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.
Where can toddlers collaborate with a Grammy-nominated cellist to create new music? At the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum in Milwaukee!
I participated in their Toddler Talkback program with Malik Johnson, the museum’s first Artist-in-Residence, and witnessed something remarkable: tiny hands helping create music alongside a musician who’s performed with Stevie Wonder and John Legend.
While that sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, children’s museums create magic every day. This extraordinary collaboration illustrates what makes children’s museums so powerful for early development.
Each exhibit and experience is curated with little ones in mind, inviting them to explore, experiment, and make their own discoveries. Unlike screentime, these playful spaces spark fun, active, hands-on learning.
Why Museums Beat Screen Time Every Time
Special events aside, everything at children’s museums is designed at children’s eye level—within their reach and ready to be explored. The multisensory, accessible design of exhibits, along with the presence and voices of supportive adults, boosts kids’ experiences.
Multiple studies show that children’s museum visits foster measurable gains in:
- Language and social communication. Museum play boosts toddlers’ vocabulary, causal talk (like “if I do this, then that happens”), and storytelling skills. They also practice turn-taking, cooperation, and emotional regulation, especially when adults engage with them in supportive ways.
- Spatial cognition and exploration. Exhibits designed for hands-on engagement lead toddlers to explore more systematically, which sharpens problem-solving and spatial reasoning skills. That’s the foundation for everything from block-building to math concepts.
- Parent-child interaction. The research is clear: when parents join in with timely talk, support, or open-ended questions, toddlers gain even more. Adult involvement before or alongside a child’s exploration makes the learning stick.
Museums Build Vocabulary in Action
Here’s something many parents overlook: stepping out of your daily routine is one of the most powerful things you can do for your toddler’s vocabulary development.
While we might feel comfortable sticking to familiar activities at home, community experiences like Johnson’s cello sessions expose children to words, concepts, and ideas they might never encounter elsewhere.
During the session, toddlers heard words like cello and imagination—language that becomes the building blocks for future reading comprehension. When they see these words in books years later, they’ll have a reference point to understand them (not just sound them out) from that day they made music with a live musician.
Johnson’s artist residency culminated in a music video featuring the children’s snaps, claps, squeals, and dancing within their collaborative composition.
“I just took all of the magic that I remembered from all of the sessions, talkbacks and performances, and just put them in a song for you all to enjoy,” Malik said during the song’s release event. Imagine telling your child years later: You helped create this song with a Grammy-nominated musician.
The Real Return on Investment
Many museums offer free Community Access Days or library passes, but if possible, consider getting a membership. It’s not just about unlimited visits; it’s about making exploration a regular part of your child’s world. As Sarah McManus-Christie, the Betty Brinn Museum’s Education Director, puts it: “One of the museum’s values is to make memories that last.”
The song the children created captures this perfectly, with lyrics about imagination, reaching for stars, and being surrounded by friends at Betty Brinn. It’s a reminder that the most powerful learning happens when curiosity meets community.
Your toddler’s future literacy skills are being shaped right now—not just by the books you read at home, but by every new experience, conversation, and vocabulary word they encounter.
To make the most of your next children’s museum visit:
- Follow your child’s lead. Let them explore what interests them and then talk to them about it. Use rich, descriptive language about what they’re seeing, touching, and doing.
- Ask open-ended questions. Try: What do you think that does? or How does that sound?
- Talk about it afterward, too. Revisit the experience by recounting what you did together and listening to your child’s reflections, strengthening their memory and language.
To find a children’s museum near you, visit Findachildrensmuseum.org.
When your kid is desperate to spell a word—even if they type “Ueuuehh” for skateboard—that’s your golden teaching moment.
Case in point: a hilarious viral clip of a sharp five-year-old lecturing his mom on her unwillingness to download an app for him. “That’s not taking ownership,” he scolds. When she questions his understanding, he nails it: “It’s being responsibility.” He knows exactly what he means.
