I Made These New-Mom Mistakes. Then I Wrote a Book So You Won’t Have To.

On the night my dad died, I walked to his bedside to show him a black-and-white sonogram, glossy and blurred. It may have been the first time I ever approached him while he was lying down. In my memories, he was always up—reading the newspaper at the kitchen table, mowing the lawn or shoveling snow, laboring over files in his office, watching some dark TV drama. I remember the picture feeling light and flimsy in the enormity of the moment, a father on his deathbed hearing his only child tell of the life she carried.

He took in the sound waves rendered in print, smiled, and whispered, I think it’s a boy, but I hope it’s a girl. He got his wish, but I never got to ask him what he meant by it. He passed within hours of his quiet declaration and left me to puzzle over the spaces between a parent’s dreams and a child’s promise, between presence and absence, between birth and legacy.

When our baby girl was born months later, my husband and I named her after Zora Neale Hurston to foretell a wise, bold, and colorful life. Like my parents did when they named me after Maya Angelou, we set the intention of resilience, fortitude, and distinction upon her young shoulders. We vowed to help our Zora experience the fullness of her inheritance—to discover herself powerful, unique, and inseparable from all the life that pulses everywhere. Or as her namesake put it, to know that each of us is “the world and the heavens boiled down to a drop.”

I made reading—the miracle of connecting with others across space and time—a pillar of my mothering. In our first days at home, the intimacy of sharing stories and books became a touchstone. I recited lines from Jabari Asim’s Girl of Mine from dawn till dusk. Hello, howdy do, little princess honeydew. Giggly, wiggly precious pearl. I’m so glad that you’re my girl. That little board book held my dreams for my daughter, held my awe of her existence. Reading it over and over felt like love and life support for a sleep-deprived mom. Soon I’d memorized the text, turning the pages only for show as I kept on rocking, reading, feeding her.

As a new mom who’d just lost a parent, I was comforted by the story’s easy rhythms and my own belief in the power of a parent’s words in a child’s ear. Knowing firsthand how words nourish, I wanted to feed her page upon page, give her tastes of poetry, let her sip prose. I felt the book’s upbeat refrain bolster something precious and fragile in her—and in me. Reading to her was love, care, and a pathway to a family ethos that I treasured. Toni Morrison said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Stories were our first, most cherished language. I threw myself into the quest to raise a reader with all the zeal of new motherhood and the passion of someone who has lived the written word’s power to both uplift and inspire. Soon, though, I was ready to expand my repertoire of literacy-promoting activities. But what to add? The advice in the books on my shelf, and in the articles I consumed voraciously, seemed to start and stop with storytime.

I put Zora in a Montessori toddler program for some professional backup. There she gained other valuable skills through baby-doll washing and moving pompoms from one dish to another with tongs. Her fine motor skills, potty training, and home tidying abilities blossomed, but I remained unsure about her reading development. Were the verbal experiences, social interactions, and classroom read-alouds enough? Was I doing my part at home?

The knowledge that parents need about reading development and instruction is not easy to come by. The United States invests little in children in their first few years of life, when the brain is at its most flexible to build a foundation for learning, social engagement, and health. 

There’s no mass early-literacy boot camp for parents; valuable research is locked behind paywalls and inaccessible to the public; and too few experts communicate their findings in clear, understandable, and practical terms. Most librarians and booksellers are pros at helping you locate what they’ve stocked, but less so at explaining how to facilitate language and literacy learning at different ages and stages.

I remember wandering the aisles of bookstores selecting the “best,” most beautiful picture books for my newborn. I knew she couldn’t lift her head or even see well yet. But I didn’t know that a photo of a human face or a bold pattern would catch her attention more than the lush illustrations of a Caldecott Medal winner. And while I knew to talk to my baby, I didn’t get that it was a two-way street from day one, that her coos and babbles were as significant as the words I spoke.

In short, I made every mistake in the book—if there had been such a book. Oh, how I wished there were a book (maybe with a title like What to Deliver After You’ve Delivered), preferably with a job description, manual of procedures, and performance metrics. But like so much of parenting, no clear instructions came with the position.

So I went back to school myself, enrolling in a graduate course at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia to get the literacy lowdown. I learned that there was more—much more—that I could do to unlock long-term reading and educational success for Zora. I also discovered that what I’d thought was personal ignorance (I didn’t know how to teach reading) was actually a national crisis. 

Parents were far from the only ones missing a clear sense of how reading skills develop and the knowledge needed to nurture them. Teachers, pediatricians, and educational policy makers often lacked this critical insight as well. Most classmates in the Foundations of Reading Instruction course were teachers, and while they knew more than me, they had much to learn, too.

I quickly discovered that being a strong reader in no way prepares you to teach reading. In fact, many fluent readers aren’t consciously aware of the underlying structure of language and print that good teaching must make explicit for children. In order to help kids, parents—and certainly teachers—need to learn to attend to and describe features of written language that expert readers no longer notice or focus on.

The contrast between (on the one hand) abysmal reading performance and (on the other) superficial advice doled out to parents about how to raise readers rankled. Surely the parents who shape a child’s reading prospects for years before the child enters school should be better informed.

Without any mom-in-the-trenches guidance, I set out to document what I learned about how reading works, how parents can foster  it, and what we can (and can’t) expect from instruction in schools. I scoured academic literature, reading curricula, state learning standards, government reports, and more. I talked to teachers, tutors, and parents in the thick of raising readers. I served on school, library, and literacy nonprofit boards; volunteered in early-learning programs; and developed databases of research and instructional techniques. I also called top researchers to ask what specific advice they would offer parents today.

My personal effort to better understand what it takes to raise a reader tipped into a larger mission to help all parents learn what’s needed to do this vital work.

Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.