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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

As a parent of a toddler and a baby, this article bothers me to bits.

The author somehow seems to implicitly assumes that being able to read as early as possible is good, period. Younger == better. He has a huge "why" chapter, where he debunks and defends all kinds of criticism he's gotten, but I haven't been able to at all find the section where he simply describes why it's a good idea. Not why it's not not a good idea, that's not good enough. Why would I teach my children to read already?

There might be good reasons, but this author is so consumed with the "it's possible! it's not harmful!" part of things that what should have been the central argument is nearly entirely missing.

I mean, seriously, it's possible and it's not harmful? I can think of a lot of things that are possible and not harmful but still wouldn't do with my kids.

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Read the section titled "What is the point?" - http://larrysanger.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/How-and-Wh...

You may disagree with the author's reasons but at least read the whole article before saying that quite a long section is "entirely missing".

Because having more skills is good under virtually all circumstances? The child can now read if the desire or need arises, and can choose not to read under other circumstances.

Really, more skills the better? I have 3yr old son and I've been reading to him / teaching him to read only as much as he can concentrate while enjoying it. It is really easy to be too pushy and have a child lost interest. The skills does not matter nearly as much as the learning experiences. I rather hope that he grows an interest in learning itself than teach him read under 4 of age and possible hating the experience.

All things being equal, wouldn't you say it's better to be able to read than not read?

Yes you can create a circumstance where literacy is gained through onerous means, but you can use that same hypothetical with pretty much any form of parental guidance till you get to the point where children are now only learning what they want to and not what is necssary.

> All things being equal

Pretty big assumption there.

Yes, this touches the point that is overlooked. We are eager to assume that the cost of acquiring a (reading) skill is static and low, involving only time. The way I see this is that for toddlers the added value by hour declines rapidly, so instead of investing more time to teach my child to read properly, I prefer to teach/explore other things such as story telling, cutting shapes with scissors, etc.

The other problem is for children who superficially appear to understand reading. They may not get the help they need to progress because people thing they can read.

Isn't this a difficulty that any child would face, no matter what time they learned how to read?

I'd think in context---a child taught how to read in a one-on-one interaction with a parent is more likely to have their difficulties noted and receive help from that same parent, than a child taught how to read in a one-on-fifteen classroom setting.

Well the original commenter basically said, the article defended itself well against criticism that there would be harm caused by teaching a young child to read, so his question was "what is the benefit?"

So I wonder: isn't reading a benefit in and of itself? If there's no direct harm, then it ought to be at worst a waste of time.

> If there's no direct harm

Again, that's a big assumption. Plausible problems:

1. developing language skills early stunts development of more visual skills

2. too much structured time has drawbacks

3. "it ought to be at worst a waste of time" ... and additional stress. Opportunity costs could also include relationship capital (pushing your kid to do unimportant things means you can't push as hard in other areas).

I don't think anyone is assuming anything.

The author of the article went into detail as to what possible harm there could be, and why he thought they were avoided or null.

Your stance seems to be summarized as: 'what if parents are thoughtless, naive, and too forceful?'.

In this case, the author was none of that, and really shouldn't be compared to this hypothetical worst case scenario.

> developing language skills early stunts development of more visual skills

This seems incredibly unlikely. I'd in fact bet money that developing any skill young will not stunt the growth of another skill, so long as a normal amount of time is spent invested in that other skill comparative to normal children.

> too much structured time has drawbacks

Indeed, but according to the author all they did was read to the child before dinner, and have them sound out words as they pointed to them. Does 30 minutes to an hour of reading and pointing count as too much structured time?

> Opportunity costs could also include relationship capital (pushing your kid to do unimportant things means you can't push as hard in other areas).

This sounds like a problem of methodology, not of aims. If teaching a child anything causes alienation, then you are doing it wrong, especially if that thing is a basic skill that they must learn.

Yes, more skills is better, because of the way brain works. Learning new skill creates new connections and these come handy even in situations where the said skill is not involved at all.

Huh? Yes, the more skills the better. Your post doesn't exactly read as an attack on that assumption, but as a criticism on the method of teaching.

I agree, both the learning experience and the acquired skills matter. What's often overlooked is that every child develops at their own pace, and the skills progression taught in schools is based on both normative ideals and descriptive "modal" pace. Offering a child new material that they "should not be learning yet" is not a crime, nor an offense to the child, nor a criticism on other parenting methods (or other children, for that matter).

Not to mention that skills development doesn't occur across a single line. As an example, a child of a friend of mine is now almost two years old, and still vocalizes at most two syllables. Yet she's able to comprehend (and execute) very complicated sentences and commands, in two languages. Still, she's now officially labeled a "deficient" child, with all the counselling and monitoring that that entails...

You need to define skills first and how deep you are talking about.

Someone who are good a at multitude of things but very superficially does not make them more well rounded than one that practices on area more deeply. There are many many many areas that seem to be simple to learn because you can do them very quickly. But thats not what skills are about. Sure you can fake it, but unless you tried to dig deeper into something and learn what it means to learn then you aren't really going to be at a bigger advantage later on in life.