When Mom still says no, he takes matters into his own hands, typing a query in the app store: Ueuuehh. Does this say skateboard? he asks her. Not quite, buddy. But wow—what persistence, creativity, and focus on display. He can’t spell yet, but he’s thinking, questioning, problem-solving.
He’s locked in. He’s motivated. He wants to be able to type skateboard. (He doesn’t yet know that he can ask Siri and bypass writing altogether. Thank goodness!)
These are our teachable moments. This is when we can lean in and give a little print-focused literacy lesson. Reading means connecting sounds to print—what researchers call the alphabetic principle. To type skateboard, the child has to hear the /s/ sound, know it’s linked to a letter, and recall that letter is S. He won’t stumble onto that by chance. He needs grownups to point it out.
Here’s how: Point out letters to your child or write letters to show them. Trace the letters with your finger. Say their names. Call out the sounds. For example, you could say, “See this L? Long line, short line. It says /l/, like in Lucky Charms.” These light touches—on signs, cereal boxes, stoplights—help kids notice letters, recognize patterns, and link sounds to print.
These teachable moments happen naturally between the ages of about 3 and 6. The key is recognizing and seizing them. Keep it casual. Comment on a letter here and there as you go through daily life. If your child doesn’t seem interested, move on and try again later. Never let it become frustrating.
Research shows early mastery of these connections predicts later reading and spelling success. You don’t need fancy programs—just curiosity, patience, and 30 seconds a day. Today, pick one letter in your home, trace it with your child, and talk about its name, shape, and sound.
Get Reading for Our Lives: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan to Help Your Child
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
It was my pleasure to join Nancy Redd on her Mompreneurs podcast recently to talk about my journey as a mom, entrepreneur, and author of Reading for Our Lives. Our conversation emphasized one simple truth I want every parent to know: we are our children’s first and best teachers. Long before our kids set foot in a classroom, our voices, conversations, and shared stories lay the foundation for their reading success.
There’s no magic bullet for literacy. Instead, what your child really needs is you—your voice and your attention, across the days and years. The good news is that you don’t need fancy toys or expensive programs. Talking with your child from infancy (even before they can respond) and as they grow builds their vocabulary and strengthens their brain. Reading picture books, asking questions, and giving your child time to think and reply can turn everyday moments into literacy lessons. These simple, consistent interactions add up to something powerful over time.
Another point I shared is that we parents must not underestimate our influence on our children’s literacy, which shapes their whole academic experience and beyond. Schools and teachers matter deeply, but their work rests on the groundwork parents build at home. Whether it’s five minutes of story time, a playful chat in the car, or a mini ABC lesson over breakfast, each little interaction contributes to your child’s growth.
A few more takeaways from our conversation:
- Knowledge and comprehension fuel literacy. Learning to sound out words is essential, but kids must also know what the words mean. Without rich conversation and exposure to different ideas and experiences, they’ll lack the context to make sense of what they read.
- Reading and writing still matter in the tech age. Artificial intelligence and tech tools may smooth over weakness in reading and writing, there’s no substitute for being able to think independently and communicate effectively. Ask your child: Do they want to be the person who’s reliant on these tools, or the person who shapes them?
- When it comes to screen time, parents set the pace. If we’re always on our phones, kids see screens as the norm. Even more, we lose valuable opportunities to talk, respond, teach, and read to our children. To help your child, start by modeling balance yourself.
Watch our full conversation below. And if you’d like to dive deeper into the science behind these ideas—plus get practical tips for weaving them into your family life—I share more in my book, Reading for Our Lives. It’s a guide for parents who want to raise strong, confident readers, right from day one.
Get Reading for Our Lives: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan to Help Your Child
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 Every parent deserves to feel empowered as their child’s first teacher—and every child deserves the chance to thrive. That’s the driving force behind my book Reading for Our Lives and the community campaign I’ve built around it.
I wrote this book for parents raising readers, but I now have family-facing professionals in mind, too: nurses, early intervention specialists, child development educators, and social workers that parents turn to for guidance. These trusted advisors are uniquely positioned to share the book with families and help them act on its messages.
