Summer break arrives, and with it, the familiar quest to keep kids reading during their time off from school. Many parents optimistically enroll children in summer reading programs, hoping it helps kids foster a love for books and learning. And to sweeten the pot, libraries tout rewards like coupons and gift certificates to entice kids to hit milestones—say, a certain number of books or minutes read.
As a child who loved to read, I know the appeal personally. I recall carrying a stack of books taller than myself to the checkout desk at my local library in preparation for their summer reading program. I’d scavenge the library, meticulously looking through each section, hoping to find interesting books that were short enough to finish in time to receive a prize.
But now I wonder: What comes first, the love of reading or the enticement of a reward? Do rewards really help kids fall in love with books, or are they just icing on the cake for kids who already enjoy reading?
Let’s look at the arguments for and against summer reading rewards programs—and the story of one library that ditched them in favor of building up kids’ basic reading skills in a county where low literacy is endemic.
The Case for Summer Reading Rewards
Conventional wisdom says incentives get kids into the library, encourage them to seek out books they enjoy, and get them reading more. A whopping 97% of public libraries nationwide offer reward-based reading programs, doling out everything from stickers, stuffed animals, and temporary tattoos to free books, coupons, and tablets. As one librarian noted, kids may come for the prizes but then “leave reading for their own sake.”
Surveys of and interviews with middle schoolers who participated in summer reading programs and their parents suggest that the effectiveness of prizes is a mixed bag: a combination of what’s called “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” motivation.
Essentially, “intrinsic” motivation is when you want to do something for the sense of satisfaction you get from doing it. In this case, that would be reading for the love of reading. “Extrinsic” motivation is when you want to do something because you’ll get some kind of compensation or outside approval for doing it. Here, that would be reading to get a reward.
Popular thinking is that intrinsic motivation is more powerful, but research suggests that people aren’t driven completely by intrinsic motivation or completely by extrinsic motivation, but rather by a complex mix.
Indeed, the surveys showed that some kids who already enjoyed reading appreciated program perks as nice add-on incentives and said they read more than they might have otherwise to meet program targets. Others felt the content of the prize itself was less compelling than the sense of accomplishment they gained from doing the reading required to earn it.
Most of the parents surveyed felt that their kids read more, improved their reading skills, and gained reading confidence as a result of the summer reading rewards programs.
The Case for Ditching Reading Rewards
But not everyone is convinced that such summer rewards programs meaningfully fuel a love for reading—or even that administering them is a good use of librarians’ limited time.
Veteran children’s librarian Anne Kissinger believes libraries should focus on directly helping kids gain reading skills (which many lack, according to the numbers) instead of celebrating pages turned over the summer. In fact, she successfully lobbied for her library system to abandon summer rewards programs altogether.
For years, she says librarians at the Wauwatosa Public Library where she worked spent most summer days stamping coupons for participants in their reading rewards program. In summer 2017 alone, the library system distributed 3,000 rewards.
But at the height of this apparent success of the summer reading program, she worried that the library had evolved into a “clearinghouse” for promotional goods instead of a bastion of reading skill and interest. “They’re not reading for their own enjoyment,” she observed of kids participating. “They’re reading to fill in our logs or meet our requirements.”
With her branch located in a county where 25% of adults read at or below the lowest literacy level, peddling extrinsic motivation at that scale felt to her like shirking responsibility. Faced with the choice of sticking to the status quo or championing a deeper commitment to reading, she advocated to free librarians’ time up from stamping coupons and direct it toward better equipping parents to help their kids learn to read in the first place.
Reading specialist and Wauwatosa library patron Christine Reinders noticed the change in what the library offered physically—and culturally. It had always been a place where parents could find material to read to their children, but now it was becoming a space where parents could support their kids to read to themselves. For example, it was offering more books with simple words that kids can sound out along with more support for parents teaching their children to read.
“‘[Wauwatosa] is a really special place, because they had a library and a children’s librarian who recognized this need” to cultivate basic literacy, Reinders said. “The library was filled with all these wonderful books, but many were not accessible because kids were just learning to read. Now, we have those beginning readers to help them establish that solid foundation to become proficient readers and writers.”
Lessons for Parents From the Reading Rewards Debate
Ultimately, rewards may get some kids in the library and reading more in the short term, but parents would do well to attend to the longer term and intrinsic motivation, too. That’s the kind of motivation that stems from kids learning to read with enough skill, fluency, and understanding to enjoy it.
And libraries like Wauwatosa’s can be great partners in that pursuit when they offer resources for parents about fostering reading skills, as well as simple early reading material for kids.
