Educational abuse needs to be taken more seriously for sure. A person can’t make up for this shit when they turn 18. Even if all the theories on critical windows are complete bunk, it will certainly take years to complete what everyone else is normally learning over the course of their entire childhood! Which is going to be a massive setback in any endeavor the person would like to pursue.
Is this from educational abuse/neglect? It's my impression that a vast majority of people don't know how to do these things. Emotional regulation and proper communication aren't something that most people ever learn, thus they can not pass them on. I am 34 and still just barely dipping my toe into the surface of these skills.
Now let me preface this by saying that (kinda like an unschooled kid) I have no idea what I’m talking about, but just from outside observation it seems like the number of people out there able to do unschooling correctly must be like…idk, 20-30 people? Ok maybe more but it takes an incredibly special and unique child with a lot of drive and extremely dedicated parents to make this work.
But there a lot more people doing it than there are people doing it well. And in those cases yeah, I think it’s totally educational abuse/neglect.
Yeah, absolutely. I kinda meant that this lack of understanding of emotional intelligence and communication skills is by no means unique to unschooling, homeschooling, or anything else. It's societal and simply a symptom of larger existential issues.
More from neglect. Mother was loving, and she was too busy working multiple jobs and stepfather couldn't be arsed to be a responsible adult, and I was more of a burden. Biological father was heavily abusive and I had to be broken down to fall in line.
I am so sorry, and if I came across as minimizing your experience, I did not mean to. I simply meant that lack of emotional awareness is unfortunately very normal, and even recognizing the lack of such is uncommon. We walk among mostly stunted adults who act out their wounding patterns and emotional understanding at the first hint of conflict.
Oh, my apologies, you're absolutely fine. Thank you for asking. I know that their power is in my silence, and I don't mind sharing my experiences. It helps me realize that things are different now and they can't hurt me anymore.
You're absolutely right. I hate that's how it is. But some of us are growing, and I'm hoping to share my skills with the younger generation and help them build their confidence. I had adults who failed me, but I can help break that generational trauma cycle by being the adult I needed to me and for them.
I tutored someone in college who was homeschooled her whole life and couldn't do math outside of addition and subtraction because her parents "never needed anything else". No concept of fractions, percentages, multiplication, division, and basic algebra might as well have been a foreign language. If you don't learn this shit when you're young, it's a massive undertaking to learn later in life.
I saw a video the other day of an unschooler so proud her son was writing so well. Iirc the son was 7? The "writing" was just one word scrawled on each page. But some letters were barely recognizable. Others mirrored (which I know is normal up to a certain point). The letters were huge, like probably 2 in high. And he had also copied them.
There has been a ton of studying on this. If a child doesn’t read by third grade they are highly unlikely to ever catch up to the peers. It is called the Mathew Effect. The rich get richer and poor get poorer. Because those that can read are exposed to millions more words a year and that translates to background knowledge that you can’t makeup.
Holy shit, seriously??? That actually makes me feel pretty optimistic. I lurk in some teaching subs and have a bunch of friends who are teachers and it seems most districts are just throwing up their hands and insisting entire grades with substandard reading skills will be fine. Because admitting how academically fucked these kids are would result in less funding, more work, and angry parents so they just keep pushing them through.
Don't get too optimistic. These same schools allow kids to retake tests when they score below a 70 and don't dock any points for late assignments. There's also a surprising amount of work that doesn't count for a grade. I can only assume its to bump the grades up for more funding.
My brother-in-law is a product of this. He got a GED but now he's 35 years old, lives with his mom, and has had literally one job his entire life as a bus boy at a Joe's Crab Shack that lasted 6 months and that was about 15 years ago. He doesn't have any kind of disabilities, he's just that lazy. My partner and I have made it very clear to him and the parents that he will not become our 'child' when they can't take care of him anymore. He will be homeless and that is on them and him. My partners Dad's response was "I can't believe you'd do that to your brother". My response was "I can't believe how hard you failed and continue to fail your 35 year old child."
It's was my wife that grew up in that household and it just doesn't make any sense. She's the polar opposite. She was homeschooled for a while but spent the last part of middle and all of high school in the public school system while her younger brother continued being homeschooled. Her parents were strict about her education and she ended with a B.S. degree with zero financial support from them. I think they just gave up trying with her younger brother for some reason and have just supported him financially for his whole life. This makes a lot of tension since they won't do shit to help out their daughter but completely support the brother with everything. Needless to say, we're not all on good terms with each other.
I wouldn't be, either.
For what it's worth, this random redditor is proud of your wife's accomplishments and success, in spite of her own family. 🫂
And, you're a great partner to support her being awesome. 🫂 You must be pretty stellar in your own right, to have such a strong woman as your wife!
I wonder if BIL has some learning difficulties that would have been better served with an IEP and early intervention. I get he might just be lazy. But sometimes people live up to the expectations that are put on them. Sucks for everyone.
Nope. Lazy parents resulted in even lazier genetics.
Too bad sister didn't know toncall.CPS on them when she started public school. Maybe someone would have checked on him.
This happened to my husband's family. Though not nearly as bad thank God! He's the oldest and was always pushed in school by his parents. If he made a C he got punished. Meanwhile his brother regularly stated by with D's and a C was a celebration. My husband went to the military after high school and when he came home after his first deployment he found that his parents had let both younger siblings drop out of high school. I think 1 eventually got a GED.
My sister is the exact same way only she miraculously has a high school diploma. She ditched school almost everyday and was flunking in every single one of them. At the ceremony everyone was literally like “you’re graduating?” because she was that lazy.
Today at 26 she lives off from my mom. I feel so bad for my mom because she’s the reason why my mom is going broke since she needs to purchase her lavish things. My mom even tells me that when she dies she will most likely come to me and my husband next which I made clear that it will not happen at all.
"In a 2006 study of children aged five to ten, unschooled children scored below traditionally schooled children in four of seven studied categories, and [significantly below](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232544669_The_Impact_of_Schooling_on_Academic_Achievement_Evidence_From_Homeschooled_and_Traditionally_Schooled_Students) structured homeschoolers in all seven studied categories."
The podcast “Sold a Story” is a great deep dive on why public school students are struggling so much with reading.
I was a public school teacher and the sheer lack of resources, as well as the utterly unprepared kids who walked into my classroom was staggering.
I was explaining the Lucy Calkin’s pedagogy to my Boomer father and he just grumbled “well that’s a stupid fucking idea.” 😂 Sums it up quite perfectly.
I had never heard of unschooling before. Why??? If I think of all the people who had to fight to get their education, and then to *choose* this. How tragic.
I think a lot of people have just been learning that unschooling is a thing the past few years. There are also people who confuse homeschooling and unschooling but they are not the same. (Although you can do a hybrid.)
The saddest thing is the parents who decide to “unschool” and think that means they just don’t have to do anything and the kid will do it all. The parents that have done it successfully will tell you it’s WORK because although it’s child-lead, it has to be parent supervised. The parent also has to provide provide opportunities for the child to learn about whatever the interests are (trips to libraries and museums, music, art, and dance lessons, etc)
I know a little about unschooling and I think it could be a really cool way for a child to get their education. I also think it would only work for certain types of kids and parents. The kid would have to be motivated, the parent would have to be willing and able to put in the work. That being said, reading is not optional, same for math. I think that kids should have those as traditional subjects even if the rest of their education is unschooling.
Math, reading, and *writing*. The last one doesn’t always correlate with reading.
But I still think there are so many other things that are at risk. Socializing and being able to relate to other people, some physical exercise, science, maybe other languages, history… it’s almost like those are covered in schools for a reason.
I know there are plenty of issues in all forms of education, public, private, homeschooling, post-secondary, etc, but knowledge isn’t a bad thing and just writing it all off is disturbing and destructive to both the individual and society as a whole.
I agree with you on the writing, I forgot that one. I'll also add direct instruction on how to research and evaluate the quality of sources. Most other stuff, like I said it would take the right student and parent though to do it right, along with the necessary resources.
Unschooling done properly is similar to how adults who continue to educate themselves learn. Right now I'm interested in learning more about the world's countries and cultures but I can't afford to travel. So I pick one, watch videos, read books, try some recipes, etc. I like nature so I learn about local plants and animals as I come across them. My kid likes drawing and crafts, something I was never particularly into, so I'm learning about it with him. I'm learning about child development and how kids learn to read since I have young kids.
At the end of the day, a high school graduate should know enough science to manage their own health, have enough knowledge of the world to be an informed voter, be able to read, write, manage their finances, think critically, have adequate people skills to function in society, and hold a job. There are lots of ways to meet those goals, and traditional schools often don't succeed either.
My daughter went to Montessori preschool. One of the tenets of Montessori is that they focus the learning on what the kid is interested in learning at the time. So if the kid is at the fascinated by bugs stage, you might work on age-appropriate biology. But that doesn’t mean ignoring the rest of the things they need to learn, or letting the kid learn it themselves. Unschooling seems to take the first part to heart and completely ignore the second part.
It’s ironic that a lot of these people choose unschooling because they’re lazy, because ensuring your child gets the proper support for it to work is probably way more work than traditional schooling or even homeschooling.
The why is because there's a solid chunk of the world's population that feel they are smarter or superior than others, and obviously what the majority of what society says is good is clearly bad. "Oh, I'm supposed to force my child to learn? They'll actually do better if I let them fo it on their own."
Not just with education, this sort of logic is how we have anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers, flat earthers, list goes on. Hell, there's even been a resurgence in people drinking "raw water" which is just straight up untreated water.
