit and practice reading when your brain isn’t ready yet. I can only imagine it would be like being put in calculus when your brain hasn’t practiced algebra yet. The foundations aren’t there. The connections aren’t there. You can look at the formulas and functions and try to make some short term memories and find some patterns, but it would be SO frustrating.
SO self-deprecating.
SO disheartening.
Especially if there are kids all around you whose little brains HAVE made those foundational connections.
It doesn’t matter how smart you are. How extensive your verbal vocabulary is (like my daughter). You feel less than. You feel incapable.
I would NOT allow that to happen to my daughter. I most certainly would not let MY anxiety cause her to experience such a thing.
Facilitate. Inspire. Provide.
So what DID I do? I provided resources.
From the day my daughter was born, I was reading books to her, talking to her, singing to her, and showing her pictures in books.
From birth she was surrounded by books. She had an overflowing bookshelf of kids books from birth (former teacher, remember). She was encouraged to play with all kinds of books. Look at any book that interested her.
She saw her Mom and grandmother and others regularly reading books. I gave her the freedom to just look at the books, the words, the pictures, and not feel pressure to do anymore than that.
As she got older, if she was willing to point out letters for me, name an animal for me, share what word she might recognize for me, great! I would certainly ask. But she was absolutely allowed to say no.
She has always been allowed to refuse forced learning. Sometimes she loved to learn the letters, show me words she knew, ‘read’ the (memorized) story to me, or let me point to the words as I read.
But many times, especially as she reached ages 5 and 6, she did NOT like me pointing out the words or asking her what a word was that I knew she would know. There was a pressure to it that upset her or frustrated her.
THAT was hard for me at first. Respecting her little brain enough to take ‘no’ as an answer when she was nearly 7 and not reading. BUT, I did NOT want her to shun books. I not NOT want her to feel books were a pressure she wanted to avoid. I feared her future hatred of books more than I feared her lack of reading at that age.
I simply offered.
What Offering Looked Like
Me: ‘Hey, I got these graphic novel books about Cleopatra in Space at the library and they look so cool! Would you like me to read one to you?’
Her: ‘No.’
Me: ‘Okay. Well, I’m going to read them to myself then.’
Her: Just don’t read them out loud!
Me: Of course. I’ll read them in my head.
I then sit and read the books while she plays with something else nearby.
Some days she would just play.
Some days she would eventually come up and sit with me and want to look at it with me but not read it.
Sometimes I would find her days later flipping through each book, page by page, intently following each frame.
OR
Me:’I finished those Cleopatra in Space books. Did you know there were a lot of cat characters in those books? And they talked!’
Her: …
Me: ‘Did you know that cats in Ancient Egypt were considered very wise and respected?’
Her: No. Why?
I answer her question and Google some images for her. The next day I notice her looking for cats in the books I was telling her about. Later that day she is nowhere near the books, but she is making a story with her Legos about Cleopatra and cats in space.
Update: She still hasn’t wanted to read those books, but she enjoys looking at the pictures on her own. Either way, it’s a win. She’s enjoying books.
OR
Me: ‘I just downloaded a new game on your iPad that I think you’ll like. You help cute little critters called Readlings on an adventure to rescue a book that was stolen from them.’
Her: How?
Me: ‘You’ll just have to try it and find out.’ (Starting up the game so she can see the colorful animations before she says ‘no.’)
The animations and fun sounds sucked her in long enough to find out she really liked this game. And I HAVE to tell you how AMAZING this reading game is. I KNOW it made a huge difference helping her feel more confident and interested in reading and learning phonics. Look for a future post about an app called POIO (screen grabs below). She STILL plays it even now that she can read AND already beat the game…she just started over again.
Until It Wasn’t
However, sometimes offering ends differently:
My daughter loves the story of Mulan.
She’s never seen the movie(s) but I told her about the story once and found a graphic novel version.
At first she wanted nothing to do with it when I asked if she wanted me to read it to her. A few days later she looked quietly at the graphic novel. Over and over again for weeks she would do that, but she never wanted it read to her.
Fast forward a few months and now that graphic novel has been part of bedtime every night for weeks.
She also integrates the story into her Lego builds and her dress up warrior stories.
She has even been interested in looking at short YouTube videos about ancient china to understand why the characters were dressing and acting in certain ways.
In the meantime, she would ask me to read her:
words on signs,
words on text messages from grandma or a friend,
what her newest Lego box said,
the subtitles on her favorite YouTube videos,
and more.
But she did NOT want the pressure of being asked if she knew the word, let alone reading out loud.
That was too much.
Until it wasn’t.
Additional REsources
Suggested Quick Reading:
Ballard, W. (2021). Study shows: pushing kids to read too much, too early is counterproductive. Bored Teachers: Celebrating Educators Everyday. https://www.boredteachers.com/post/learning-to-read-too-early-might-be-counterproductive
Hogenboom, M.(2022). What is the best age to learn to read? BBC.com. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220228-the-best-age-for-learning-to-read
References:
1Suggate, S.P. (2013). Children learning to read later catch up to children reading earlier. Early Childhood Research Quarterly. 28(1). 33-48.
2Suggate, S.P. (2009). School entry age and reading achievement in the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). International Journal of Educational Research. 48(3). 151-161.