After all, reading motivation is no simple black-and-white matter. Once we can read, we do it for many reasons: interest in the story, curiosity about the topic, the satisfaction of learning or getting to “the end,” the joy of personal choice, the prospect of a prize. We’re driven by a messy mix of reasons and inspirations. Parents and others hoping to encourage kids to read, or read more, may be best served by leveraging the gamut of motivations.
Confession time: For someone who preaches deep family and community involvement in children’s education, I’m not a constant presence at my daughter’s school. I couldn’t pick many of her teachers out of a lineup, and I rarely sign up for parent-teacher conferences.
In my defense, they’re virtual and so short that by the time we exchange pleasantries, they’re practically over. My emails to the school are mostly logistical: “She’ll miss class for a family commitment/soccer tournament/orthodontist appointment, sorry!” And you know what? I’m okay with that.
The truth is, your involvement with your child’s school will naturally ebb and flow based on your circumstances, interests, and—most importantly—your child’s needs. And that’s exactly as it should be.
When my daughter was younger, I was all in. She attended a public Montessori school for a brief time, and I wore every hat: school board member, reading buddy, field trip chaperone, you name it.
I felt a deep obligation to advocate for all children in a school serving many under-resourced families. Plus, I wanted to make sure she was getting the foundational skills she needed for long-term success. But as she has grown and her needs have changed, so has my school involvement.
Now that she’s a teenager, I focus more on empowering her to take responsibility for her education. I want her to check her own grades, follow up with her teachers, and learn to communicate effectively—life skills as much as academic ones. My role now is backup and coach.
I’m still deeply engaged, but my involvement looks different: daily conversations directly with her, gentle nudges, and teaching moments about things like the perils of group projects, email etiquette with teachers, and how to ask for help.
So, what’s the takeaway for you?
Parental school involvement and supporting your child’s education doesn’t have to look one way. It doesn’t have to mean signing up for every conference, attending every event, or leading the PTA.
It just needs to reflect your family’s unique circumstances and your child’s needs at the moment. And here’s the good news. You get to decide what that looks like.
Three Simple Steps to Meaningful Engagement
- Stay Aware
Keep a pulse on how your child is doing developmentally and academically. If they’re in preschool, know the milestones typical for kids their age. For school-aged kids, familiarize yourself with grade-level expectations and where your child stands. If something feels off, ask questions. Teachers and administrators are there to help. - Reflect on the Data
Look at report cards, state assessment scores, and other information the school provides about your child’s learning. Even a quick review can give you insights. If teachers raise concerns—whether academic or behavioral—engage in constructive dialogue and work together to find solutions. - Seek Support When Needed
If challenges arise—and they will at some point, about something—explore resources both within and beyond the school. Schools often offer tutoring, reading buddies, or other support. Libraries, community organizations, and even your personal network can be incredible allies in your child’s learning journey, too.
Above all, give yourself permission to change your approach and intensity as you and your child grow. Some seasons of life will call for all-hands-on-deck engagement. Others may let you step back. Both are okay.
Set Your Own Standard
Here’s the bottom line: Thoughtfully decide how you want to show up for your child, and then show up that way. Whether you’re the board member parent, the email-only parent, or somewhere in between, your ultimate goal is the same: to meet your child’s needs and support their development. Sometimes for busy parents that means leaning on others, too—a partner, grandparent, or someone else who can fill in when you can’t.
You don’t have to do it all. Nurturing a child’s development is its own kind of group project.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives
This year marks the 10th anniversary of my turn as The Richmond Christmas Mother, a community fundraising campaign I led that raised more than $325,000 to make the holidays a little brighter for Central Virginia families in need. It was the 80th anniversary of the Christmas Mother Fund, and I was the youngest woman—and first black woman—to helm the effort. I quipped at the time that for the last several years the committee had selected Christmas Grandmothers. (Daphne Maxwell Reid, the original Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, followed me in the role in 2018.)
In retrospect, that campaign signaled a turning point—not just for the fund, but for me personally. It marked a pivotal early step in my personal transformation from community volunteer and book cheerleader to early literacy leader and parent engagement pro. The campaign added “child literacy advocate” to my name in news headlines for the first time, and it stuck. In the years since, I’ve added new titles like “author” and “parent educator” to the mix, as I’ve sharpened my understanding of what it takes to really move the needle on reading achievement.