That’s why I created a way for generous readers to donate copies of Reading for Our Lives in bulk to organizations that already serve families. While some people are buying extra copies to give out at baby showers or pediatrician waiting rooms, I wanted to make it easier to give at scale—to get dozens or hundreds of books into programs with real reach.
The Impact in Action
Take Penfield Children’s Center in Milwaukee, which sends trained parent and child support professionals into homes to serve more than 1,600 children under age three in Milwaukee County alone. They already deliver children’s books, puzzles, and learning games to support early literacy. Now, they’ll be able to offer Reading for Our Lives to support parents too, giving them tools, inspiration, and confidence to lead their children’s learning from the start.
The book campaign will also deliver free books to families served by organizations including Penfield Children’s Center, Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee, and St. Francis Children’s Center.
How It Works
I’m thrilled to partner with Harmonic Harvest, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit whose mission of community empowerment aligns perfectly with Reading for Our Lives. This collaboration combines their expertise in community engagement with my focus on early literacy to create lasting change for families. When you donate to the Reading for Our Lives Book Fund, Harmonic Harvest handles the logistics—issuing tax receipts and working with local independent booksellers to distribute copies to partner organizations. Your dollars support families, community organizations, and neighborhood businesses all at once, creating impact that extends far beyond individual books.
This isn’t just about dropping off books and walking away. Every program that receives donated copies also gets access to live virtual Q&A calls with me, plus invitations to educational events and conversations. We’re not just building readers—we’re building a community of support around them.
Join the Movement
If you believe that every parent deserves support and every child deserves the chance to thrive, I invite you to contribute to the Reading for Our Lives Book Fund today. Together, we can put powerful books in the hands of families and the professionals who walk alongside them every day.
Let’s build something beautiful—one book, one conversation, one child at a time.
Here’s what happened when Fox 6’s Carl Deffenbaugh and I talked about turning lazy summer days into literacy goldmines.
Picture this: It’s July in Milwaukee. School’s been out for weeks, and parents are wondering if their kids’ brains are slowly turning to mush. Sound familiar?
That’s exactly what Carl Daffenbaugh (fellow Medill School of Journalism alum!) and I unpacked during my recent Fox 6 Milwaukee morning show appearance.
Plot twist: When summer breaks the rigid routines of the school year, all learning isn’t lost. The change of season creates space for the kind of natural, joyful learning that actually sticks.
Your Minivan Is a Mobile Classroom for Summer Learning
Summer is a goldmine for language and literacy learning—precisely because routines are disrupted. Those long road trips, impromptu museum visits, and endless grocery runs? They’re packed with learning potential.
Think about it: Words like acceleration, corkscrew, and harness may show up in class someday—but at an amusement park, staring up at the foreboding climbs and precipitous drops? That’s vocabulary in action: vivid, memorable, meaningful.
Unlike the classroom, summer hands you organic teaching moments at every turn. The farmer’s market becomes a lesson in colors, textures, and seasons. The drive-through line becomes an opportunity to read menus together. All you have to do is notice—and talk.
The Great Baby Talk Debate (Spoiler: You Can Do Both)
During the segment, I urged viewers to treat their babies’ coos and babbles as real conversation, and to respond. Yes, even when it sounds like gibberish. These early “chats” help build the brain connections that support language and reading later on.
Carl brought up the question every parent wonders about: Is baby talk bad for kids?
My response: Go ahead and use silly voices sometimes—kids love them. But pair it with real words for real things. Say “Look at the enormous truck!” instead of “Wook at da big-big twuck!”
You are your child’s primary vocabulary builder. If you don’t introduce rich, meaningful words, who will?
The Research That Will Blow Your Mind
“There are correlations between the language skills of toddlers and their IQ and vocabulary as middle schoolers,” I shared with Carl and the Fox 6 audience.
Think about that. The words you and your two-year-old exchange today predict their language and literacy performance years down the road.
The action step? Continue having those back-and-forth conversations. Ask your little ones lots of questions and give them opportunities to think and use the vocabulary they’ve learned.
