My oldest was given a goal almost 2 years ago when he started to learn reading. If he could make it through an entire book, reading to me without help, I would get him his dream toy. He was so excited and every time we mentioned it to him he would try to learn the sounds the letters made and how to understand the words. It worked like a charm to get him to want to read, for a few weeks.
Then frustration started to creep in. When he realized that progress in learning wasn’t as fast or as easy as he had hoped it would be, he started to give up. He begrudgingly would take up his reading task like it was brutal and some form of child torture. Occasionally, he would show signs of passion again when he decided he still wanted that toy.
In his mind, he was going to be forced to read some philosophical treatise on the fall of man. That was a massive mountain compared to the pebbles he was moving in his mind.
In fact, he was relatively blown away when I said it didn’t even need to be a difficult book. I just wanted it to be an actual book with actual words on the page, and without pictures that quickly told you what the words were. An animal book that simply says the name of an animal with a picture of it is too easy. He could simply read nothing and just name what he saw in the pictures.
Needless to say, once the revelation reached him that he wasn’t going to be reading Atlas Shrugged, he started to get excited again. He sat down to read to me one night and broke my own internal standard of “three strikes.” He still did very well, and I told him as much. The disappointment in his eyes was there when he missed about 9 words, and of the 9 words, at least 7 of the mistakes were the same two words that he just kept messing up.
He was literally about two words away from only making two mistakes in the book.
What was frustrating to me, though, was when reading the word he messed up, I would let him try, coax him, and then eventually provide the answer and explain how to read it, and then he messed up 2-3 more times in the same reading.
He wasn’t listening.
Now this week, he was willing to try again. He actually read it to my wife today, and she said he did really well. She had brought the book to the living room and left it on the couch for him. When I sat down to write my blog, he came over and picked the book up, intent on reading it.
He made a couple errors initially but then would catch himself while lookin at the word, admit it was wrong, correct it and move on. I had said nothing.
Then he got to a certain page and just wouldn’t read the words. He kept saying what he wanted it to say rather than what it actually said. The frustration set in and he started to cry. After a few moments of tears, he started blaming everyone else. He said he didn’t want to read anyway, but as I said, he did. I wasn’t even ready to have him read as I was sitting down to write a post. He initiated it from the start. Somehow, though, it was his mom’s fault for putting the book in the living room.
He later mentioned to his mother that he is afraid to read to me. He told me the same a few minutes after I heard him talking to her.
Fear? I’m not callous or mean when he reads. I am firm. But afraid to read to me?
When he first said it I was almost offended. I want him to read more than anything in the world and as he had been catching and correcting his errors on his own, I wasn’t even counting them as errors. In fact, internally, I was celebrating that I wasn’t having to ask him to look at the word again!
Fear?
As I simmered on that word for a few minutes it hit me. He isn’t afraid. He is nervous. He wants to impress me and gain my approval. He practices with his mom all the time at home and only gets a few times a week to make an impression on me with his reading. Further, there is the toy looming as a reward and the longer he has struggled to read and to attain his goal of that toy, the more fleeting and out of reach it seems.
He was experiencing nervousness and it was shutting him down.
I happen to have a couple days off this week, so I developed a plan. Taking my wife at her word, I assume he has read the entire book without a problem. So I needed to get him to read it to me without him feeling the performance anxiety associated with the toy and him trying to gain my affirmation.
He was going to read me a page at a time. Just practice. He could take a break at any time.
He seemed resistant at first, but I stressed that it was just practice, so it didn’t matter, but he had to read just that little first bit, and then he could be done. Thing is, he wasn’t done. He didn’t stop. He completed the first few pages and then needed some reminding.
This is just practice. Take a break if you want and we can do it later.
He did take some deep breaths. He completed the whole book.
He made a total of 4 errors, and immediately caught the the first two and corrected himself. One of the last two he needed a reminder of one of our infinite exceptions to rules that already only apply a third of the time, and the last, well, I had to read that one for him. That was truly his only miss. I would refer to the other as a foul ball, but still a strike, and the others were not wrong. He corrected it himself, without my help.
So he gets his toy. We ordered the Indominus Rex within the moment since there were no local vendors anyway.
He’s ecstatic. The lesson I stressed to him afterwards, and hope he remembers, is that there really is no difference between practice and a performance. The stress, anxiety, nerves and other features that add stress are all in our heads. For him, it is just a book, and his mind. The fear he feels trying to read for me isn’t about reading.
I love that I had the fortune to be aware enough of his anxiety to find a way around it. The goal was to get him to read, not to paralyze him with fear.
Did you know that one of the best ways to teach your kids to read is to simply read to them? To let them see you reading on a regular basis? Most of our ability to teach something has little to do with our knowledge of the innovative ways to explain or use memory tools. It has to do with immersion and showing something is a useful and important tool to have. They do this with languages as well, and take trips to live in a culture immersed in the new language to force the behavior on them if the student wants to enjoy the features and immense fun available if they can use the key of language. So get some good books, and read to your kids. Once they start picking it up, read more difficult books to your kids. Just read.
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