The Christmas Mother Fund historically directed most of its support to the Salvation Army’s Christmas assistance programs. But during my tenure, we expanded its impact by launching a competitive grant project in partnership with the Community Foundation. We interpreted “Christmas” broadly to extend all the way from Thanksgiving to New Year’s and aimed to reach into 80 different pockets of the community through local organizations big and small. This allowed us to support incredible work, such as providing home-cooked meals to homebound seniors and disabled people and bringing joy to kids battling cancer.
While I did the usual hustling—placing calls, talking with media, meeting with local businesses, and presenting to civic organizations—I also put my own spin on the campaign. I donated copies of Each Kindness and other Jacquelyn Woodson books to local children at schools and child care centers. By the season’s end, I’d distributed more than 1,000 books. My Christmas Parade float, too, reflected my passion for literacy: I decked out a trolley in homage to Ezra Jack Keats’s classic picture book The Snowy Day. The marvel of art, craft, and engineering on wheels was brought to life by a dedicated team of volunteers. (Yes, we hung countless hand-cut snowflakes from the trolley windows to ensure a white Christmas.) All in the hopes of inspiring reading, encouraging parents to read to their children, and getting families to give books for Christmas instead of only toys.
Along the Dominion Energy Christmas Parade route, I tossed stuffed dolls of Peter, the main character of The Snowy Day, into the crowd. (Throwing board books into the air felt too risky.) I was joined by author friends Meg Medina, Gigi Amateau, Robin Farmer, and Stacy Hawkins Adams. At the time, I thought I might follow them into publishing fiction. Instead, I walked a different path, writing for parents and encouraging families to raise readers.
This wasn’t my first foray into advocacy. Previously, I’d launched a campaign to raise funds and awareness for Friends Association for Children, an early childhood development center that I adored and that I later highlighted in the conclusion of Reading for Our Lives. But my Christmas mother campaign gave me a platform to articulate what I now see as my core conviction: if we want to address society’s most entrenched challenges, we need to invest in children’s early education and literacy.
Looking back at a 2014 interview with Cheryl Miller on Virginia This Morning, I’m reminded of how long and deeply I’ve held this belief. All those years ago I said, “I’m a really big advocate for early childhood education programs and literacy programs for our children. I think as a community, we can invest more in children earlier and prevent a lot of the problems that many social-service organizations are grappling with as the children age.”
Some things never change! Ten years in the game and I say some version of this daily. Only now, I have the privilege of taking stages nationwide to spread the message. In 2024 alone, I addressed thousands of early childhood educators, K-12 teachers, librarians, interventionists, and parent educators in states as far-flung as Wisconsin, Louisiana, Iowa, Ohio, Maryland, Florida, and Idaho.
The Richmond Christmas Mother campaign wasn’t just a fundraiser. It was a turning point, a launchpad, and a testament to the power of a community coming together to create change. It’s been 10 years, but the lessons I learned and the momentum it sparked continue to shape the work I do today.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Literacy First, an Austin-based high-impact tutoring program, kicked off its 30th anniversary celebrations in a meaningful way: with a virtual book club discussion of my book, Reading for Our Lives.
Rather than just retrospective fanfare, the organization chose to ponder its mission by engaging staff, board members, district partners, and the broader community in a thoughtful dialogue about work outside of its current scope. The topic: engaging with parents of kids before they arrive in school. This choice underscores Literacy First’s commitment to continuous learning and using collaboration to drive change.
Reading for Our Lives Book Discussion
It was a pleasure to join the conversation with readers who had already engaged with the book. Their questions showed real curiosity and thought, diving into the nuances of my writing process: Why that title? How did I decide which histories and voices to feature? We also explored practical strategies for supporting young readers—tools that anyone, whether a parent, teacher, or community member, could use.
The discussion took on some of today’s most pressing literacy topics, including how to embrace multilingualism as an asset to literacy development. Another topic we addressed was the role organizations like Literacy First, along with partners such as BookSpring and school districts, can play in achieving literacy for all children.
Participants were eager to dig into early literacy milestones, reflecting on the need for schools to raise expectations around specific literacy skills like phonemic awareness and decoding. A recurring theme emerged: the challenge of communicating to parents and educators that just good enough isn’t good enough—early literacy skills matter deeply, and they set the foundation for future success.
We also tackled practical concerns. How can preschools recognize the importance of systematic instruction? What strategies work for families with neurodiverse children or late talkers who aren’t ready to jump into conversations but still want to build literacy skills? And finally, I was asked a fun yet intriguing question: Have you thought about starting a podcast? (My answer: Try me in 2026!)
