Kelly talks to educator Maya Smart about her new book “Reading for Our Lifes: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan to Help Your Child.” 

So much of your book is about teaching us that reading starts well before the actual teaching of reading in school. 

“I think it’s hard for people to connect the dots between things that are happening with really young children and literacy outcomes that we don’t measure until years down the road. So oftentimes we act as if problems start when we start paying attention to them. There are so many examples in everyday life of problems that really come down to reading comprehension challenges and people being unable to communicate with one another on many levels. And while we don’t formally begin to teach kids how to read until elementary school, in most cases, there is a foundation of language and knowledge and understanding and brain connections that happens years before we think of it as affecting reading.” 

Unfortunately, this work has to start with the parents right after birth, correct? 

“We make the problem complicated by waiting so long to address the issues when they’re really very simple things. Like, you build vocabulary and brain connections just by being responsive with your little one, by paying attention to their eye gaze and where they’re pointing and responding to their coos and babbles. There’s this really important groundwork that’s laid easily in the beginning, but when we don’t build the vocabulary, when we don’t optimize their brains for learning. When we don’t bring their attention to print when they’re two and three, then we expect schools to miraculously teach all of these kids all of these things when they’re coming in, in most cases, at a lower level than is expected for that particular grade level. So, the teacher has mission impossible in many cases with 25 to 30 kids who aren’t ready for grade level instruction. And that’s leaving out the pandemic and learning loss and all these other more recent things.”

So much of what I think ended up working for my kids was just guess work on my part as a parent. 

“I never had that illusion as a parent that I knew what I was doing. I think so many people go into parenting with this overwhelming confidence and I’m a detail oriented person and I had questions and to me it seemed like saying read to your child, it didn’t seem like nearly enough when I contrasted that advice with news headlines talking about this terrible reading achievement, particularly among black students. As a black mom, I wanted to make sure I was doing everything that I needed to do so my child wasn’t a statistic in that sense. We know it’s not the kids. We know in all of these cases that the test scores are the result of experiences they’ve had, lessons they’ve been given, teacher quality, all of these different factors. And so I really, as a parent, wanted to know the details. What exactly does she need and when? And in many cases, I discovered things – as readers of my book will – sometimes you just don’t know. Sometimes you do a lot of good things on accident, right? You’re lucky. And, you know, socioeconomic privilege, being educated yourself, being a book lover yourself, there are certain things that you’ll pass on to your child, but there are also children of educated, well-off people who struggle with reading.” 

Photo Credit: Amanda Evans