The very act of going deeper into a specific skill is teaching you something that just brushing over a wide area of skills isn't. In fact by going deeper into some of the typical things kids learn you are more likely to be able to also become better at others because you learn what it means to dig in rather than brush over.

Is there a cost of opportunity? If the toddler is learning to read instead of playing with toys, can we be sure that won't hurt it's hand-eye coordination or something?

For once, I agree with your conclusion. I am not aware of any evidence showing this may be harmful, so in the end, I think it is up to the parents and the kid.

However, how do you know that "having more skills is good under virtually all circumstances" when toddlers are concerned? I have no reason to assume that learning to read at a very young age is harmful (which is why I'm not against it), but I can easily imagine ways that it could be harmful (or beneficial). But making a definitive ruling either way requires knowledge that neither I nor you possess. So I say "go ahead if that's what you want" just because I'd rather not recommend against something unless it is shown to be bad. But you seem to make a big assumption about developmental psychology that you have absolutely no basis to make.

Thats such a misguided way to look at things. There are plenty of dyslexic people who become successful entrepreneurs exactly because they are developing a different perspective on things than everyone else who can read. They learn to compensate. Just like a blind person learns to compensate for the lack of vision.

Sure there are many areas where reading is good, but it's not as simply as you want to present it here. Not by a longshot.

Well, I can't give you a peer-reviewed, n>500, p=0.001 answer, but I can tell you that I've never regretted my mother teaching me to read at age two. Reading has given me a great deal of both pleasure and knowledge throughout my life, and I can't think of a single time I've looked back and said "Gosh, you know, I sure wish Mom had waited three more years to teach me to read, or just left the matter in the hands of the public school system."

Of course, that was thirty-odd years ago, before kindergarten-aged kids were expected to be familiar with English lit back to Chaucer and mathematics up to basic trigonometry. I can see how in the modern environment someone might react negatively to the suggestion that it doesn't hurt kids to know how to read when they're two, because letting on about it could well result in an environment where a kid who's three years old and can't yet read is either developmentally delayed or has bad parents, or of course possibly both.

Edited to add: It doesn't help at all that the author of the article under discussion couches his reasoning in terms of improved educational outcomes -- he's explicitly trying to turn his kids into highly performant overachievers, and that is super creepy. If that's your only available perspective on the matter, I can't blame you at all for being bothered by it, because I actually was taught to read at age two like he's advocating and it bothers me too. He sounds more like an education researcher than like a father, and that's disturbing.

But Mom didn't teach me to read early because she had some kind of n=1 eugenics experiment in mind. She did it because she loved me and thought I'd enjoy being able to read, and she didn't use the rather chilly and vaguely clinical-sounding methods this author describes. As she described it to me not long ago, she'd just read part of a story to me, showing me each word in turn and helping me sound it out and learn its meaning, and offer me as much help as I wanted in figuring the rest out for myself -- which I would, because I wanted to know how the story turned out. Evidently this method worked well enough, and as I said before, I've never regretted it. Make of that what you like, of course.

I always felt as a child that I had so much curiosity and ability to learn but that I never had anyone around me who saw this. I would have loved to have a parent like this.

But there are things you could be learning instead of "how to read" - relationships between things, for example, would probably be more useful. You start with hotter / colder; bigger smaller; and move onto "meat eating" / "plant eating" - look at the big claws, look at where the eyes are.

Yes, but reading is the single skill with the highest payoff, when it comes to learning things that let you learn more things. Why give the kid a fish, if you can teach her how to catch her own?

(Again, as in my other comment, I feel it worthwhile to point out that this isn't a purely theoretical discussion for me: I was myself taught to read at age two, and have never been other than glad of it.)

> but reading is the single skill with the highest payoff, when it comes to learning things that let you learn more things

Not when you're two. When you're two you need to learn that asking questions is okay, how to ask questions, and how people answer questions.

It takes bad parenting to give a kid that age the impression that asking questions could ever not be okay. As long as that mistake isn't made, the rest follows organically.

I don't know if it is harmful or not. But I ask another question: How is reading words different from looking at a tree and saying "tree". Or looking at a bird and saying "bird"?

It's not, but it IS different from looking at a tree and analyzing its bark and leaves, or looking at a bird and wondering why it has feathers instead of fur.

I vaguely remember first encounter with LCD watches when I was probably 10. The same concepts (numbers) seemed strange when presented in LCD font (especially the regularity of 2 and 5). However, adjusting to this form was very quick and after probably less than 24 hours I went from "de-constructing" to pattern recognition through some phase of "pattern acceptance".

What I mean is that identifying the parts of the whole through de-construction is not the only way we recognize things.