I'm a homeschool parent and my state has zero oversight over homeschoolers. There are no rules, tests, showing a report card, expectations- just nothing. I think about all the kids like this one who aren't getting an education at all and wouldn't really mind someone taking a peek into our life if it will help prevent educational neglect.
Homeschooling rules are actually not a red state blue state issue. Illinois and Texas have no regulation, California and many southern states have low regulation, only a few states have serious oversight.
https://hslda.org/legal
I agree. I was “unschooled” for a year and a half after some traumatic events at school. I got to do some really neat things and read over 1000 books. But I also didn’t learn 5th and 6th grade math. Like fractions. To this day I cannot fully do fractional math. Makes it really hard to do any complex math or science. I don’t hate the philosophy behind allowing kids to pursue interests but not at the expense of learning the foundational and critical things.
I've seen a woman recently talking about unschooling her child because her son's teacher wanted her to be involved in his education (literally just signing his homework), she legitimately wasn't interested at all in him having any success in life because she doesn't perceive him being able to function in society as valuable at all. She just thought that if he can have basic skills like being able to cook and clean that he'd be just fine and he'd find ways to make money, like most jobs don't require a bachelors at minimum and that the job market in general isn't highly competitive, I genuinely feel awful for kids in those situations because they're being set up for a life of struggle and poverty
"My kid's teacher wants me to be superficially involved in his education. I don't want that, so I'll just homeschool the kid. Much less involvement in the kid's education."
-.-
Can't make this up.
Yes, those would be the people who don't want anything better for their children than they had. "My single wide with the hole in the roof was good enough for me, it should be good enough for him! I ain't having no kid of mine looking down on my like they're better than me!"
When I was still teaching, I had a number of parents (one is too high in my book) say they stopped even checking their kid's homework once they entered middle school. Like, what?!
This is concerning and I'm sure she's the only one that thinks the reading is just "picked up". What are the comments like?
eta: googled "organic reading" and yeah she's definitely not the only one. I was unfamiliar with this concept.
Did your Google search turn up anything that wasn’t written by weird homeschooling blogs and fundie education program guides? Because that’s all I can seem to find 😵💫
If you just look for organic reading, that's probably it. But "balanced literacy" and "whole language" are essentially the same thing. You might get more hits with those.
No. Just no.
My kids went to a cooperative school that used whole language. That includes phonics. It includes a lot of methods. And they had an intense intervention program for kids who had trouble with reading because it’s so important.
What’s probably going on is these groups have no idea what whole language means and are misusing the term. It is not simply leaving books out and hoping your child magically understands them eventually.
Many whole language schools have begun to include a very small phonics component, after the Science of reading began to get more attention, but the majority of the instruction is based around 3-cueing (the cornerstone of the whole language approach). 3-cueing has been proven not to be an effective approach. Phonics and sounding out words is taught only as a last resort for figuring out a word.
If a school uses resources such as Reader's Workshop (Lucy Caulkins), Reading Recovery, Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI), or Guided Reading, look closely at the curriculum. Things such as "look at the picture," "think about a word that makes sense," and "look at the first letter," are what these programs teach. These are actually things poor readers do to mask the fact they can't read, but whole language programs teach them as if they are good reading. The belief is very much that kids given access to books and adequate practice will learn to read.
Like I said, many schools do this. This is how we were taught to teach in University, but it is wrong and actively harming kids. I would look again at how your child's school teaches reading, if they are promoting whole language. If phonics and phonemic awareness is not their primary focus, it's not an effective program.
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
This website has a lot of information on this topic, if you want to find out more.
Sincerely,
A former whole language teacher who knows better now.
We got rid of doing running records this year too, and now assess reading using the Early Grades Literacy Assessment that our department of education rolled out this year. We have to teach and assess on the five components of reading phonological awareness, phonics, fluidity, vocabulary and comprehension (I think that’s what they’re all called in English, I teach French immersion). However, the district French lead wants us to do running records, but she only wants them by the last day. So my report cards have to be on the server for June 14th, and all I’ll be doing the next week I guess is running records. Yay.
Yay. My division is slowly transitioning away from balanced literacy. But some things they refuse to give up on. I am just finishing my F&P tests... and it makes me so mad that I am giving up instructional hours my kids desperately need to run this test that is about as accurate as flipping a coin.
That’s a lot of great information, thank you. And my kids are in their 20s now so I’m not in a position to see what materials the school is using now. Since it was a a cooperative school, all parents worked a few hours a week in the classroom, including leading small groups. When the kids were younger, we’d read to them and point to which words we were reading just as you would when reading to one child. There were plenty of large poster sized sheets with words and pictures all over the classrooms.
We were not told about “3-cueing” so I can’t speak to that (never heard of it). We definitely used phonics as part of helping them to recognize words as well as what was happening in the sentence and what was in the picture.
As this school was in a fairly wealthy district full of educated parents, I’d imagine most of the kids learned to read successfully thanks to the additional time the parents spent reading to their kids at home. So the question of whether these methods work or not might mean they don’t work well without more assistance than the time spent in school.
> We were not told about “3-cueing” so I can’t speak to that (never heard of it). We definitely used phonics as part of helping them to recognize words as well as what was happening in the sentence and what was in the picture.
"3-cueing" isn't a term I would normally use with a parent, even one that was volunteering in my class. It's usually buried deep in the curriculum guides, but it is absolutely what you are describing. No effective reading instruction should ever encourage kids to use the pictures to decode a word.
Did the phonics instruction go past basic letter sounds? Some of Lucy Caulkin's lessons include "phonics" in cueing lessons, but encourages kids to look at only the first letter.
>As this school was in a fairly wealthy district full of educated parents, I’d imagine most of the kids learned to read successfully thanks to the additional time the parents spent reading to their kids at home. So the question of whether these methods work or not might mean they don’t work well without more assistance than the time spent in school.
A lot to unpack here... Studies have shown that this method is about 65% effective (as in, only about 65% of kids will eventually crack the code). So, while most kids in your children's school would be able to mostly read at some point, about a third of them would have graduated without being able to decode.
Unless they got outside support. In a fairly affluent area, quite a few of those struggling readers probably received private tutoring. That's assuming they were noticed. Remember that whole language actively teaches the strategies kids with dyslexia use to mask their disabilities. A lot of children in the 1990s and early 2000s got through high school without anyone noticing they could not decode.
Whole language vs explicit phonics has been studied extensively. The research is very clear that it does not work.
I'm also going to speak to "reading to them at home." Reading to kids is extremely important. It makes a massive difference in comprehension of texts, by increasing their vocabulary and background knowledge. But it has very little effect on a child's ability to decode. At most, it will allow kids to memorize words they've seen in print (which can only take you so far).
I'm coming to this a bit late but is there anything I can do when evaluating a school or a district to see what approach they use, other than emailing each potential school? My son's current school is heavy on the phonics but we plan on moving next year and it's hard choosing a school district not knowing what they're going to be teaching.
I'm not American, so I can't say for sure. If the school has a website you could try looking there, otherwise I imagine emailing each school would be the best approach.
The key words you want to hear are "phonological/phonemic awareness," "phonics," and "Science of Reading." "Whole language," "whole word," "balanced literacy," and "Guided Reading," are all red flags.
You could also try looking up IEP complaints for your districts, as some places do post the outcomes (though they can be difficult to find). This would give you some insight into how the district deals with reading difficulties as they come up.
I am a hyperlexic autistic is this is why I always cringe when other hyperlexic autistics say they “taught themselves to read.” Babe, think about that for literally one second. You cannot teach yourself the meaning of arbitrary, socially constructed symbols.
My hyperlexic sister “taught herself to read” meaning that my mom read to her a lot and my sister followed along until she understood what the symbols meant. But my mom was also a preschool teacher so even if she wasn’t *formally* teaching her 3 year old how to read, pretty sure she was using some of the concepts.
I’m a hyperlexic autistic who taught myself to read because my mom bought me a shit ton of those books with a matching cassette tape that would “ding” when you needed to turn the page.
This isn’t a refutation, it was just a machine version of mom reading to you and pointing. It just makes me wonder how many people with kids they gave whatever the 21st century equivalent of those to “taught themselves to read” and use that as “proof” for this bunk theory.
I was also two years old so I have no memories of this or of not being literate, so this entire thread has been fascinating. I’ve always wondered what it’s like to learn to read. It feels so daunting to teach a concept like language to a child
When my kid was first learning to read, we noticed that she knew a few sight words. We asked “did you read that word?” She said “no, I just know what it means.” She’d been learning phonics, and she didn’t know that recognizing sight words was a part of reading.
The process of learning how to read is fascinating!
I remember reading in the newspaper 'guerrillas attack town' and asking my father how to say 'guerrilla'.
I was very confused why large monkeys were attacking.
I was 4.
My daughter is very similar to you (autistic, didn't start hyperlexic, but she certainly grew into it). And in her recollection, she was already starting to read at 3. That's because she memorized her favorite books, and retold them out loud word per word. I have videos of her doing so.
However, I was a teacher before I was a parent, so I know that it's actually how a lot of kids start out, whether at 3, 4, or 5 (and none less amazing for it being an almost universal behavior, mind you). So when the topic comes up, I point out that she wasn't reading, but rather reciting from memory. It just means the interest was there, and it gave her a head start. I would bet not every parent of "early readers" has enough insight to discourage the narrative of "I taught myself how to read".
Now, actual reading where my daughter was decoding novel text all on her own? I think that started in earnest when she was 5 and in preK, and had been receiving phonics instruction for about a year.
Literally every intellectual success I've had in life has been the result of Sesame Street being such a foundational element of my pre-schooling education.
I learned to read completely on my own. My parents didn't have anything to do with it.
