Your first grader can read Ulysses but they won’t want to and that’s okay

Having staked out the position that early literacy is really important, I do want to make it clear that I disagree with a lot of how early reading instruction is advertised. A lot of early literacy programs seem to treat ‘success’ as ‘the child can read advanced and sophisticated books’. An example, from an early literacy program that I think is well-designed and worth a try with your young kids to see if you and they enjoy it, but that I think is focused on the wrong endpoint:

at six, my son switches between “serious” literature which he reads with a dictionary app, including Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, and The Secret Garden, and easier literature including Beverly Cleary books, the Hardy Boys, and Encyclopedia Brown. If his answers to regular comprehension questions are any indication, he’s understanding what he reads pretty well.

my second is following in his brother’s footsteps, reading a version of the Odyssey (he’s crazy about Greek mythology—go figure) at age 3.5.

My seven year old can, when she wants, read chapter books for preteens; she can read news articles pitched at adults; she read the California voter’s guide. But that’s not actually what she likes to read most. What she likes to read most is often Captain Underpants, because she’s in first grade and first graders go wild for Captain Underpants, or the wiki for Bloons Tower Defense 6 so she can learn the best tactics for her favorite game, or the Order of the Stick comics, or D&D rulebooks.

I think this is great.

I think the aim of early literacy should be to get kids to the point where they can use reading to achieve their goals. They can read a map; they can read the rulebook for games they want to play; they can read books they find enjoyable and delightful; they can read books for the purpose of learning the answer to a question that they have.

It’s tempting to have kids read ‘serious literature’ early. It’s impressive to other people, and I think many parents (certainly me) have a deeply rooted desire to be able to point to legible impressive things about our children. Kids getting to impressive books sooner means they are reading books we remember reading and are excited to talk to them about. And when you know your kid can handle Ulysses, it feels wasteful for them to read Captain Underpants. It feels like they’re failing to live up to their potential, and you can encourage them to expand their horizons.

But there are downsides to pushing for this too much - either by directly insisting your kids try harder and harder books, or just by radiating at them that you’ll be proud of them for tackling the hard books and disappointed with them for sticking to the easy ones. I have a close friend who, growing up, was a mature reader who read advanced books and made adults proud, but then ended up thinking of reading as basically something she did for other people not herself - somewhere along the way she’d totally lost the ability to read for pleasure.

I read Winston Churchill’s six volume history of World War II in elementary school. I felt very clever, but it produced neither a deep abiding love of military history nor an understanding of concretely who fought in World War II. The problem wasn’t my ‘reading comprehension’, it was my total lack of technological, political, and geographic context that the book simply assumed. I could read two hundred pages on the North Africa campaign without actually being clear on what it meant for countries to go to war, or what a cannon was, or what a Nazi was, or where Italy was, or that Rome was in Italy.

I was thinking about this when, for a school exercise (where the point of the exercise was for kids to talk about what it was like when a lesson was too hard for them) my first grade daughter picked up The Count of Monte Cristo. She boggled at the opening sentences: “On the 24th of February, 1815, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples. As usual, a pilot put off immediately, and rounding the Château d’If, got on board the vessel between Cape Morgiou and Rion island.”

What makes this hard for my first grader to read isn’t reading ability; she read every word aloud to the class, except the place names, which she refused to guess (she hates mispronouncing things). It’s that she doesn’t know anything about 19th century history, so ‘1815’ doesn’t call to mind ‘tall sailing ships’ for her; and that means ‘three master’ is totally meaningless. It’s that she doesn’t have the geography knowledge to place the story in France from ‘Notre Dame de la Garde’ or to infer the ship has journeyed from Italy with ‘Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples’. She can read every word, but they don’t paint a picture, because that picture is a collaboration between author and reader and, no matter how precocious a reader, she doesn’t have the context to have the intended experience.

One way of thinking about Captain Underpants is that it’s juvenile and obnoxious. Another is that it is rooted in the experience of the world that first graders actually have; it references and touches off concepts they understand, the way Count of Monte Cristo references and touches off a setting that is thrilling once you have some context on the 19th century and impenetrable until then.

I’ve advocated pretty aggressively for teaching kids to read really young, but that’s because I think being a fluent reader is a big quality of life improvement for a five to seven year old child, and gives them new ways to learn everything else they want to learn. I don’t think the purpose of it is necessarily to get them ‘ahead in reading’, and I don’t think it matters at all whether they read Ulysses at seven or at twelve or at twenty five. If you teach your child to read early, and then they read second-grade books for a long time, it might feel like they’re losing ground or squandering their lead. But I would encourage parents to think of this as everything working exactly as hoped for. The child developed the reading fluency that allows them to do whatever interests them, and since they’re a second-grader, what interests them is sometimes immature potty humor. They’re experiencing the delights and joy of reading - reading for themselves, not reading to impress adults. They’ll definitely tackle complex material - but ideally when it contains something they want to know, not just because it’ll impress adults.

My guess is that the best way to support the growth of your precocious reader is to find books that they absolutely love, surround them with those, and then try as hard as possible to take your expectations out of it.