Because I write articles about the importance of establishing a good math foundation in pre-schoolers, I tend to read everything I find dealing with early childhood education to determine what is factual and what is not. There is currently a parental push to have children reading earlier and earlier–even before the age of 3. This is like “keeping up with the Joneses” with reading. The message to others is “Look what my child can do,” and should be interpreted as “My child is smarter than your child.” This can be a harmful way to be manipulating your child.
I recently found an article on several different websites in which a father is pushing for parents to have their child reading phonetically before the age of 3. His website is urging everyone to buy his materials so that your child, too, may begin reading at the age of 2. This father has included on his website a video of his daughter, age 2 years 11 months, “fluently” reading. His response to criticism of pushing his daughter too hard has been “Why wouldn’t you do this?” and “You can’t push a child too hard.” He is so very WRONG!
I have watched this video many times and I had a friend, also a teacher, watch it as well. My friend’s response to the video…”What language is that child speaking?” Her response, which was similar to mine, was based on the fact that the child’s extreme “sounding out” effort made her words nearly impossible to understand. It is difficult in writing to convey the idea of what we heard, but this is my attempt (make each of these sounds in the order they appear): G, GA, R, ER, GAER, E, EE, GAEREE, N, NN, GAEREENN = GREEN! It was almost painful to watch.
Using refrigerator magnets, the father had placed a sentence on the floor. The child then proceeded to painstakingly sound out each word. At the end of the sentence the child smiled with an obvious sense of accomplishment, although, she had only read the sentence as individual words rather than a complete thought. I suspect that if asked to read the sentence again, she would have to sound out many of those same words.
Was this child “reading?” Not by any definition used today. The equivalent situation in mathematics would be the child who can count and maybe even recognize number symbols and number words, but has NO CONCEPT of what is meant by the spoken word “five” or the symbol “5.” Being able to count is of little value in the years ahead without the necessary understanding of what numbers actually represent.
Being able to sound out a word in no way indicates that word has any meaning for the child. Being able to say the words in a sentence or paragraph does not indicate that the child understands what ideas the sentence and paragraph are trying to convey.
To be a fluent reader, a child must be able to quickly identify the first word (not sound it out), speak it smoothly, know what the word means, continue the same process for the entire sentence and paragraph and at the end be able to explain what they just read. Reading is about comprehension. Word pronunciation is just one tiny piece of the reading puzzle.
I recently wrote another article about this push to read before the age of three. That article has more details on the harm that pushing your child to read before they are ready can cause. Here, I will just give a quick summary of these problems along with the suggestion to read the other article.
Problems created by pushing too hard too early:
(1) Literacy problems in the years ahead.
(2) Growing rebelliousness.
(3) Confusion in school as to what reading actually is. (They have been told by parents and others that they are excellent readers.) So, what’s with definitions?
(4) Their confusion about comprehension slows down the normal reading progress.
(5) The reading differential is not maintained. The other children catch up quickly without the negatives effects.
(6) There is no evidence that reading early is in any way beneficial, but is often harmful.
(7) These early years would be better utilized by creating good foundations in both language AND math.
We do best for our children when we give them good language and mathematics FOUNDATIONS during the critical periods for each, and then let the children develop their language and math skills at the appropriate time in school and at their own pace.
We hinder our children when we push them to perform to make ourselves look like super parents. This is actually a form of emotional abuse and will have long-term negative effects. If you recognize yourself in anything mentioned here, STOP–for the sake of your child.
Our children’s accomplishments should never harm them!