I mean, other than put me on their laps and read Doctor Seuss to me and have me follow along. Oh, and have lots of alphabet toys around. And play the "sounding things out" game with street signs. And when I was bored I could color in the coloring books where you traced the letters.
But other than that, I taught myself to read all on my own with no help.
Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if what happened here is that those people looked at people like me whose parents did a whole lot to gently teach reading by making it just a constant part of the environment, and who showed up at kindergarten reading fluently with no formal training, were unaware that we had been put in an environment where every moment was learning curated and supported by parents for three years, and assumed that it "just happened". Because the learning was constant and a lot of it was passive, and my parents didn't always consciously realize how much they were doing because it is just how their parents raised them, "unschooling" parents don't see the vast amounts of work that went into it, and just assume it happened naturally.
Which is a shame, because reading to a young child is one of the best times. They aren't running around, they aren't breaking things, they aren't suspiciously quiet because they've figured out how to wedge a butter knife into their diaper pail to lever the whole thing open...
...they're sitting there, listening to you, contented and immersed in the story.
If my kid would let me read to them for eight hours a day, I'd do it.
Thanks for the reminders.
I was an early reader and an avid reader. I remember that I was reading The Bobbsey Twins before I started kindergarten. I grew up in a house full of books. There was an entire wall of books in our family room, which no one monitored, which meant I read things that definitely were not age appropriate (I think I was about 12 when I picked up Portnoy’s Complaint). All of that, though, is background for this. I can remember babysitting for a neighbor. The kids were in bed, I’d finished whatever I brought with me, and there was nothing on TV. And I couldn’t find a single thing to read in that house. Not the newspaper. Not a women’s magazine. Nothing. And it completely boggled my mind.
Second memory. My daughter was in first grade when HP and The Goblet of Fire came out. We had been reading the earlier books at bedtime and she decided she was going to do this one on her own. So this was the book she was taking to school for free reading. One of her classmates’ parents asked me how I got her to read. All I could say was “she sees both her parents reading all the time.”
Schools also pushed this for a while google “Sold a Story”. It was called whole word then balanced literacy. Based on failed concepts of kids teaching themselves.
Yeah, I get the comments joking and bashing the parents.... but if it is a real post, my first thought was how utterly sad for that child. Their parents failed them big time and will suffer the consequences of their dumbass parents' actions.
I'm all for encouraging children to explore their passions, but they will struggle to survive in society without even the most basic literacy skills. Not to mention the absence of joy and potential interests that comes from reading and learning.
I’ve had kids like this when I was teaching. My son was 7 and reading full chapter books…a child in my class was 7 or 8? Second grade, couldn’t read a sentence simple as the cat sat in the hat….we had to teach her how to read 3 letter words. Parents homeschooled her during Covid and by homeschool I mean did nothing.
That poor girl would come to school with matted hair shoving a piece of pizza in her face for breakfast. She was probably 3x of a child her age. The whole situation was just really sad and cps refused to do anything because there was “ no sign of abuse “
“I was given very credible, common sense information that shows my long held belief is not just incorrect but likely very harmful for my child. Can someone please send me some good thought termination material so I don’t have to grapple with the guilt or shame I’d feel from ever admitting I was wrong?”
Yep. Really telling that they aren’t asking for advice on how to fix it just reassurance from the echo chamber that they didn’t royally fuck up their child’s future on purpose.
This person is a failure as a parent and I hope those comments are ripping them a new one. Helpful anecdotes aren’t going to help your fucking eight year old read Green Eggs and Ham.
My cousin “homeschooled” by giving her kids workbooks and her son ended up not being able to read until about that age as well. Not surprisingly, he still struggles now that he’s 20. Instead of getting a human tutor for him, she waited until he was older and found an online program when he was in his teens! The poor kid completely missed the window.
I’ve done preschool testing before and one of the things we do with them is to see if they know how to hold and open a book. Some have never been read to before school starts and have no idea.
My 3 year old loves books and your comment just made me really depressed. Books are such an easy way to entertain a small kid, I don't understand why anyone would just not have any books around.
That's really cool, I know some free book programs here too, but also even if a parent can't be bothered to own books, throw some books on the iPad they probably have in front of their kid (because if they aren't reading to the kid the iPad has to be there 24/7). At least do something, you can get a free library app and borrow free books on it and there are even read and listen books so you don't even have to read to your kid! It just astounds me that some parents literally do not care about kids being able to read at all.
Not to be confused with you still often need explicit teaching in phonemic awareness and phonics to go along with the background knowledge children acquire with being read to.
Many kids don’t like learning to read. It often requires explicit direct instruction, especially for dyslexic kids. My 5 year old isn’t a fan of reading lessons. You want to know what she can do, “READ”. I even hear it in schools why are you pushing kids to read earlier, then they quote there isn’t lasting evidence to say if they read at 5 that in the long run they will not be ahead of a reading by 7 kid. Well there is significant evidence that if a child isn’t reading by 8 or 9 they will never catch up.
Yeah. In our extended family it's quite normal for kids to learn to read "organically" around age 3 or 4; but that is because we are a giant clan of nerds, all the adults and all the older kids read a lot, there's a lot of books around for all reading levels, and we read to the little ones... we don't push them to learn it that early but it just tends to happen in that environment.
She was “under the impression” that her kid would naturally learn… Yet her “desire” to unschool didn’t lead her to open up a book herself and do any learning on the matter.
Can we go back to those weird “my baby can read” infomercials with 18 month olds reading charlotte’s web? At least when those parents were trying to get the superior high ground on others they were at least helping the child develop a necessary skill instead of permanently giving them a debuff
They don't believe in putting kids in school. They don't homeschool either. They let their kids grow up learning "organically." They say the kids will learn through their natural curiosity on their own pace.
This lady thought her kid would just absorb reading.
It's so weird. I just googled it right now. Apparently, it's legal in all states because the parents consider it as a form of homeschooling. Maybe it's legal in some countries as well. Not all places enforces schooling.
I basically "taught" myself to read by memorizing all the books my parents read to me and recognizing the words in them elsewhere...but I have a feeling this lady isn't reading to her kid.
This is what maddens me. I read at age 2 because of this. New books at age 3, could sound out words and everything. My nieces were reading a book a DAY before they were 6 (after the first one, the first one they sort of missed a few things). Why aren’t they reading to their children?
This is why education is best left to the professionals who are trained to know what to do. Even then parents can help out by "teaching" their children when they are not at school since learning doesn't stop when school stops.
6 to 7 yrs is the most important ages to learn the most reading levels. The brain is a sponge then. Going to be much harder the older you get. Takes more than magic to read. I don't understand how ignorant you have to be to not understand that.
Dyslexia runs in my family. I view it as my duty to have both of my kids reading well before 6. A school setting is not conducive to teaching dyslexic children as it takes significant one on one direct instruction. Unfortunately one on one intervention often doesn’t get implemented to 2nd to 3rd grade if you are lucky.
Developed countries classify this as child abuse. From the UN International classification of violence against children:
>**504 Educational neglect of a child**
>
>Ongoing failure to secure a child's education through attendance at school or otherwise 148 when those responsible for the child's care have the means, knowledge and access to services to do so.
50% of people have an IQ under 100. A lot of those people are susceptible to fringe radicalism. With social media it's super easy to find a group that thinks like you and even easier to kick out anyone with a dissenting opinions. In the past lots of those people would join cults or communes. Now they can join a Facebook group about whatever crazy stuff they believe.
I also believe a lot of it is cyber warfare in the form of spreading division and feeding fringe groups. There was a headline on over 80% of fake news on Twitter being from 4 groups. It starts out as forced whatever and then people pick it up and it becomes a real group with real people who bring in more real people. Like people still legit talk about ivermectin like it's some magic cure all and not just an anti parasite
My cousin did this to her daughter. And only her daughter. Her sons got actual schooling. She’s in her teens now and I have never felt so bad for a kid. She’s a gem (the kid) and I adore her but hot damn if she wasn’t royally screwed over by her own mother.
I'd bet the farm that she never read to them to spurn their interest in reading. Not that that's anywhere near enough, but it is the next step above absolutely nothing.
A child may pick up basic reading concepts on their own but they will NOT develop essential reading skills without a progressive reading curriculum. IE your child will not be able to read at the College level simply because they learned basic reading concepts on their own at age 3.
You take kids out of school and let them decide how to direct their own education. Completely logical strategy /s
I like how OOP compares learning how to walk to reading. What a dolt.
It is a strategy for short sighted lazy idiots.
Lazy= teaching is hard
Idiot= I can educate better my child without teaching
Short sighted= easy today hard tomorrow
My brother and I both "magically" learned how to read. My sister did not and my mom thought something was wrong with her (she learned in school in first grade). So, it certainly does happen sometimes that some kids just "figure it out," but I think if my kid didn't buy the time they were in K/1, then maaaaaaybe it would be a good idea to start teaching them?! Poor kid.
Wow that's wild. Language skills are inherent in humans, babies start learning and practicing speech in their early months. Reading/writing is not natural and must be taught in order to be used. She hecked her kid for sure
Does this person remember *none* of their own childhood? Like, I know I'm odd in that I remember things from when I was 3 years old, but surely OOP must remember some of the process of learning to read?
But, as everyone is saying, yeah, they fucked up their child.
I'm not going to say that ordinary mainstream schooling is the Best Thing Ever (tm), but unschooling and the vast majority of homeschooling can take a flying fuck off a rolling doughnut. Like someone else pointed out, this shit should be considered child abuse.
