Are We Pushing Kids to Learn to Read Too Soon?

When I went to school, there were no kindergartens. When my children went to school, there were only a few private kindergartens-none connected with the public schools, and certainly none who boasted that their students were fluent readers by the time they were ready to enter the first grade.

The kindergartens my children attended were, by today's standards, pretty poorly run. We didn't pay a lot each month for the privilege of sending our children to kindergarten, but were quite happy when the year ended and our children had learned to get along with their peers, color reasonably well inside the lines, and how to count to 10. They also spent a lot of time taking field trips around town to places like the police department, the fire department, and the public library, and devoted plenty of time to decorating for holidays and to just plain old playing with each other.

The only thing I remember them learning that was remotely connected to reading was when they brought home a piece of paper every couple of days with a letter of the alphabet on it. They would tell me the name of the letter and then go hunting through magazines for pictures of items that started with the same sound of the letter they had brought home. A cat for C, a dog for D, etc. They would paste these small pictures on the page with the letter on it and take them back to school. After they had done this for every letter of the alphabet, the papers were stapled into a small booklet, with a cover designed by the student and put on display at an open house for parents in the spring. The alphabet books occupied a prominent place among other treasures such as clay animals, beaded necklaces, popsicle stick buildings, and lots and lots of hand-colored pictures.

Were we damaging the future of our children because they weren't taught to read in kindergarten? Was my educational future damaged, because I didn't even attend kindergarten at all, thus forfeiting the opportunity to even do an alphabet book before I turned 6?

Although some may disagree with me, I don't think so.

When I was in college, I had a professor who made a great point of the mental differences between boys and girls at an early age. He even dared suggest that boys be held out of school until they reached a mental age of 6 years and 10 months, which he claimed was the optimum age for beginning the process of learning to read, and that boys reach that mental age later than girls do. I'm not sure where he got his information, but his reason for claiming it became obvious to me after I became a teacher, myself.

According to this professor, many boys have more trouble in school than girls because they are pushed to learn before they are mentally ready. He said that holding boys back a year would make them more able to compete on an equal footing with girls nearly a year younger. He did stress that this inequality was not permanent. In fact, he said, boys often caught up with the girls in a few months and in many cases even surpassed them in ability, but that being marked as a failure at the very beginning of one's school career often caused boys to quit trying and to develop a poor attitude toward school and learning. How much better to provide them with the ability to succeed to begin with.

He also compared learning to read with learning to ride a bike. Sure, with a lot of "hands-on" help, you can teach a very young child to ride a bicycle. But, if you wait until their feet actually reach the ground and they have developed a sense of balance, they can almost teach themselves without any help---or any spills.

In my experience as a third grade teacher, I often noticed that boys who were struggling with reading had already developed a negative attitude about school. This type of attitude was also prevalent among students whose parents seemed overly demanding that their children excel in school. "Do your best," is a parental expectation I can respect, but the demand that "Nothing but A's will do," is another thing entirely.

This week I read a blog where a woman was concerned because her 4 and a half year old daughter still hadn't shown any skill at reading? I felt like calling the children's' services and reporting her for child abuse.

Another lady said that if you delay teaching your children to read until they enter first grade you have already wasted valuable years of your child's life. Wasted, in whose opinion? Tests have shown that students who learn to read early, are not necessarily at the top of their class a few years later. When little 3, 4, and 5 year old children are subjected to regimented daily reading lessons, I can't help but wonder, will these children ever even get a chance to be children?

I'm not totally familiar with the policies of Waldorf schools, but I recently read where they don't get into the formal teaching of reading until students finish the first grade. That sounds like a good idea to me-kind of like the bicycle illustration I used earlier. If we wait until the student is really ready for whatever it is we want him or her to learn, the results will far easier and more successful in the long run.

Lest you think that I am suggesting we hide books from our children until they start to school, that is far from what I am advocating. By all means, populate your home with books for your children beginning at infancy. Let them play with books and enjoy the colorful pictures. Read to them constantly and don't discourage them if they try to read the story for themselves. Like learning any other skill, a lot about learning to read is absorbed naturally.

What I am against, is pushing children to read before they are ready. By expecting kindergarteners to sit at a desk for long periods of time, we may be encouraging sedentary behavior that can lead to later obesity and cause them to miss out on a lot of time they really should be playing and developing the important skill of getting along well with others.

In our country there seems to be an unspoken competition among parents. We feel as if it is somehow a reflection on our parenting skills if a friend's child learns to roll over, walk, talk, use the potty, or read before our child does. Isn't that a bit ridiculous? Do we feel that we don't quite measure up if a friend can paint a beautiful picture while ours look like hen-scratches? Of course not. Different people have different skills. We, as parents, need to make sure that our kids have a chance to follow their own pattern of skill development.

Please, encourage your kids to read by making sure books are available for them to enjoy, and set a good example by showing them that you enjoy reading yourself. But don't, push them into reading before they are ready. It can only do more harm than good.