How to teach your two-year-old to read
Teaching (very) early reading: Part 1
All children find themselves living in a new world papered with strange hieroglyphics. Most of the time, they must wait to be enrolled in an institution to slowly learn how to read the signs of civilization. According to experts, most children in America should have learned to sound out simple words in 1st grade (six years of age) and should be able to read novel but short sentences in 2nd grade (seven years of age)—standards many schools now don’t reach.
Yet, if a child is instead taught to read by their parents, or an early caregiver, it is quite possible for toddlers to read at the age of two. I know this because my two-year-old son can now read, after just a few months of tutoring (see the video of us below for results). Reading is, of course, a spectrum that begins at D-O-G and hopefully ends at cracking books as complex as Ulysses, so to clarify, by “reading” here what I mean is roughly the first to second grade standard of “the ability to work out simple sentences never seen before.”
Please note: teaching your child to read, and especially to read early, is not for everyone. In fact, it doesn’t make sense for a ton of families’ situations and isn’t the right move for all children. I want to be really clear about that. However, I’m writing this because I believe there is a significant untapped pool of parents who could teach their child to read, and also who would want to, and that this outcome would be best—for their situation, for their relationship with their child, for the child itself—yet these parents don’t do it because none of them even know it’s an option.
While teaching reading is definitely taking on a challenge, it requires less effort than one might think. Because the truth is that a parent and child can radically outperform any school, public or private, in about 10 minutes a day of tutoring, at ages far younger than normally thought possible.
Below is a video showing this process. At the beginning, in January, I’d only previously taught the most common letter sounds to my son, Roman, and we were just putting very simple words together. Yet by video’s end, filmed in April, he’s reading full sentences, and understanding their gestalt. This is despite me, his teacher, starting with zero experience and zero background knowledge (other than, you know, being able to read myself).
Why do I think there are other parents who should consider doing this?
First, let’s take a dryly analytic perspective: tutoring reading is probably one of the most maximally-helpful things you can do as a parent when it comes to cognitive development (another candidate: modeling imaginary play). Educational researchers refer to early-age reading as “a head-start” and consistently find it positively correlated with future educational achievement, and practices like language-centric bedtime routines (the specific place where I first recommend reading practice) are found to causally improve cognitive outcomes. In longitudinal studies, early readers have an advantage compared to later readers in categories like “general information,” and this is true even when accounting for reading ability at the start of the study, or if IQs are initially matched between groups. Positive cognitive effects from reading even show up in twin studies. Reading is not just a skill, it helps create a more mature, creative, and analytic mind.