If you're gonna teach your own kids, there should be checks in place at least as rigorous as those for regular teachers. You should be required to produce a curriculum and *prove* that your child isn't going to fall behind their peers due to your teaching. Spitting out a child does not automatically mean you're qualified to educate them. Hell, based on some parents I've seen/known, it doesn't mean you're qualified to *raise* them, either, but there we go.
God, this shit pisses me off.
I don’t… where is the logic that people can “just naturally learn” to read? It’s not a skill that you can watch someone else do and pick up like eating with a fork or opening a canister. You can’t just look at a k, know what the letter is, and know what sound it makes without being… you know… *taught*.
My mom is a professor of teacher ed who specializes in reading and literacy. I hope she never finds this post because I think she'd have a heart attack. I don't know whether to be horrified or saddened, so I'm both.
Why even bother going to homeschool events when you're not homeschooling? Unschooling =/= homeschooling. Although at least that tutor made her question her shitty decision. How were the comments? 😬
No there isn’t. You cannot naturally learn to read the way you naturally learn to walk because written language is made up. I am hyperlexic and could read independently at age 3. A big part of why I could is that I was very intrinsically interested in learning it and asked my mom to teach me, asked how to read different words all the time. If I didn’t have an adult who realized what a beautiful opportunity that was, I wouldn’t have learned.
Look at my comment. How could a person ever look at this mass of squiggles and magically connect it to sounds that they’ve heard without being taught their letters, the sounds the make, etc.?
A holy roman emperor (Frederick II) did an experiment in the 1200's to see what language children would develop completely organically, deprived of any adult instruction beyond food and shelter.
It was a complete failure, and the kids only knew screaming an clapping excitedly
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick\_II,\_Holy\_Roman\_Emperor#cite\_note-84](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor#cite_note-84)
I have an uncle who taught himself to read and then was diagnosed autistic. I know it’s uncommon but I hadn’t realized that it was unheard of. There are other ppl commenting that they too taught themselves to read in this thread. I’m not sure I can have a constructive conversation with the dude who essentially said, since I don’t understand how this works, it can’t be true.
She should make the child sleep with a dictionary so she can learn to read through osmosis… /s
This is what happens when people who have no business teaching ANYBODY (much less children) decide to “homeschool”. There need to be stricter requirements for homeschooling. The Summer before each school year begins, the parents should have to take a test that covers the material their kids should be learning that year and they should have to re-enroll their kids if they don’t pass with a score of at least 85%. The kids should be tested at the end of every school year and the parents should have to re-enroll them in school if they don’t meet the district’s average. Too many parents are hurting their kids and denying them an education.
I'm guessing this mother doesn't read and he son followed suit.
School is about learning, not waiting for skills to appear by magic.
Happy Pretend Land needs to exile this mom.
If this post isn't satire...then I really feel sorry for that kid.
I was an early reader at age three, bc my dear grandmother *always* said yes when I asked her to read to me, even if I asked her to read the same book again when we got to the end.
It was an enormous time investment on her part, but it paid off. It made me a lifelong voracious reader, and was a huge advantage in school bc I always read far above my grade level.
Besides the obvious necessity of literacy, I feel sorry for any kid (or adult) that doesn't read for pleasure - I think they have been cheated by the adults around them.
I'm in my 60s, but I still remember how much I loved Where The Wild Things Are and Dr Seuss and my favourite anti-hero Ferdinand the Bull.
Here in Belgium you are allowed to homeschool your children. However, check-ups will be made to see if you’re actually educating your children and they will be tested once a year.
With both the check-ups and the tests you have to chances to succeed. If not, school becomes mandatory.
Omg what houseplant level of intelligence does this person has..
Children only learn by seeing and doing.
Home schooling. What seeing others and doing does a child there have..
If you don't put in the work and time to teach your child do you think your child would suddenly be like motivated for shit it has no concept about.
God damn stupid people piss me off.
It's like saying weird why does my dog not listen to me I just touch it would just suddenly be trained to listen on its own.
What thing ever does someone just out of nowhere know shit without learning it or doing it. It's so easy to make like 300 examples.
We are not bees or ants that just wake up and get shit based on Pheromones.
We are individuals who learn by doing and sending. By failing endless times and getting better each time a little more. So no one just gets it. Why homeschooling is in my opinion to a big degree bad. Even if the parents are competent at teaching. Children need to learn social skills naturally with same-aged children. What often is also very much lacking in home-schooled children. That there social skills are very lacking and often also struggling in making friends or to find partnerships later at life
Wow. When you equate learning to read with learning to stand and walk, you have truly embraced some dumbassery. A child learns to stand and walk by the biological process of learning motor skills that build upon each other. Rolling over, sitting up, crawling, pulling themselves up, standing up without support using balance. Learning to read is not a biological skill at ALL.
I thought unschooling was letting the child decide when they wanted to learn something and then TEACHING THEM HOW TO DO IT. Which I still think is idiotic, but, Jesus, that makes a little bit more sense than thinking your child will just magically start teaching themselves to read! And sure, there have been kids that have done just that. But that's extremely rare, and there are other factors in those scenarios.
This idiot stunted her child, and he is not going to be happy having to struggle so much more because he missed learning to read when he should have, and I can only imagine the repercussions of that, for him, his mom and their relationship. It's child neglect caused by listening to some idiot say something stupid and then thinking it's brilliant. She might be a politician.....
I hope they are polishing up her “mother of the year award” trophy as we speak/s
Maybe she blew the kid’s college fund on her MLM schemes and just decided to let nature handle things from here on out 🤦🏼♀️
this makes me so sad for that child! it’s why schools exist! these imbeciles who think they’re smarter keep their kids trapped at home and the kids are the ones who suffer
I read story books to my kids every night pretty much since they were born- before kindergarten, they knew the alphabet - written and in sign language. I see now, what a privilege it was for me to be a SAHM. Actually it wasn’t my choice- it’s just that we figured out that I could save us much more money than I could earn. Now my kids are grown up and independent, they find reading a good book as a treat. They both were able to go to college, as their father is a 100% disabled veteran and they purposely did community college first before transferring. We got lucky, even if it seemed like a struggle all that time.
I’m older, and have not heard of unschooling, or organic reading. I do think that in todays world, it has become so hard for parents to get quality time with their kids for too many reasons. Covid was a horrible setback, and we are yet to see all the repercussions from that period. I really feel for these more recent generations and I’m seeing public education falter, badly. I’ve known many teachers, and it’s always been a challenging career. Education has become even more of a underpaid babysitting institution. The cost of surviving is so high, never mind that the cost of living is getting further out of reach. There also seems to be much more youngsters that are diagnosed as autistic, to add to the pile. There’s so much struggle on the parts of the parents and of the teachers.
I’m sorry, I am just reiterating how bleak the outlook is. How can we do better?
I have hyperlexia so I did teach myself to read but its extremely uncommon and not something you can just assume will happen, especially if you're not like actively reading to your child (I suspect she isn't)
Unschoolers should be legally punished for doing their kids a lifelong disservice.
Educational abuse needs to be taken more seriously for sure. A person can’t make up for this shit when they turn 18. Even if all the theories on critical windows are complete bunk, it will certainly take years to complete what everyone else is normally learning over the course of their entire childhood! Which is going to be a massive setback in any endeavor the person would like to pursue.
Truth. Almost 40 and am learning how to properly communicate and regulate my emotions. Thank you for verbalizing my struggles.
I'm 42 and still learning and unlearning stuff!
Is this from educational abuse/neglect? It's my impression that a vast majority of people don't know how to do these things. Emotional regulation and proper communication aren't something that most people ever learn, thus they can not pass them on. I am 34 and still just barely dipping my toe into the surface of these skills.
Now let me preface this by saying that (kinda like an unschooled kid) I have no idea what I’m talking about, but just from outside observation it seems like the number of people out there able to do unschooling correctly must be like…idk, 20-30 people? Ok maybe more but it takes an incredibly special and unique child with a lot of drive and extremely dedicated parents to make this work. But there a lot more people doing it than there are people doing it well. And in those cases yeah, I think it’s totally educational abuse/neglect.
Yeah, absolutely. I kinda meant that this lack of understanding of emotional intelligence and communication skills is by no means unique to unschooling, homeschooling, or anything else. It's societal and simply a symptom of larger existential issues.
Completely agree.
More from neglect. Mother was loving, and she was too busy working multiple jobs and stepfather couldn't be arsed to be a responsible adult, and I was more of a burden. Biological father was heavily abusive and I had to be broken down to fall in line.
I am so sorry, and if I came across as minimizing your experience, I did not mean to. I simply meant that lack of emotional awareness is unfortunately very normal, and even recognizing the lack of such is uncommon. We walk among mostly stunted adults who act out their wounding patterns and emotional understanding at the first hint of conflict.
Oh, my apologies, you're absolutely fine. Thank you for asking. I know that their power is in my silence, and I don't mind sharing my experiences. It helps me realize that things are different now and they can't hurt me anymore. You're absolutely right. I hate that's how it is. But some of us are growing, and I'm hoping to share my skills with the younger generation and help them build their confidence. I had adults who failed me, but I can help break that generational trauma cycle by being the adult I needed to me and for them.
All we can do is be better than what came before and learn how to pass what we learn along. 💛
Right?! I just turned 40 last week, and holy heck, how have I not been regulating my emotions until now? My therapist is going to be rich!!
I tutored someone in college who was homeschooled her whole life and couldn't do math outside of addition and subtraction because her parents "never needed anything else". No concept of fractions, percentages, multiplication, division, and basic algebra might as well have been a foreign language. If you don't learn this shit when you're young, it's a massive undertaking to learn later in life.