Reading the word tree could be described as de-constructing the letters that make up the word 't r e e', re-combining them into a whole, 'tree', then recognising the 'sound' and associating with a concept 'tree' then comprehending it's context to give it meaning 'the tree of life', 'it was like climbing a tree', ' the tree was bending'.

During early years teaching it's apparently fairly trivial to identify the children who are recognizing shapes over the deconstruction technique, there's a test where they are shown lists of words with nonsense words thrown in, for those recognising shapes, when they see 'strom' they cannot help but unknowingly correct it to 'storm', their brain just fixes it for them, it's close enough and the word 'strom' has probably not been encountered, children implementing the deconstruction technique will have less of a problem.

Why teachers care is that it helps them identify children who may have issues identifying letter shapes but can pass other tests by recognising whole words, early diagnosis of dyslexia can have a very positive impact on a child's educational progress.

Interestingly, when you get proficient at reading, you stop deconstructing words. That is, you can do if you want/need to, e.g. to double-check if that weird pattern you see is a real word at all, but it's not generally what you do - instead, most of the reading is image patter-matching. That's why yuor brian will autocrroect "strom" to "storm" when you're reaidng fast.

> Why would I teach my children to read already?

To start the "compound interest" benefits as early as possible?

There are no compound interest benefits to learning to read early. Children who learn to read at 5 and at 7 have indistinguishable reading skills at 11. That's why reading instruction in Finland and Germany begins in grade school, not kindergarten.

I regret I've lost the study (observational, not experimental) on students in North Rhine Westphalia on long term effects of early reading instruction but it showed children who learned to read later doing better at 16 or 17 than the ones who learned to read earlier. I think it was published in an economic of education journal but that's all I remember.

Edit:

The below study shows tiny differences between performance/school readiness of French and German children on entering primary school despite the French system being much more school like and placing a much greater emphasis on reading. Italics in abstract not in original.

French nursery schools and German kindergartens: effects of individual and contextual variables on early learning

Eur J Psychol Educ (2011) 26:199–213 DOI 10.1007/s10212-010-0043-4

The present article investigates the effects of individual and contextual variables on children’s early learning in French nursery schools and German kindergartens. Our study of 552 children at preschools in France (299 children from French nursery schools) and Germany (253 children from German kindergartens) measured skills that facilitate the learning of reading, writing and arithmetic at primary school. We also evaluated educational family practices and parents’ expectations of their children’s pre-school education. In order to take into account the hierarchical structure of our data, multilevel models were used in the analysis, which was carried out using MLwiN software version 2.02 (Rasbash et al.2005). Although French nursery schools emphasise academic learning, we did not find any significant differences in overall performances between the French and German samples. However, significant differences were obtained for some subscale results. In addition, our results indicate that individual and contextual variables have an impact on the differences observed between children from the two countries.

Maybe that's just on average though. My guess is that when you look at high-IQ groups, learning to read early is better.

I am unaware of any country that makes a significant effort to tailor instruction to very high ability students in any systematic way. This certainly doesn't occur during primary school age anywhere in the Anglosphere.

I'm also not bullish on the positive effects of primary school on cognitive skills full stop. Unschooled children are only a year behind their counterparts in public schools on average. That's a really small effect for the difference between more than five hours a day of purposeful instruction versus none whatsoever. The same study does show children in structured homeschool doing one to five grade levels better depending on what's tested so there almost certainly are students who benefit from earlier more advanced reading instruction but the implications for mass schooling are unclear. If we can't even have children in different classes by ability level instead of age group I don't hold out much hope for sane educational policy.

The Impact of Schooling on Academic Achievement: Evidence From Homeschooled and Traditionally Schooled Students

There aren't enough data points to claim it's a universal pattern, but still, there do seem to be a lot of data points that suggest that cramming stuff into a child very early has all evened out by the time they are an adult.

It's easy to forget, but 0-5 is, in terms of these advanced skills like "reading" (as opposed to "understanding what my body feels like"), not even 1/4th of a childhood. There's no way to stick a concrete number on it, but it's probably less than 10%.

We have a lot of evidence that depriving a child of the basics of life can affect them all their life, but I am not sure I've ever seen a study that has ever supported the idea that it is beneficial to accelerate education at the toddler phase. It's like trying to win a marathon by running really fast in the first 300 meters; unless you are going to be able to maintain that pace for the entire rest of the marathon, you probably haven't accomplished much.

Care to back that up with some better stats a sample of 250 kids isn't that accurate.

And anecdotally I learnt to read at 4 and half and buy they time I was 11 I have a reading age several years higher than the adult population average.

"A sample of 250 kids isn't that accurate... And anecdotally..."

A sample of 250 could be wrong but at least it's a study, and so much better than an anecdote.

It's also much better than the original article, which says, as justification for teaching children to read early, "I will wait for the results of empirical studies before insisting on definitive claims, but my guesses are as follows.... Again, I know this is just speculation, but it seems very reasonable to me, and in the absence of better evidence, I feel justified in acting on what seems very reasonable."

So, to sum up: the best evidence we have says this does not work.

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