Literacy First: The Gold Standard of Reading Tutors
For three decades, Literacy First has set the bar for reading intervention through its effective approach, inclusivity, and measurable impact. Serving students from kindergarten through second grade in both English and Spanish, the program will support 2,000 children this year—adding to the more than 30,000 students it has helped since its founding.
I’ve followed Literacy First since 2017, and I can attest that it’s the real deal. During my time in Austin, I had the opportunity to observe its tutor training sessions, attend a tutor swearing-in ceremony, visit schools to see tutors in action, and celebrate the program’s successes. Making it possible for well-trained tutors to intensively support kids’s reading development in English or Spanish for 30 minutes a day 5 days a week is as impactful as it is rare.
Two key lessons stood out during my Literacy First observations. First, focus and intensity matter. To be effective, educators need to engage with research, identify the exact skills students need, and deliver targeted instruction at a dosage high enough to move the needle. Second, tracking progress is essential. Literacy First not only holds itself accountable to results, but it also makes sure its efforts translate into measurable improvements for students.
A Reading Mission That Matters
I’ve seen firsthand how transformative qualified tutors can be. There’s simply no substitute for a focused, intentional effort to teach more people how to teach reading. Sadly, in too many settings, reading tutoring falls short—not due to lack of effort, but because of a lack of expertise and funding.
Children deserve better. They need programs like Literacy First that combine research-backed methods with a commitment to excellence and accountability.
After 30 years of remarkable impact, Literacy First remains a beacon of hope for students, families, and educators. Despite its age, I think it’s just getting started.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Newsflash:
All those beautiful children’s books you’ve been collecting?
They won’t help your child learn to read or love it unless you actually read them—regularly. Sharing books with kids gives them indelible experiences and positive emotions around reading that make them want to read on their own. Yet many parents focus on what they plan to read to their kids and neglect the urgent matter of assigning time to actually do it.
And it’s no wonder. Endless book reviews and recommendations (mine included!) feed our picture book cravings and tout books for every theme, holiday, or moment in your child’s life. The coverage journalists and influencers give to the content of books grows our libraries and Amazon wish lists, far outpacing reports on how to build strong family reading habits.
There’s a lot to keep us parents from reading to our kids daily—from a wavering motivation to read and competing priorities to busyness, fatigue, and more. Not to mention our kids’ moods, attention span, age, and interest level.
But I’m here to tell you that looking beyond bedtime and identifying multiple, recurring opportunities to read with your child will pay off big-time. Building these routines not only fosters better vocabulary and language skills for your little one, but also more quality time, bonding, and well-being for the whole family.
The Anatomy of Family Reading Culture
Let’s face it: Reading stories is important, but building reading culture is transformative. Culture requires depth and frequency, so families that weave multiple strands of reading into the fabric of their daily lives reap the greatest impact.
Each family’s reading culture is the product of a unique mix of resources, relationships, and rituals. Factors include the books and other reading material you have in your home, how you show up to share them, and how frequently you do so. All of these can nurture your kids’ reading attention, interest, and motivation.
A family living in a book desert, for example, might not have much reading material, but could read fewer texts more frequently and with great warmth and get good results nonetheless. By the same token, a family with more resources might fill a child’s room with kid-lit but never take the time to read or discuss the books together—coming up short on relationships and rituals. Luckily, regardless of your starting point, there are always opportunities to ramp up your book collection, book talk, and reading routines.
Of all these elements of reading culture, rituals are especially powerful, because they increase the dosage of the other two: reading material and relationships. Reading together daily—preferably multiple times a day—boosts your child’s exposure to the vocabulary and knowledge in a wide range of books, plus it increases your engagement and conversation. The benefits of consistency are so pronounced that I believe that when you choose to read to your child matters as much as what you choose to read.
Designing Reading Rituals
Ready to establish some reading rituals to ensure that the books you’ve been collecting get read and discussed? Here’s how:
Step One: Choose Your Moments
As I learned from behavior scientist BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits method, timing is critical. Fogg recommends consciously tethering new habits you want to build to your most deeply entrenched existing routines. This makes it easier to remember and implement the new habits. That’s part of why bedtime story reading is such a common ritual for families, with 87% of more than 2,000 parents surveyed by Scholastic saying their read-alouds occurred at bedtime or naptime. Kids go to sleep (or at least get in bed) every night, so it’s less of a stretch to add reading into the mix of tucking them in.