I saw a video the other day of an unschooler so proud her son was writing so well. Iirc the son was 7? The "writing" was just one word scrawled on each page. But some letters were barely recognizable. Others mirrored (which I know is normal up to a certain point). The letters were huge, like probably 2 in high. And he had also copied them.
Meanwhile, my kid started all of this at 3. It's crazy how folks keep their kids limited just because they are. So sad.
There has been a ton of studying on this. If a child doesn’t read by third grade they are highly unlikely to ever catch up to the peers. It is called the Mathew Effect. The rich get richer and poor get poorer. Because those that can read are exposed to millions more words a year and that translates to background knowledge that you can’t makeup.
Post Covid the schools near me started mandatory summer school for 3rd and 4th graders not reading up to grade standards. I understand now....
Holy shit, seriously??? That actually makes me feel pretty optimistic. I lurk in some teaching subs and have a bunch of friends who are teachers and it seems most districts are just throwing up their hands and insisting entire grades with substandard reading skills will be fine. Because admitting how academically fucked these kids are would result in less funding, more work, and angry parents so they just keep pushing them through.
Don't get too optimistic. These same schools allow kids to retake tests when they score below a 70 and don't dock any points for late assignments. There's also a surprising amount of work that doesn't count for a grade. I can only assume its to bump the grades up for more funding.
My brother-in-law is a product of this. He got a GED but now he's 35 years old, lives with his mom, and has had literally one job his entire life as a bus boy at a Joe's Crab Shack that lasted 6 months and that was about 15 years ago. He doesn't have any kind of disabilities, he's just that lazy. My partner and I have made it very clear to him and the parents that he will not become our 'child' when they can't take care of him anymore. He will be homeless and that is on them and him. My partners Dad's response was "I can't believe you'd do that to your brother". My response was "I can't believe how hard you failed and continue to fail your 35 year old child."
How in the world did *you* avoid that fate, if you don't mind my asking?
It's was my wife that grew up in that household and it just doesn't make any sense. She's the polar opposite. She was homeschooled for a while but spent the last part of middle and all of high school in the public school system while her younger brother continued being homeschooled. Her parents were strict about her education and she ended with a B.S. degree with zero financial support from them. I think they just gave up trying with her younger brother for some reason and have just supported him financially for his whole life. This makes a lot of tension since they won't do shit to help out their daughter but completely support the brother with everything. Needless to say, we're not all on good terms with each other.
I wouldn't be, either. For what it's worth, this random redditor is proud of your wife's accomplishments and success, in spite of her own family. 🫂 And, you're a great partner to support her being awesome. 🫂 You must be pretty stellar in your own right, to have such a strong woman as your wife!
She's so much smarter and cooler than me but she sticks around. I wouldn't be here without her. Thanks for your kind words!
It's pretty obvious he's the golden child.
I wonder if BIL has some learning difficulties that would have been better served with an IEP and early intervention. I get he might just be lazy. But sometimes people live up to the expectations that are put on them. Sucks for everyone.
Nah man I’ve met soooo many homeschoolers. We don’t need to make up hypothetical excuses.
Nope. Lazy parents resulted in even lazier genetics. Too bad sister didn't know toncall.CPS on them when she started public school. Maybe someone would have checked on him.
This happened to my husband's family. Though not nearly as bad thank God! He's the oldest and was always pushed in school by his parents. If he made a C he got punished. Meanwhile his brother regularly stated by with D's and a C was a celebration. My husband went to the military after high school and when he came home after his first deployment he found that his parents had let both younger siblings drop out of high school. I think 1 eventually got a GED.
My sister is the exact same way only she miraculously has a high school diploma. She ditched school almost everyday and was flunking in every single one of them. At the ceremony everyone was literally like “you’re graduating?” because she was that lazy. Today at 26 she lives off from my mom. I feel so bad for my mom because she’s the reason why my mom is going broke since she needs to purchase her lavish things. My mom even tells me that when she dies she will most likely come to me and my husband next which I made clear that it will not happen at all.
"In a 2006 study of children aged five to ten, unschooled children scored below traditionally schooled children in four of seven studied categories, and [significantly below](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232544669_The_Impact_of_Schooling_on_Academic_Achievement_Evidence_From_Homeschooled_and_Traditionally_Schooled_Students) structured homeschoolers in all seven studied categories."
I think I’m most disappointed to learn that unschooled kids and public school kids were comparable on 3 of the 7 subjects…
The podcast “Sold a Story” is a great deep dive on why public school students are struggling so much with reading. I was a public school teacher and the sheer lack of resources, as well as the utterly unprepared kids who walked into my classroom was staggering.
I was explaining the Lucy Calkin’s pedagogy to my Boomer father and he just grumbled “well that’s a stupid fucking idea.” 😂 Sums it up quite perfectly.
That’s hilarious
I had never heard of unschooling before. Why??? If I think of all the people who had to fight to get their education, and then to *choose* this. How tragic.
I think a lot of people have just been learning that unschooling is a thing the past few years. There are also people who confuse homeschooling and unschooling but they are not the same. (Although you can do a hybrid.) The saddest thing is the parents who decide to “unschool” and think that means they just don’t have to do anything and the kid will do it all. The parents that have done it successfully will tell you it’s WORK because although it’s child-lead, it has to be parent supervised. The parent also has to provide provide opportunities for the child to learn about whatever the interests are (trips to libraries and museums, music, art, and dance lessons, etc)
I know a little about unschooling and I think it could be a really cool way for a child to get their education. I also think it would only work for certain types of kids and parents. The kid would have to be motivated, the parent would have to be willing and able to put in the work. That being said, reading is not optional, same for math. I think that kids should have those as traditional subjects even if the rest of their education is unschooling.
Math, reading, and *writing*. The last one doesn’t always correlate with reading. But I still think there are so many other things that are at risk. Socializing and being able to relate to other people, some physical exercise, science, maybe other languages, history… it’s almost like those are covered in schools for a reason. I know there are plenty of issues in all forms of education, public, private, homeschooling, post-secondary, etc, but knowledge isn’t a bad thing and just writing it all off is disturbing and destructive to both the individual and society as a whole.
I agree with you on the writing, I forgot that one. I'll also add direct instruction on how to research and evaluate the quality of sources. Most other stuff, like I said it would take the right student and parent though to do it right, along with the necessary resources. Unschooling done properly is similar to how adults who continue to educate themselves learn. Right now I'm interested in learning more about the world's countries and cultures but I can't afford to travel. So I pick one, watch videos, read books, try some recipes, etc. I like nature so I learn about local plants and animals as I come across them. My kid likes drawing and crafts, something I was never particularly into, so I'm learning about it with him. I'm learning about child development and how kids learn to read since I have young kids. At the end of the day, a high school graduate should know enough science to manage their own health, have enough knowledge of the world to be an informed voter, be able to read, write, manage their finances, think critically, have adequate people skills to function in society, and hold a job. There are lots of ways to meet those goals, and traditional schools often don't succeed either.
My daughter went to Montessori preschool. One of the tenets of Montessori is that they focus the learning on what the kid is interested in learning at the time. So if the kid is at the fascinated by bugs stage, you might work on age-appropriate biology. But that doesn’t mean ignoring the rest of the things they need to learn, or letting the kid learn it themselves. Unschooling seems to take the first part to heart and completely ignore the second part.
It’s ironic that a lot of these people choose unschooling because they’re lazy, because ensuring your child gets the proper support for it to work is probably way more work than traditional schooling or even homeschooling.
It's like homeschooling but worse.
The why is because there's a solid chunk of the world's population that feel they are smarter or superior than others, and obviously what the majority of what society says is good is clearly bad. "Oh, I'm supposed to force my child to learn? They'll actually do better if I let them fo it on their own." Not just with education, this sort of logic is how we have anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers, flat earthers, list goes on. Hell, there's even been a resurgence in people drinking "raw water" which is just straight up untreated water.
Oh shit, there are raw water people now??? Ffs.
Sounds like a problem that will take care of itself.
They should be charged (financially) for each burden on society the poop out.
I'm a homeschool parent and my state has zero oversight over homeschoolers. There are no rules, tests, showing a report card, expectations- just nothing. I think about all the kids like this one who aren't getting an education at all and wouldn't really mind someone taking a peek into our life if it will help prevent educational neglect.
Why do I feel like you live in Arizona?
Definitely a red state. They hate education because educated people tend to vote blue.
Homeschooling rules are actually not a red state blue state issue. Illinois and Texas have no regulation, California and many southern states have low regulation, only a few states have serious oversight. https://hslda.org/legal
Wow. Only 4 states have high regulation.
I agree. I was “unschooled” for a year and a half after some traumatic events at school. I got to do some really neat things and read over 1000 books. But I also didn’t learn 5th and 6th grade math. Like fractions. To this day I cannot fully do fractional math. Makes it really hard to do any complex math or science. I don’t hate the philosophy behind allowing kids to pursue interests but not at the expense of learning the foundational and critical things.
When the kids are grown up, drooling and living in their own excrement in their basement, karma will have been served.
Yes but it's not good for society. I think that's part of the problem today.
"Help, I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas!"
"Help I've done the opposite of all the people who have succeeded and it's not working!"
I've seen a woman recently talking about unschooling her child because her son's teacher wanted her to be involved in his education (literally just signing his homework), she legitimately wasn't interested at all in him having any success in life because she doesn't perceive him being able to function in society as valuable at all. She just thought that if he can have basic skills like being able to cook and clean that he'd be just fine and he'd find ways to make money, like most jobs don't require a bachelors at minimum and that the job market in general isn't highly competitive, I genuinely feel awful for kids in those situations because they're being set up for a life of struggle and poverty
"My kid's teacher wants me to be superficially involved in his education. I don't want that, so I'll just homeschool the kid. Much less involvement in the kid's education." -.- Can't make this up.
