Is reading the foundation of all other learning?
The last two of my four unschooled children (ages 4 and 7) are learning to read together right now, and the milestone of having all four children reading has caused me some reflection.
When I set out to homeschool eight years ago with my first kindergartener, teaching a child to read felt like such a daunting task. It felt like the key that would unlock all other educational opportunities for him, and I wanted to get it right. I used the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelmann, as recommended and gifted to me by a seasoned homeschool mom who had taught all of her kids to read with it.
Watching my first child discover reading was exhilarating. I think the process is actually what hooked me on homeschooling. I didn’t want to miss that experience with my other kids. It also completely sold me on that book. It was my first experience with phonics-based teaching, and I was convinced that it was the secret sauce to teaching all kids to read.
But as with all things parenting, what worked for the first didn’t get the same mileage with the second. My second son didn’t like the taste of the secret sauce. At 5 (and then 6), he couldn’t sit still for the short lessons, and he couldn’t remember from day to day the sounds from the previous day. It wasn’t sticking easily like it had with my first, and it felt like drudgery to both of us. I wondered if he wasn’t ready or just wasn’t interested, because I was still sure that this phonics-based approach was how all kids should learn to read. It hadn’t occurred to me yet to ask whether 5–6 is the prime age for all kids to learn to read. That was just assumed from my own school experience.
Rather than looking for a new curriculum, I got curious about unschooling. Do unschooling parents let their kids decide when to learn to read? How do you learn other things if you can’t read? Is delaying reading harmful? My research didn’t assuage all my fears, but evidence shared by experts like Boston College psychology professor Peter Gray gave me enough confidence to move forward with what felt like an unschooling experiment. I announced somewhat ceremoniously to my family that we would now be learning whatever interests us, and then privately panicked that I may have just handed over the reins of all decision-making to my kids.
What followed in the next few years didn’t really look like learning to read. My second child engaged mostly with drawing. He asked how to spell words while looking up images he wanted to draw or tutorials he wanted to follow. “School” mostly looked like crafting, family read-alouds, and asking how to spell words in his Minecraft inventory. I do think that my experience with phonics-based teaching made me a better reading coach when he would ask questions about how to spell or read something, but it still felt almost magical when around age 9, he just started reading on his own.
My third child, who also loved to draw, started making shops on paper, drawing swords, and then asking how to spell words for his labels like “fire sword” and “water sword.” We made up our own alphabet, naming the letters according to the shapes he saw like “Bumps” for capital B and “Mountain” for capital M. He also started dictating his own stories to me, and I found that the language that lived in his head was much more advanced than any early reader book would give him.
My fourth child and only girl has been the earliest, at age 4, to take an interest in learning to read. She has been exposed to the concept through older siblings, a neighbor’s in-home preschool, the reading.com app which we love, and lots of read-alouds.
In total, I will soon have four children who can all read. They have all reached this milestone on unique paths and at unique ages. But that isn’t the most interesting part.
From where I stand now, learning to read feels like a relatively short chapter in their lives. What stands out more is everything surrounding it: the interests they pursued, the confidence they built, and the ways they learned to engage with the world—and the many new opportunities to grow that still lay ahead of them.
When I started, I thought that reading would determine their academic future. Now I see that the process of learning to read shaped something deeper. They were learning how they learn. Sometimes learning is treated like it sits behind a locked door that only reading can open. By doing this, we risk cutting kids off from the very curiosity that would lead them to want to read in the first place. Handing them dry, repetitive texts and telling them that the real world comes later can turn learning into something to endure instead of something to pursue.
What I’ve seen from watching this process unfold for my kids is that learning is not linear, and reading is not the gatekeeper we often make it out to be. A child who “can read” isn’t just one who can decode words on a page or answer comprehension questions; it’s a child who uses reading as a tool. They look up how to build something, follow a tutorial, get lost in a story, chase a question into another question. That kind of reading doesn’t show up well on a test, but it shows up clearly in real life.
Reading is important. It opens doors to independence, new information and ideas, and greater creativity. It is also one of many opportunities for a child to learn how to learn. They discover how to struggle through something new, how to practice, how to build skill over time, and how to be a beginner. And the way they experience that process matters more than the timeline in which it happens.
I set out believing that reading was the most important thing I would teach my kids. Now I see that teaching them how to learn was really the foundation of their education.