Bedtime is far from the only consistent, daily event that you can anchor reading to, though. Pay attention to your time with your child and make a list of the daily habits, routines, and points of interaction you share. Do you wake them up? Prepare meals? Eat together? Drive them to daycare or other activities? List out all the recurring moments. Think of things you do before noon, afternoon, and in the evening, right before they go to bed, etc.
Step Two: Brainstorm Behaviors
With your existing patterns in mind, look for opportunities to make reading tag alongside those activities.
Can you open up a book of five-minute stories after you wake your little one? Turn on an audiobook after you fasten your seat belt in the car? Point out words and letters on signs, or comment on your morning reading, as you drive through your neighborhood?
The goal is to weave reading and literacy into your day via small actions, making new behaviors as inevitable as brushing your teeth or eating dinner. Think of “tiny” as something that can be done in 30 seconds or less or in 5 reps or less, e.g. reading a page of a book (not reading for an hour) or pointing out a word or letter (not a dozen).
This doesn’t mean that you can’t aim high, just that you’re focused on starting small and (importantly!) celebrating sooner.
Step Three: Celebrate Your Successes
As you try out new habits, remember to celebrate your wins. Parents don’t get enough credit, so give yourself a mental high-five every time you successfully incorporate reading into a new part of your day. You could also celebrate out loud and bring your little one in on the action. Give them a high five along with saying “we did it!” to share your enthusiasm with them and put an exclamation mark on the experience.
In the Tiny Habits method, celebrations are truly the key to making the new behaviors repeatable. When you give yourself a pat on the back, pump your fist, or engage in the celebration of your choice immediately after accomplishing the new habit, you reinforce that behavior. Your celebration’s positive vibes trigger a dopamine surge, wiring your brain to link your habit with those feel-good moments.
If, on the other hand, you follow the accomplishment by mentally beating yourself up for not reading more, or sooner, or better, you do the opposite—discourage yourself. So be your own cheerleader to best instill positive habits.
As Fogg puts it in the Tiny Habits book: “There is a direct connection between what you feel when you do a behavior and the likelihood that you will repeat the behavior in the future.”
That’s great news! It means that we can form new habits quickly, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not how many times you repeat a habit that makes it stick. It’s how positive your emotions connected to the habit are— and that’s something we can consciously impact.
Step Four: Tweak and Repeat
Start by experimenting with a few new reading habits at once, so you can compare and contrast results. Don’t feel pressured to nail the perfect routine immediately. Try different times and methods of incorporating reading and see what sticks. This is a design process. Observe what works, adapt when needed, and keep refining your approach.
Through it all, stay tuned in to your child. If they’re squirmy before meals, distracted during playtime, or tired at night, don’t push it—try other times and places. And if the books you’ve picked aren’t grabbing their attention, switch things up until you find some they love.
Remember, the most compelling picture book in the world won’t build a lasting reading habit on its own. You reading it regularly to your child will.
And a proven way to make that happen is the kind of purposeful behavior design described above, bolstered by positive emotions. So skip obsessing over finding the perfect books and focus on weaving reading throughout your busy days instead.
America celebrates July 4th as the birth of the nation’s independence, commemorating the date in 1776 when the Continental Congress declared the 13 colonies’ political separation from Great Britain.
Those early patriots cruelly toasted a kind of freedom while millions remained in bondage–enslaved and brutally colonized on North American soil for nearly 90 more years. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution didn’t officially end slavery in the United States until 1865, and full rights of citizenship for black people remain contested to this day.
And as I noted in Reading for Our Lives, mass literacy was so threatening to enslavers that they routinely met black people’s attempts at reading with anti-literacy statutes, whippings, amputations, and even murder.
Cutting the finger of the offending reader down to the first joint was common. Mississippi law made corporal punishment “not exceeding thirty-nine lashes” the price to be paid by groups of black people—enslaved or free—who dared assemble to learn reading or writing. South Carolina created stiffer and stiffer anti-literacy statutes between 1740 and 1834, eventually punishing black readers with up to 50 lashes. And even in states like Maryland where the law didn’t prohibit such teaching, custom often did.
Historian Heather Andrea Williams explains how denying literacy was meant to deny enslaved people’s very humanity and prolong their captivity. “Reading indicated to the world that this so-called property had a mind, and writing foretold the ability to construct an alternative narrative about bondage itself,” she writes. “Literacy among slaves would expose slavery, and masters knew it.”
So amid the rush of fireworks, pageantry, and barbecue, my husband and I always pause to consider the boundaries of the freedoms our nation extols: Whose rights are granted, protected, and expanded, and whose are not.