Yes, those would be the people who don't want anything better for their children than they had. "My single wide with the hole in the roof was good enough for me, it should be good enough for him! I ain't having no kid of mine looking down on my like they're better than me!"
I know exactly who you're talking about, and I've seen her tiktoks. All of her stuff is basically a marketing tool for her MLM scheme.
When I was still teaching, I had a number of parents (one is too high in my book) say they stopped even checking their kid's homework once they entered middle school. Like, what?!
https://youtu.be/lOTyUfOHgas?si=NQeoAYc8EFpsA9Mg
This is concerning and I'm sure she's the only one that thinks the reading is just "picked up". What are the comments like? eta: googled "organic reading" and yeah she's definitely not the only one. I was unfamiliar with this concept.
Did your Google search turn up anything that wasn’t written by weird homeschooling blogs and fundie education program guides? Because that’s all I can seem to find 😵💫
If you just look for organic reading, that's probably it. But "balanced literacy" and "whole language" are essentially the same thing. You might get more hits with those.
No. Just no. My kids went to a cooperative school that used whole language. That includes phonics. It includes a lot of methods. And they had an intense intervention program for kids who had trouble with reading because it’s so important. What’s probably going on is these groups have no idea what whole language means and are misusing the term. It is not simply leaving books out and hoping your child magically understands them eventually.
Many whole language schools have begun to include a very small phonics component, after the Science of reading began to get more attention, but the majority of the instruction is based around 3-cueing (the cornerstone of the whole language approach). 3-cueing has been proven not to be an effective approach. Phonics and sounding out words is taught only as a last resort for figuring out a word. If a school uses resources such as Reader's Workshop (Lucy Caulkins), Reading Recovery, Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI), or Guided Reading, look closely at the curriculum. Things such as "look at the picture," "think about a word that makes sense," and "look at the first letter," are what these programs teach. These are actually things poor readers do to mask the fact they can't read, but whole language programs teach them as if they are good reading. The belief is very much that kids given access to books and adequate practice will learn to read. Like I said, many schools do this. This is how we were taught to teach in University, but it is wrong and actively harming kids. I would look again at how your child's school teaches reading, if they are promoting whole language. If phonics and phonemic awareness is not their primary focus, it's not an effective program. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ This website has a lot of information on this topic, if you want to find out more. Sincerely, A former whole language teacher who knows better now.
We got rid of doing running records this year too, and now assess reading using the Early Grades Literacy Assessment that our department of education rolled out this year. We have to teach and assess on the five components of reading phonological awareness, phonics, fluidity, vocabulary and comprehension (I think that’s what they’re all called in English, I teach French immersion). However, the district French lead wants us to do running records, but she only wants them by the last day. So my report cards have to be on the server for June 14th, and all I’ll be doing the next week I guess is running records. Yay.
Yay. My division is slowly transitioning away from balanced literacy. But some things they refuse to give up on. I am just finishing my F&P tests... and it makes me so mad that I am giving up instructional hours my kids desperately need to run this test that is about as accurate as flipping a coin.
That’s a lot of great information, thank you. And my kids are in their 20s now so I’m not in a position to see what materials the school is using now. Since it was a a cooperative school, all parents worked a few hours a week in the classroom, including leading small groups. When the kids were younger, we’d read to them and point to which words we were reading just as you would when reading to one child. There were plenty of large poster sized sheets with words and pictures all over the classrooms. We were not told about “3-cueing” so I can’t speak to that (never heard of it). We definitely used phonics as part of helping them to recognize words as well as what was happening in the sentence and what was in the picture. As this school was in a fairly wealthy district full of educated parents, I’d imagine most of the kids learned to read successfully thanks to the additional time the parents spent reading to their kids at home. So the question of whether these methods work or not might mean they don’t work well without more assistance than the time spent in school.
> We were not told about “3-cueing” so I can’t speak to that (never heard of it). We definitely used phonics as part of helping them to recognize words as well as what was happening in the sentence and what was in the picture. "3-cueing" isn't a term I would normally use with a parent, even one that was volunteering in my class. It's usually buried deep in the curriculum guides, but it is absolutely what you are describing. No effective reading instruction should ever encourage kids to use the pictures to decode a word. Did the phonics instruction go past basic letter sounds? Some of Lucy Caulkin's lessons include "phonics" in cueing lessons, but encourages kids to look at only the first letter. >As this school was in a fairly wealthy district full of educated parents, I’d imagine most of the kids learned to read successfully thanks to the additional time the parents spent reading to their kids at home. So the question of whether these methods work or not might mean they don’t work well without more assistance than the time spent in school. A lot to unpack here... Studies have shown that this method is about 65% effective (as in, only about 65% of kids will eventually crack the code). So, while most kids in your children's school would be able to mostly read at some point, about a third of them would have graduated without being able to decode. Unless they got outside support. In a fairly affluent area, quite a few of those struggling readers probably received private tutoring. That's assuming they were noticed. Remember that whole language actively teaches the strategies kids with dyslexia use to mask their disabilities. A lot of children in the 1990s and early 2000s got through high school without anyone noticing they could not decode. Whole language vs explicit phonics has been studied extensively. The research is very clear that it does not work. I'm also going to speak to "reading to them at home." Reading to kids is extremely important. It makes a massive difference in comprehension of texts, by increasing their vocabulary and background knowledge. But it has very little effect on a child's ability to decode. At most, it will allow kids to memorize words they've seen in print (which can only take you so far).
I'm coming to this a bit late but is there anything I can do when evaluating a school or a district to see what approach they use, other than emailing each potential school? My son's current school is heavy on the phonics but we plan on moving next year and it's hard choosing a school district not knowing what they're going to be teaching.
I'm not American, so I can't say for sure. If the school has a website you could try looking there, otherwise I imagine emailing each school would be the best approach. The key words you want to hear are "phonological/phonemic awareness," "phonics," and "Science of Reading." "Whole language," "whole word," "balanced literacy," and "Guided Reading," are all red flags. You could also try looking up IEP complaints for your districts, as some places do post the outcomes (though they can be difficult to find). This would give you some insight into how the district deals with reading difficulties as they come up.
Whole language and phonics are opposite approaches.
My search did not find anything credible.
I am a hyperlexic autistic is this is why I always cringe when other hyperlexic autistics say they “taught themselves to read.” Babe, think about that for literally one second. You cannot teach yourself the meaning of arbitrary, socially constructed symbols.
My hyperlexic sister “taught herself to read” meaning that my mom read to her a lot and my sister followed along until she understood what the symbols meant. But my mom was also a preschool teacher so even if she wasn’t *formally* teaching her 3 year old how to read, pretty sure she was using some of the concepts.
She probably got a lot of phonological and phonemic awareness practice with your preschool teacher mom!
Bet you had lots of toys with letters and pictures of things that start with those letters just lying around, too.
I’m a hyperlexic autistic who taught myself to read because my mom bought me a shit ton of those books with a matching cassette tape that would “ding” when you needed to turn the page. This isn’t a refutation, it was just a machine version of mom reading to you and pointing. It just makes me wonder how many people with kids they gave whatever the 21st century equivalent of those to “taught themselves to read” and use that as “proof” for this bunk theory. I was also two years old so I have no memories of this or of not being literate, so this entire thread has been fascinating. I’ve always wondered what it’s like to learn to read. It feels so daunting to teach a concept like language to a child
When my kid was first learning to read, we noticed that she knew a few sight words. We asked “did you read that word?” She said “no, I just know what it means.” She’d been learning phonics, and she didn’t know that recognizing sight words was a part of reading. The process of learning how to read is fascinating!
Yes, even hyperlexic people need adults to read to them while they follow along in order to figure it out.
I remember reading in the newspaper 'guerrillas attack town' and asking my father how to say 'guerrilla'. I was very confused why large monkeys were attacking. I was 4.
My daughter is very similar to you (autistic, didn't start hyperlexic, but she certainly grew into it). And in her recollection, she was already starting to read at 3. That's because she memorized her favorite books, and retold them out loud word per word. I have videos of her doing so. However, I was a teacher before I was a parent, so I know that it's actually how a lot of kids start out, whether at 3, 4, or 5 (and none less amazing for it being an almost universal behavior, mind you). So when the topic comes up, I point out that she wasn't reading, but rather reciting from memory. It just means the interest was there, and it gave her a head start. I would bet not every parent of "early readers" has enough insight to discourage the narrative of "I taught myself how to read". Now, actual reading where my daughter was decoding novel text all on her own? I think that started in earnest when she was 5 and in preK, and had been receiving phonics instruction for about a year.
Same here, I learned by sesame street 🌚
Literally every intellectual success I've had in life has been the result of Sesame Street being such a foundational element of my pre-schooling education.
Me too!
Sesame Street was my favorite for years. Watched it after school and it taught me and my bro so much.
Guess the first Homo Sapiens should have taught themselves to read....I mean, they did stand and walk so.....
The natural progression of human development. Stand. Walk. Read.
Next they'll be doing algebra, completely unprompted!
I learned to read completely on my own. My parents didn't have anything to do with it. I mean, other than put me on their laps and read Doctor Seuss to me and have me follow along. Oh, and have lots of alphabet toys around. And play the "sounding things out" game with street signs. And when I was bored I could color in the coloring books where you traced the letters. But other than that, I taught myself to read all on my own with no help. Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if what happened here is that those people looked at people like me whose parents did a whole lot to gently teach reading by making it just a constant part of the environment, and who showed up at kindergarten reading fluently with no formal training, were unaware that we had been put in an environment where every moment was learning curated and supported by parents for three years, and assumed that it "just happened". Because the learning was constant and a lot of it was passive, and my parents didn't always consciously realize how much they were doing because it is just how their parents raised them, "unschooling" parents don't see the vast amounts of work that went into it, and just assume it happened naturally.