Those everyday chats about cloud shapes, grocery lists, and bedtime stories are building your child’s academic future, one conversation at a time.
Permission to Keep Summer Learning Simple
Here’s your official permission slip: Effective literacy support doesn’t require turning your home into a school this summer.
“Even if your child is two or three, you can start pointing out letters. This is an S—see how it curves? These little things that don’t feel like lessons are really impactful over time,” I explained to viewers.
The magic happens in the moments that don’t feel like teaching at all. Weave the summer learning lessons into everyday life—it’s easier for you and more effective for them.
The Bottom Line
Want to dive deeper? All of this—and so much more—is in Reading for Our Lives: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan To Help Your Child. Because raising readers shouldn’t be complicated, but it should be intentional.
In May, I had the incredible privilege of interviewing Ibram X. Kendi during the Milwaukee stop of his Malcolm Lives tour. The event, hosted by America’s Black Holocaust Museum, Niche Book Bar, and Boswell Books, was electric—equal parts literary conversation, history lesson, and community gathering.
But what moved me most? The kids.
The crowd was mostly adults, so the wide-eyed young readers stuck out, and I made sure to call on them during the open Q&A. They raised their hands. They asked questions. They waited patiently (and giddily) in line to get their books signed. And they walked out with more than an autograph—they left with a spark.
Bringing kids to author events isn’t just cute or educational. It’s transformational.
1. Meeting the Author Makes the Book Come Alive
When young people meet an author, the words on the page suddenly feel personal. They’re no longer reading a story by a name—they’re engaging with a real person who chose every scene, fact, and phrase with care.
As Kendi explained during our talk, “Stories are the greatest teachers.” And when kids hear directly from the storyteller, their learning deepens. They get behind-the-scenes access to the writing process, the research, the emotional labor—and the joy. One young attendee asked what inspired Kendi to write this book. His answer was that he wanted young people facing tough circumstances to see themselves in Malcolm and think, “Despite all of that, I can still transform the world.”
2. They See Reading and Writing as Real, Powerful Work
We often talk about reading as a gateway to academic success. But seeing an author in action reframes it: reading is a gateway to connection, conversation, and change.
Kendi described how he became a “real reader” at age 23. At the time, he was in graduate school, surrounded by peers who were referencing books and authors he hadn’t yet read. That experience stirred a sense of urgency—and humility. He felt like an outsider, unsure if he belonged. So he dove in, reading nearly 100 books in a single year. “Creating spaces where reading is valued where you feel like you have to read to belong—that’s what did it for me, ” he said. “And that’s what did it for Malcolm.”
When kids attend an author talk, they don’t just hear about the book. They experience reading and writing as tools for exploration, empowerment, and expression.
3. It Plants Seeds for Lifelong Curiosity
Books carry stories. Events create memories. Together, they build identity.
One powerful element of the Malcolm Lives event was the setting: America’s Black Holocaust Museum. As Kendi shared Malcolm’s story—one of displacement, resistance, transformation—the museum’s exhibits stood as a living testament to the broader black experience in America. It was history and present-day reckoning, all in one place.
In our conversation, we talked about how Kendi layered the book with “split screens” of past and present, inviting readers to see how history still shapes their neighborhoods, families, and prospects today. That kind of framing helps young people see reading not just as decoding words but as decoding the world.
4. It’s a Memory You’ll Both Treasure
Author events amplify your everyday family literacy rituals. They’re not just about the Q&A or the autograph; they’re about walking out with your child and hearing them say, “I want to read more about that.” Or “I didn’t know Malcolm lived in Milwaukee.” Or even, “I want to write something, too.”
Want to raise a real reader? Bring them to author talks. Let them ask questions. Let them be moved. Let them see that behind every book is a person—and that people like them write books, too.And if you missed Dr. Kendi’s Milwaukee stop, Malcolm Lives is available now. Grab a copy and read it together. The story’s powerful. The conversations it sparks? Even more so.
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.
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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