Of course, there’s reading involved. We reread and discuss Frederick Douglass’s speech, “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?”, every year. It’s a brilliant oratory from perhaps the greatest American and it offers a timely reminder not to allow myth to obscure truth or celebration of progress to minimize the urgent need for more.
When called to speak at a Fourth of July celebration in 1852, the former slave and famed abolitionist asked if the invitation was meant to mock him with its hypocrisy. What, from the perspective of those held in bondage, could Independence Day possibly mean?
Douglass answered: “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
And this, I think, is what we’re reading for. To better understand the history that’s led us here. To abandon illusions. To commit to progress. To right wrongs. To liberate through literacy. And Douglass’s own story illustrates powerfully just how well literacy paves the path to liberation. His road to reading started out forthrightly enough, when his enslaver’s wife taught him the alphabet and a few short words.
But this early instruction was cruelly cut short by a lesson his teacher received: that literacy and slavery were incompatible. In an autobiography, Douglass recalls his enslaver warning his wife, “A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master—to do as he is told to do . . . Now, if you teach that nigger (speaking of [Douglass]) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”
Douglass heard his enslaver’s tirade for what it was—a clear admission that literacy was no less than “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” Thus motivated, he set out to learn to read “with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble.”
He mastered the letters S, L, F, and A from the scribblings of Baltimore shipyard carpenters who marked timber placements starboard or larboard side and forward or aft. He plied poor Irish immigrant boys with bread to get them to teach him the letters they knew. Then Douglass snuck away to scrawl the treasured letters with a lump of chalk on a board fence, brick wall, or pavement, and copied them in the spaces left in a white child’s old Webster’s Spelling Book until he knew them cold.
Literacy, starting with the recognition and naming of 26 letters, offered the enslaved a measure of mobility, privacy, and liberty that was as precious as life itself. Thousands of enslaved men, women, and children ventured this dangerous, covert pursuit of the alphabet and the powerful words it made by any means they could, and an estimated 5% succeeded in learning to read by 1860.
Perhaps thousands more perished trying. Enoch Golden, a black reader and teacher, is said to have mused on his deathbed that he had “been de death o’ many a nigger ’cause he taught so many to read and write.”
Your child’s journey won’t be this perilous. But make no mistake, literacy today is no less powerful a means of resistance and liberation. And there are still considerable obstacles to its attainment, especially for children who are poor or black.
Want to support my work to foster liberation through literacy? Here are 10 Ways to Help Me Promote Literacy for All.
For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I hail from Akron, Ohio, a city most famous (depending on who you ask) for being the former rubber capital of the world, the birthplace of LeBron James, or the site of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in 1851. But not until Zaila Avant-garde, a black girl from Harvey, Louisiana, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2021 did I hear of another of my hometown’s claims to fame: Akronite MacNolia Cox was the first black student to make it to the final round of the National Spelling Bee—in 1936.
Today the Scripps National Spelling Bee is among the most diverse academic competitions around, but in Cox’s day vicious segregation marred her ascent to the national stage. Poet A. Van Jordan, another Akron native, excavated Cox’s incredible story by obtaining information at the city’s Department of Vital Statistics and snippets from Cox’s mother’s diary, which had been preserved by a family member. Cox had to ride in segregated train cars, take back stairs, enter banquets through the kitchen, and stay at the home of a black surgeon in D.C. because the Willard Hotel where the other spellers stayed wouldn’t welcome her.
Cox spelled flawlessly in round after round of the national competition. Meanwhile her white competitors misspelled words and were allowed to remain in the competition due to technicalities. When she looked destined to win, spelling bee officials gave her a word that wasn’t on the approved list: Nemesis, the name of the Greek goddess of divine retribution and revenge, a proper noun and, by the competition’s own laws at the time, verboten. She spelled it incorrectly and was knocked out of the competition. She went home to Ohio, where scholarships she’d been promised never materialized, and she died of cancer, a domestic, at age 53.
Jordan’s poetic retelling of her story, M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, published in 2006, tells Cox’s life story in reverse from her deathbed to the night before the historic spelling bee, the moment of her highest potential. In an article, “The Word Is ‘Nemesis’: The Fight to Integrate the National Spelling Bee,” historian Cynthia Greenlee captures the larger significance of the story: “historically, African-Americans have understood the spelling bee as a contested racial space, where mastering a word list was a feat of skill, motivation, and racial resistance through direct competition with one’s ‘social betters,’” she writes. “If black spellers weren’t actually sparring with white rivals, each word memorized—the letters, language of origin, possible meanings—was another symbolic brick building a black community hungry for the book-learning denied to them in slavery and segregation.”