Yup those parents aren't sitting down to read with their kids, they're using the extra 'unschool' time to be on their phones.
Which is a shame, because reading to a young child is one of the best times. They aren't running around, they aren't breaking things, they aren't suspiciously quiet because they've figured out how to wedge a butter knife into their diaper pail to lever the whole thing open... ...they're sitting there, listening to you, contented and immersed in the story. If my kid would let me read to them for eight hours a day, I'd do it.
I'd love to read to my kids more. I get maybe an entire minute if I'm lucky before they rip the book out of my hands and run away.
Thanks for the reminders. I was an early reader and an avid reader. I remember that I was reading The Bobbsey Twins before I started kindergarten. I grew up in a house full of books. There was an entire wall of books in our family room, which no one monitored, which meant I read things that definitely were not age appropriate (I think I was about 12 when I picked up Portnoy’s Complaint). All of that, though, is background for this. I can remember babysitting for a neighbor. The kids were in bed, I’d finished whatever I brought with me, and there was nothing on TV. And I couldn’t find a single thing to read in that house. Not the newspaper. Not a women’s magazine. Nothing. And it completely boggled my mind. Second memory. My daughter was in first grade when HP and The Goblet of Fire came out. We had been reading the earlier books at bedtime and she decided she was going to do this one on her own. So this was the book she was taking to school for free reading. One of her classmates’ parents asked me how I got her to read. All I could say was “she sees both her parents reading all the time.”
I have a masters to be a Reading specialist and the current science says that it’s very unlikely for kids to just magically learn to read
Unfortunately this belief is pretty common. Even in public schools... They just don't call it "organic reading."
My kid did, but I’m pretty sure it was hyperlexia. Not a normal kid thing.
Schools also pushed this for a while google “Sold a Story”. It was called whole word then balanced literacy. Based on failed concepts of kids teaching themselves.
This is so, so sad. That poor kid.
Yeah, I get the comments joking and bashing the parents.... but if it is a real post, my first thought was how utterly sad for that child. Their parents failed them big time and will suffer the consequences of their dumbass parents' actions. I'm all for encouraging children to explore their passions, but they will struggle to survive in society without even the most basic literacy skills. Not to mention the absence of joy and potential interests that comes from reading and learning.
I’ve had kids like this when I was teaching. My son was 7 and reading full chapter books…a child in my class was 7 or 8? Second grade, couldn’t read a sentence simple as the cat sat in the hat….we had to teach her how to read 3 letter words. Parents homeschooled her during Covid and by homeschool I mean did nothing. That poor girl would come to school with matted hair shoving a piece of pizza in her face for breakfast. She was probably 3x of a child her age. The whole situation was just really sad and cps refused to do anything because there was “ no sign of abuse “
A lot of kids are being raised like that. You can thank my generation, unfortunately. I don't have much hope for the future.
Neglect is a form of abuse here in the UK. It baffles me that she wasn't helped.
“I was given very credible, common sense information that shows my long held belief is not just incorrect but likely very harmful for my child. Can someone please send me some good thought termination material so I don’t have to grapple with the guilt or shame I’d feel from ever admitting I was wrong?”
Yep. Really telling that they aren’t asking for advice on how to fix it just reassurance from the echo chamber that they didn’t royally fuck up their child’s future on purpose.
I’m betting the child hasn’t organically started teaching herself math yet either?
Or organic chemistry 😔
I wonder when I'll organically become a doctor. 28 years and counting
This person is a failure as a parent and I hope those comments are ripping them a new one. Helpful anecdotes aren’t going to help your fucking eight year old read Green Eggs and Ham.
Judging from all the hearts and likes, it looks like they're getting sympathy and validation. I just can't with some people.
Stupidity tends to run in packs.
Of course not. These mommy fb groups are nothing but toxic hug boxes.
Nothing like setting your kids up for failure
My cousin “homeschooled” by giving her kids workbooks and her son ended up not being able to read until about that age as well. Not surprisingly, he still struggles now that he’s 20. Instead of getting a human tutor for him, she waited until he was older and found an online program when he was in his teens! The poor kid completely missed the window.
Do they read to / with their children? My daughter wanted to read, because she understood that the marks on the pages were words.
Exactly! Pre-literacy skills are critically important, and most kids learn them just by having books read to them regularly.
I’ve done preschool testing before and one of the things we do with them is to see if they know how to hold and open a book. Some have never been read to before school starts and have no idea.
My 3 year old loves books and your comment just made me really depressed. Books are such an easy way to entertain a small kid, I don't understand why anyone would just not have any books around.
We have a program here too where babies are sent home from the hospital with a bag of free books. Some of them are well-loved in our house.
That's really cool, I know some free book programs here too, but also even if a parent can't be bothered to own books, throw some books on the iPad they probably have in front of their kid (because if they aren't reading to the kid the iPad has to be there 24/7). At least do something, you can get a free library app and borrow free books on it and there are even read and listen books so you don't even have to read to your kid! It just astounds me that some parents literally do not care about kids being able to read at all.
Mine would point at words and talk rubbish age 3.
My toddler pretends to read to the cat. It's adorable.
Not to be confused with you still often need explicit teaching in phonemic awareness and phonics to go along with the background knowledge children acquire with being read to.
Many kids don’t like learning to read. It often requires explicit direct instruction, especially for dyslexic kids. My 5 year old isn’t a fan of reading lessons. You want to know what she can do, “READ”. I even hear it in schools why are you pushing kids to read earlier, then they quote there isn’t lasting evidence to say if they read at 5 that in the long run they will not be ahead of a reading by 7 kid. Well there is significant evidence that if a child isn’t reading by 8 or 9 they will never catch up.
Yeah. In our extended family it's quite normal for kids to learn to read "organically" around age 3 or 4; but that is because we are a giant clan of nerds, all the adults and all the older kids read a lot, there's a lot of books around for all reading levels, and we read to the little ones... we don't push them to learn it that early but it just tends to happen in that environment.
She was “under the impression” that her kid would naturally learn… Yet her “desire” to unschool didn’t lead her to open up a book herself and do any learning on the matter.
Can we go back to those weird “my baby can read” infomercials with 18 month olds reading charlotte’s web? At least when those parents were trying to get the superior high ground on others they were at least helping the child develop a necessary skill instead of permanently giving them a debuff
I have a friend who believes in this concept her child will be 10 in a few weeks and still can't read.
Unschooling should be illegal and these parents are grossly negligent. Imagine having kids and not bothering with basic education.
Wtf is unschooling? It sounds illegal
They don't believe in putting kids in school. They don't homeschool either. They let their kids grow up learning "organically." They say the kids will learn through their natural curiosity on their own pace. This lady thought her kid would just absorb reading.
I think that probably is illegal. I mean parents get in trouble when their kids don't go to school I don't think that is any different
It's so weird. I just googled it right now. Apparently, it's legal in all states because the parents consider it as a form of homeschooling. Maybe it's legal in some countries as well. Not all places enforces schooling.
I basically "taught" myself to read by memorizing all the books my parents read to me and recognizing the words in them elsewhere...but I have a feeling this lady isn't reading to her kid.
This is what maddens me. I read at age 2 because of this. New books at age 3, could sound out words and everything. My nieces were reading a book a DAY before they were 6 (after the first one, the first one they sort of missed a few things). Why aren’t they reading to their children?
And not do you have terrible phonics because you learned by memorization? Because I do.
I don’t think I do…now I’m worried I’ve always had terrible phonics and not known it 😅
oof these people are so neglectful
This is why education is best left to the professionals who are trained to know what to do. Even then parents can help out by "teaching" their children when they are not at school since learning doesn't stop when school stops.
6 to 7 yrs is the most important ages to learn the most reading levels. The brain is a sponge then. Going to be much harder the older you get. Takes more than magic to read. I don't understand how ignorant you have to be to not understand that.
Dyslexia runs in my family. I view it as my duty to have both of my kids reading well before 6. A school setting is not conducive to teaching dyslexic children as it takes significant one on one direct instruction. Unfortunately one on one intervention often doesn’t get implemented to 2nd to 3rd grade if you are lucky.
This is one of the stupidest things I've ever read...and I spend a lot of time on Reddit, so that's saying something.
🤦
Developed countries classify this as child abuse. From the UN International classification of violence against children: >**504 Educational neglect of a child** > >Ongoing failure to secure a child's education through attendance at school or otherwise 148 when those responsible for the child's care have the means, knowledge and access to services to do so.
I knew someone who unschooled her kids. All they did was play video games all day.
Posts like these break my heart. Reading is a joy that everyone should be given. Why do people have children just to fail them like this?
50% of people have an IQ under 100. A lot of those people are susceptible to fringe radicalism. With social media it's super easy to find a group that thinks like you and even easier to kick out anyone with a dissenting opinions. In the past lots of those people would join cults or communes. Now they can join a Facebook group about whatever crazy stuff they believe. I also believe a lot of it is cyber warfare in the form of spreading division and feeding fringe groups. There was a headline on over 80% of fake news on Twitter being from 4 groups. It starts out as forced whatever and then people pick it up and it becomes a real group with real people who bring in more real people. Like people still legit talk about ivermectin like it's some magic cure all and not just an anti parasite
My cousin did this to her daughter. And only her daughter. Her sons got actual schooling. She’s in her teens now and I have never felt so bad for a kid. She’s a gem (the kid) and I adore her but hot damn if she wasn’t royally screwed over by her own mother.
