When Should I Teach My Kid to Read?
A homeschooling parent’s internal dialogue (externalized)
The algorithm (one that caters to parents of young children, homeschoolers, and homemakers) tells me that there is a great divide (among many others) on what age children should learn to read. I have always erred on the side of “sooner the better” - at the same time, having recently eased the pressure on (very) formal lessons, to give way to childhood in these early years. We still use flashcards and whiteboards, and we practice writing with our five-year-old, but we prioritize getting outside the house and giving way to play; keeping learning opportunities in the moment and on the go.
I’ve long loved reading and writing, even though my penmanship has always been abysmal - always in too much of a rush to write neatly. But I’d say that, as someone who was traditionally (publicly) educated, I have never felt compelled to ask the question, “when should children learn to read?” Until now!
Now, cut to the first couple of weeks of our homeschooling journey where I created flash cards of basic animals for my 4.5 year old to read! She had just come out of a Montessori school where she was already learning phonics and handwriting, so I continued to follow suit.
I took videos of her impressive reading efforts and shared them with our extended family - they were genuinely impressed and I certainly gave myself a pat on the back. And then I really began tucking into homeschooling and early childhood education philosophies; reading John Holt, Richard Louv, and Charlotte Mason, to name a few, and other peer reviewed articles (and yes, consuming reels and posts from other content creators), where the overwhelming consensus was that children should begin formal literacy lessons (or any formal education, for that matter) around the age of six (give or take - with the emphasis on child readiness; Holt even writes about learning to read as old as 12 - but I personally just could not wait that long). All while, in the same algorithm, receiving content on 2 year-olds reading in Montessori environments, or scrolling through @Toddlerscanread ‘s page, learning his methods on teaching phonics. Like so many others raising children in my generation, it becomes difficult to sift through the noise or even find time to sit down and dig a bit deeper for evidence from each side.
And then I went down the rabbit hole of looking into common educational practices in the US, Canada, and the UK where reading is introduced as early as 3.5 years of age. It was in this research that I discovered this long-standing tension between literacy approaches: phonics vs. whole language. This flip-flop is happening right now in Ontario where early education has been largely play-based but is now incorporating (or transitioning towards) a “back-to-basics” approach (slightly more prescriptive phonics) as a response to the decline in literacy rates and math skills (although not entirely removing the ‘play’ component).
In a 1931 peer-reviewed article, called ‘When Should Children Begin to Read?’, M.V. Morphett and C. Washburne also identified the age of six being the optimal time to learn reading. They also noted that early instruction doesn’t necessarily guarantee long-term benefits. In a 2022 article by Michelle I. Brown, Cen Wang, and Sharynne McLeod, titled ‘Reading with 1-2 year olds impacts academic achievement at 8-11’, they emphasize the importance of reading with your infants for at least 11 minutes each day to realize long-term academic benefits. Another article from 2013, suggests that children who read a bit later (say, 7 or 8) are able to catch up with those who began reading at age 5.
The ‘aha’ moment for me was realizing that schools around the world kind of got it right, beginning formal education with grade one, when children are around the age of 6! But then the societal need for childcare, pre-k, and kindergarten popped up as more mothers were joining the workforce [which I’ll not elaborate on, as my goal isn’t to debate or dispute women in the workplace - trust me, I’ve worked in corporate for a decade and I don’t have a recommendation or preference - but sharing here to simply highlight the potential responsive evolution of our educational system and its approaches]. And, at the same time, I’ve heard from my teacher friends that holistic education has fallen heavily on teachers with partnership with parents on the decline. Another sphere of debate here seems to be on what children should learn at home or at school [will not deep dive on household dynamics and circumstances in this post].
Okay, so as a homeschooling mom, this is great information but gosh - don’t you still just feel the pressure to teach literacy and numeracy at a young age, anyway? Like it’s an indicator of your effectiveness as a parent and home educator!? I know I do - and honestly because I don’t believe that we will homeschool for their entire education… So there's that voice at the back of my head that keeps taunting me, “don’t you want them to meet the standards of their peers if they go back to school tomorrow!?”
So how can we, as critical thinkers, make sense of the content we consume online, the books we read, and the articles we may or may not have access to?
For me, when it comes to literacy at 5 and 2 years of age (my two oldest children), it’s balance. It’s whole language and phonics. It’s gauging my 5-year-old’s interest and responding to it; it’s offering her opportunities to learn and equipping her with tools and skills that are developmentally appropriate. Mostly though - it’s equipping myself: the mother teacher. If she asks me how to read a word in the wild, can I make the proper phonetic sounds? Can I explain to her why the “e” at the end of the word causes the long “a” sound?
I’ll leave you with two more questions to pose in this blog post. So if not (very) formal literacy and numeracy lessons, what in the world should my less than six-year-old kids be doing? And - But what if my younger child shows readiness and interest in reading?
What should my less than six-year-old be doing at home with me? From what I gather, playing, getting outside, doing life alongside me, and working on her habits (yes, I’m leaning quite Charlotte Mason on this one). They should be experiencing the physical and tangible world; experiencing the beauty of God’s creation and naturally developing questions and curiosities. They should be working on their fine and gross motor skills. In Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter, she emphasizes the importance of three types of play: rough and tumble, exploratory, and pretend. In the Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv coined the term, “nature-defecit disorder” and how generations of children’s disconnect to nature could be connected to the rising rates of anxiety, depression, obesity, and other attention disorders. I’ll dedicate some future content on overcoming the hurdles of getting outdoors from the perspective of a suburban dwelling mom who is afraid of bugs (that’s me).
And what if my child shows readiness to read? Why shut her down of course, and tell her that the research shows that it’s too early!!! JUST KIDDING - then I’ll teach her! Even my two-year-old is showing interest, asking me to write down all our names on her paper and pretending she can read; narrating - albeit, in gibberish - some of her favourite books. I also have some materials at home to pull out to learn about the alphabet, phonics, and sight words, but these days, most of our literacy comes from on-the-spot learning (like if my almost-5-year-old wants to read something at a restaurant) and fostering their love of reading through read-alouds and demonstrating my own love of reading (instead of scrolling!).
In the next one, I’ll go in depth on what we’re doing instead of formal lessons, but also what approaches I take if there’s interest and readiness for reading (spoiler alert it’s both phonics and whole language).