Much of the media coverage of Avant-garde’s victory noted contemporary injustices that result in few black competitive spellers—expensive travel costs and competition fees, lack of sponsorships, and the fact that schools with many black children have fewer resources to support and train students. And it’s true that coaches like the fictional English professor Dr. Larabee in the movie Akeelah and the Bee are scarce and pricey. Many former Scripps Bee winners and finalists charge more than $100/hour to groom the next generation of competitors.
But the inequity is deeper and longer standing than mere access to a spelling bee. And Avant-garde, a homeschooled phenom and three-time Guinness World Record holder for basketball dribbling, is the kind of exception that accentuates the rule. She had to be extraordinary in so many ways to win her national title. The average child in America today—black or white—lacks access to spelling instruction itself, let alone opportunity for in-depth study of letter patterns, language nuances, and word meanings.
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.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives 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.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives There’s no magic curriculum to fix the nation’s reading crisis, but there is a powerful preventative measure that can get to the root of the problem: intentional, everyday literacy-building one child at a time. Too many parents overestimate what schools can do and underestimate the power of family habits. Reading for Our Lives offers practical, evidence-based tips to help parents take charge and launch kids’ learning. From the revised, updated paperback edition, here are five doable and impactful ideas:
- Set up your physical environment to remind you to nurture literacy. It’s easy for reading to fall by the wayside during busy days with young children, so set up your home to provide timely reminders. And even if reading becomes a daily habit, other key literacy-building activities can slip through the cracks—like teaching letters or playing with rhymes or alliteration. Hang a nursery rhyme mobile over the changing table, post an alphabet chart on the wall, put waterproof books by the bathtub, or stock conversation cards on the dinner table. Find your way to keep letters, language, and reading top of mind so you can nurture language and literacy at every turn.
- Use wordplay to raise your kids’ awareness of specific speech sounds. When kids struggle to hear and distinguish the individual sounds that make up words, they struggle with reading and spelling. The good news? Building this critical skill, called phonological awareness, doesn’t have to feel like schoolwork. You can make it playful and on-the-go! Sing songs like “The Name Game,” play I Spy with rhyming words, or even speak in pig Latin. Nursery rhymes help kids tune into syllables and sounds, and games like syllable-clapping and rhyming can be worked into everyday activities. As kids grow, amp up the challenge by blending or switching sounds in words as a game. Just remember to keep it light and fun.
- Help your child learn letter shapes, in addition to letter names and sounds. Kids don’t naturally distinguish between letters, numbers, and drawings—it takes time and practice. Start by pointing out letters in storybooks or daily life. Trace them with your finger and tell your child their names to build recognition. The research is clear: how you talk about letters matters. Describe the curves, lines, humps, and dots that form each letter, and you’ll get them well prepared for reading.. For example, you could point to a T, trace it with your finger, and say, This is the letter T. It has two lines, a long one that goes down, and a shorter one that goes across. The letter T says /t/.
- Boost your child’s language skills with Smart’s TALK Method. Verbal communication skills directly impact kids’ early learning and predict their school achievement down the road. The TALK Method—TAKE TURNS, ASK QUESTIONS, LABEL AND POINT, and KEEP THE CONVERSATION GOING—can supercharge your child’s language and social skills. Take turns in conversation with little ones to build their vocabulary, comprehension, and overall preparation for reading. Ask simple questions about what you see around you (What’s that? Do you see the bird?) to draw them out, label (verbally—aka name) and point to objects to build their vocabulary (That’s an umbrella!), and keep the conversation going by connecting the moment to a story or experience (It’s raining here, just like in the picture!).
- Anchor literacy-building habits to your everyday moments. It’s easier to start doing something new (or more consistently) when you tie it to your existing routine. Reading for Our Lives walks you through a step-by-step process to create simple, effective conversation habits that build your little one’s brain connections and vocabulary. For example: After I hear my baby coo or babble, I will respond in a complete sentence. After I put breakfast on the table, I will point to and name the foods I’m serving up. Plus, the process works for any literacy-building habit parents want to establish, from wordplay and letter teaching to book discussion and spelling practice.
With these simple, everyday strategies, you can unlock your child’s potential and build the foundation for a lifetime of reading success!
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?