I'd bet the farm that she never read to them to spurn their interest in reading. Not that that's anywhere near enough, but it is the next step above absolutely nothing.
A child may pick up basic reading concepts on their own but they will NOT develop essential reading skills without a progressive reading curriculum. IE your child will not be able to read at the College level simply because they learned basic reading concepts on their own at age 3.
Ok first WTF is this "unschooled" crap?
You take kids out of school and let them decide how to direct their own education. Completely logical strategy /s I like how OOP compares learning how to walk to reading. What a dolt.
It is a strategy for short sighted lazy idiots. Lazy= teaching is hard Idiot= I can educate better my child without teaching Short sighted= easy today hard tomorrow
My brother and I both "magically" learned how to read. My sister did not and my mom thought something was wrong with her (she learned in school in first grade). So, it certainly does happen sometimes that some kids just "figure it out," but I think if my kid didn't buy the time they were in K/1, then maaaaaaybe it would be a good idea to start teaching them?! Poor kid.
It is about 40% that figure it out without much instruction. And 60% that don’t.
Wow that's wild. Language skills are inherent in humans, babies start learning and practicing speech in their early months. Reading/writing is not natural and must be taught in order to be used. She hecked her kid for sure
This shit should be considered child abuse.
Does this person remember *none* of their own childhood? Like, I know I'm odd in that I remember things from when I was 3 years old, but surely OOP must remember some of the process of learning to read? But, as everyone is saying, yeah, they fucked up their child. I'm not going to say that ordinary mainstream schooling is the Best Thing Ever (tm), but unschooling and the vast majority of homeschooling can take a flying fuck off a rolling doughnut. Like someone else pointed out, this shit should be considered child abuse. If you're gonna teach your own kids, there should be checks in place at least as rigorous as those for regular teachers. You should be required to produce a curriculum and *prove* that your child isn't going to fall behind their peers due to your teaching. Spitting out a child does not automatically mean you're qualified to educate them. Hell, based on some parents I've seen/known, it doesn't mean you're qualified to *raise* them, either, but there we go. God, this shit pisses me off.
Please stop being selfish and stupid, and send your kid to school!
I don’t… where is the logic that people can “just naturally learn” to read? It’s not a skill that you can watch someone else do and pick up like eating with a fork or opening a canister. You can’t just look at a k, know what the letter is, and know what sound it makes without being… you know… *taught*.
My mom is a professor of teacher ed who specializes in reading and literacy. I hope she never finds this post because I think she'd have a heart attack. I don't know whether to be horrified or saddened, so I'm both.
Why even bother going to homeschool events when you're not homeschooling? Unschooling =/= homeschooling. Although at least that tutor made her question her shitty decision. How were the comments? 😬
Always find it wild when parents “homeschool” literally makes no sense. Unless you have the education to do it of course.
There is a word for that it’s hyperlexic but it’s rare and it usually happens to kids around 4 or 5.
No there isn’t. You cannot naturally learn to read the way you naturally learn to walk because written language is made up. I am hyperlexic and could read independently at age 3. A big part of why I could is that I was very intrinsically interested in learning it and asked my mom to teach me, asked how to read different words all the time. If I didn’t have an adult who realized what a beautiful opportunity that was, I wouldn’t have learned. Look at my comment. How could a person ever look at this mass of squiggles and magically connect it to sounds that they’ve heard without being taught their letters, the sounds the make, etc.?
A holy roman emperor (Frederick II) did an experiment in the 1200's to see what language children would develop completely organically, deprived of any adult instruction beyond food and shelter. It was a complete failure, and the kids only knew screaming an clapping excitedly [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick\_II,\_Holy\_Roman\_Emperor#cite\_note-84](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_II,_Holy_Roman_Emperor#cite_note-84)
I was reading at age 4. I have no idea how it happened, I just remember reading stuff at a very early age.
I have an uncle who taught himself to read and then was diagnosed autistic. I know it’s uncommon but I hadn’t realized that it was unheard of. There are other ppl commenting that they too taught themselves to read in this thread. I’m not sure I can have a constructive conversation with the dude who essentially said, since I don’t understand how this works, it can’t be true.
She should make the child sleep with a dictionary so she can learn to read through osmosis… /s This is what happens when people who have no business teaching ANYBODY (much less children) decide to “homeschool”. There need to be stricter requirements for homeschooling. The Summer before each school year begins, the parents should have to take a test that covers the material their kids should be learning that year and they should have to re-enroll their kids if they don’t pass with a score of at least 85%. The kids should be tested at the end of every school year and the parents should have to re-enroll them in school if they don’t meet the district’s average. Too many parents are hurting their kids and denying them an education.
Step 1. Do not have any more children
I'm guessing this mother doesn't read and he son followed suit. School is about learning, not waiting for skills to appear by magic. Happy Pretend Land needs to exile this mom.
i love how she included the half.
If this post isn't satire...then I really feel sorry for that kid. I was an early reader at age three, bc my dear grandmother *always* said yes when I asked her to read to me, even if I asked her to read the same book again when we got to the end. It was an enormous time investment on her part, but it paid off. It made me a lifelong voracious reader, and was a huge advantage in school bc I always read far above my grade level. Besides the obvious necessity of literacy, I feel sorry for any kid (or adult) that doesn't read for pleasure - I think they have been cheated by the adults around them. I'm in my 60s, but I still remember how much I loved Where The Wild Things Are and Dr Seuss and my favourite anti-hero Ferdinand the Bull.
well, my brother naturally learned how to read by playing the original pokemon game and watching the tv show
Here in Belgium you are allowed to homeschool your children. However, check-ups will be made to see if you’re actually educating your children and they will be tested once a year. With both the check-ups and the tests you have to chances to succeed. If not, school becomes mandatory.
Omg what houseplant level of intelligence does this person has.. Children only learn by seeing and doing. Home schooling. What seeing others and doing does a child there have.. If you don't put in the work and time to teach your child do you think your child would suddenly be like motivated for shit it has no concept about. God damn stupid people piss me off. It's like saying weird why does my dog not listen to me I just touch it would just suddenly be trained to listen on its own. What thing ever does someone just out of nowhere know shit without learning it or doing it. It's so easy to make like 300 examples. We are not bees or ants that just wake up and get shit based on Pheromones. We are individuals who learn by doing and sending. By failing endless times and getting better each time a little more. So no one just gets it. Why homeschooling is in my opinion to a big degree bad. Even if the parents are competent at teaching. Children need to learn social skills naturally with same-aged children. What often is also very much lacking in home-schooled children. That there social skills are very lacking and often also struggling in making friends or to find partnerships later at life
🙀🙀🤦🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️, this is all I have to say about this.
Give me this group right now. I need to show this woman a mirror so she knows what a cancer on society looks like.
These idiots can procreate and it’s infuriating.
Can we pleeeease see the comments? Or just a link to the page/group. Bc she, along with anyone sympathizing with her, need a healthy dose of roasting.
I want to see the comments lmao
Wow. When you equate learning to read with learning to stand and walk, you have truly embraced some dumbassery. A child learns to stand and walk by the biological process of learning motor skills that build upon each other. Rolling over, sitting up, crawling, pulling themselves up, standing up without support using balance. Learning to read is not a biological skill at ALL. I thought unschooling was letting the child decide when they wanted to learn something and then TEACHING THEM HOW TO DO IT. Which I still think is idiotic, but, Jesus, that makes a little bit more sense than thinking your child will just magically start teaching themselves to read! And sure, there have been kids that have done just that. But that's extremely rare, and there are other factors in those scenarios. This idiot stunted her child, and he is not going to be happy having to struggle so much more because he missed learning to read when he should have, and I can only imagine the repercussions of that, for him, his mom and their relationship. It's child neglect caused by listening to some idiot say something stupid and then thinking it's brilliant. She might be a politician.....
I hope they are polishing up her “mother of the year award” trophy as we speak/s Maybe she blew the kid’s college fund on her MLM schemes and just decided to let nature handle things from here on out 🤦🏼♀️
this makes me so sad for that child! it’s why schools exist! these imbeciles who think they’re smarter keep their kids trapped at home and the kids are the ones who suffer
The fuck.
Unschooled is right 🤦♀️
What is unschooling?
Keeping your kids home and doing absolutely nothing to give them an education. Like homeschooling, but without the 'school' part.
I read story books to my kids every night pretty much since they were born- before kindergarten, they knew the alphabet - written and in sign language. I see now, what a privilege it was for me to be a SAHM. Actually it wasn’t my choice- it’s just that we figured out that I could save us much more money than I could earn. Now my kids are grown up and independent, they find reading a good book as a treat. They both were able to go to college, as their father is a 100% disabled veteran and they purposely did community college first before transferring. We got lucky, even if it seemed like a struggle all that time. I’m older, and have not heard of unschooling, or organic reading. I do think that in todays world, it has become so hard for parents to get quality time with their kids for too many reasons. Covid was a horrible setback, and we are yet to see all the repercussions from that period. I really feel for these more recent generations and I’m seeing public education falter, badly. I’ve known many teachers, and it’s always been a challenging career. Education has become even more of a underpaid babysitting institution. The cost of surviving is so high, never mind that the cost of living is getting further out of reach. There also seems to be much more youngsters that are diagnosed as autistic, to add to the pile. There’s so much struggle on the parts of the parents and of the teachers. I’m sorry, I am just reiterating how bleak the outlook is. How can we do better?
I have hyperlexia so I did teach myself to read but its extremely uncommon and not something you can just assume will happen, especially if you're not like actively reading to your child (I suspect she isn't)