Audre Lorde
Some time ago, I read an unusual report from the Canterbury region of New Zealand. It told, in the subdued tone of an academic journal article, the story of an urgent rescue mission. On September 4, 2010, a massive earthquake rocked the city of Christchurch (population: 350,000). The seismic event measured 7.1 in magnitude. It tripped circuit breakers at substations and knocked out power. Building facades collapsed, crushed cars, and jammed roads.
And that was just the warmup. For the next year and a half, the devastation continued, with ten thousand aftershocks and three more full-blown earthquakes. A violent quake in February of the following year killed 185 people and leveled the central business district.
But the report that caught my attention wasn’t about the first responders who rushed in to tend to the injured, restore power, provide water, and reopen transport. It wasn’t about the elaborate emergency-management structures that launched within hours. It was about an unheralded cadre working to address another type of fallout from the earthquakes, one a lot less visible than liquefied soil sending buried pipes floating to the surface.
The rescuers I read about were psychologists, health advisors, and educators, all collaborating to pilot a program aimed at preventing a crisis they foresaw for children affected by the earthquakes. They knew that life in extreme instability, whether wrought by war or famine or natural disaster, breeds developmental difficulties and reinforces inequities, with lasting consequences.
They had seen data, collected 6,000 miles away in Santiago, Chile, that suggested that an earthquake can create educational aftershocks, too. Preschool kids who took early-language and early-literacy assessments shortly after the earthquake performed worse on letter-word identification and text comprehension than comparable kids who took the same assessments one year before the earthquake.
The study provided evidence that their performance had been hurt by their parents’ disaster-wrought stress and their own. Plus, school-entry data back in New Zealand revealed that many kids living in earthquake-affected communities struggled with expressive language and awareness of sound structure in words.
The researchers who ran the pilot program summed up the nature of the challenge with characteristic understatement: “These results suggest that such experiences may impact families, with potential developmental sequelae for children.”
But before vulnerable kids’ development can be protected and bolstered, parents, teachers, and other concerned parties must notice the learning crises, which aren’t glaring like abandoned buildings with missing windows and walls. Next, we have to sustain interest and intentional action through a yearslong recovery, without the benefit of construction clamor to herald our progress.
The fact is, on any given day in any given community—natural disaster or not—there are learning crises brewing. There are children who aren’t getting the language they need, due to household disorder and chaos, parent disposition, and a range of other circumstances.
And although poverty creates the kind of stress and instability that lessen child-focused conversation and responsiveness in homes, many well-educated and advantaged families struggle with talk, too, for any number of reasons.
Across demographics, differences in language skills are associated with differences in healthcare outcomes, high school graduation rates, job placement results, earning levels, and more.
The central truth every parent must grasp is this: oral-language skills are required for reading. Just as kids crawl before they walk, they talk before they read. And before they talk, babies listen, grunt, and coo. We must facilitate and encourage it all.
Psychologists Anne E. Cunningham and Jamie Zibulsky describe the delayed strong influence of early oral-language skills and reading development as a kind of “sleeper effect.”
The importance of early oral-language skills should not be underestimated, they say, because “no matter how accurately a middle school student can sound out new and difficult words like omniscient or prejudice, his ability to understand these words in context will depend on how often he has talked about these words and the concepts related to them. Each new word that a child acquires verbally becomes a word that he will eventually be able to recognize and make sense of when he sees it in print, so early vocabulary development is an essential skill for later reading success.”
Language and learning processes are overlapping and interrelated. They are like one of those elaborate domino creations that garner millions of views on YouTube. A creator devotes weeks to meticulously placing domino after domino into an elaborate design, just to engineer a few minutes of excitement when the first block sets off a chain reaction that topples thousands more. Some tumble in a straight line. Others, placed at a slight angle, bend the pattern into curves and turns. Still others are positioned to hit two dominos at once, sending branches of the design off in different directions.
Early parent talk is the first domino. It pings (through years of back-and-forth conversation) straight into an infant’s grunts, coos, babbles, and eventually words. At the same time, those early conversations knock down other dominos and create a new branch at the split that builds momentum toward a toddler’s vocabulary, which affects school readiness, which predicts third-grade reading, which correlates with high school graduation rates, and so on.
The influence that frequent, quality parent talk has on eventual literacy is so strong and begins so early in life that many experts now rank it above the once be-all, end-all practice of reading aloud. In fact, some argue that talking with your child from infancy may be “the single strongest action you can take to increase your child’s educational opportunities.”
Words matter. Timing matters. You matter.
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.
Get Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six
Learn how to foster your child’s pre-reading and reading skills easily, affordably, and playfully in the time you’re already spending together.
Get Reading for Our Lives