Pressures on parents

I explained in my last post that our son struggled with learning to read. As university educated parents, we did our best to support him. His teacher used to write the words which regularly gave him trouble such as ‘said, through, people’, on little cards and put them in a small tin, to take home for more practice. He was not fond of this, but we kept asking to see the tin and patiently persevered with helping him to decipher the tricky words and to memorise them.

We were typical of most middle class parents - taking a keen interest in our children’s learning and doing all we could to help them. A 2007 survey by the Open University found that a third of middle class parents were so interested in their children’s homework that their offspring never mentioned it at home to reduce their involvement. None of them had any difficulty getting help if they needed it. Among children from poorer homes by contrast, one fifth never got any help with their homework at all.

In the Cambridge Review of Primary Education, Professor Robin Alexander reported in 2009 that conversation in the home and regular reading of bedtime stories affected children’s educational progress more than anything else. Researchers for the Sutton Trust have just reported that, children from the poorest homes are almost a year behind middle class pupils by the time they start school”, but that “good parenting, such as reading to children and having fixed bed times”, is the best way to reduce the gap.

Over the last decade, the UK government has financed several TV campaigns to encourage parents to talk and read to their children, especially fathers to sons. It has also begun regular free distributions of books to pre-school children, and it expects teachers to send books home with their pupils for reading aloud to their parents.

For the 1 in 5 parents, however, who are functionally illiterate, doing all that the government would like them to is much harder than for educated middle-class ones. A 2007 survey by the adult learning organisation Learndirect found that 1 in 10 parents struggled to understand the bedtime stories they read to their children. Almost a quarter admitted to skipping passages they could not read, or inventing words to cover up their problems. Jean Gross, the UK’s newly appointed tsar for language development, has also pointed out that in some deprived areas of the UK, 60-75% of parents do not know how to communicate with their children (TES 12 Feb). The long and unsocial hours which many poorer parents often work, also make it harder for them to be more supportive of their children’s learning.

Would there be so much pressure, on all English-speaking parents, to get children reading-ready, and to help with learning to read once they start school, if learning to read English was not so uniquely difficult? In Finland, which has the simplest writing system in Europe, parents are actively discouraged from teaching their children to read before they start formal schooling at 7. They prefer all beginners to start on the same level.

When learning to read is easy, even children whose preschool experiences were not particularly conducive to learning to read, can do so quickly and without parental help. They can then immediately begin to use reading for independent improvement of their general linguistic skills, as I did with Lithuanian. Growing up in a remote village under Soviet rule, with my mother having to work full-time, I was looked after by my almost deaf Lithuanian grandmother and spent most of my time playing and roaming outdoors, with a few other children who were also waiting to start school at 7. Yet learning to read Lithuanian, once I was at school, took me just a couple of weeks, even though my mother spoke only German.

In English, readiness and parental help with reading are so much more crucial, only because many words are not entirely decodable (‘I read every day, and I read last night’; ‘although tough, plough through’). For children with poor speaking skills and little home support, learning to read such words is extremely difficult.

In addition to helping their children with learning to read, educated parents also tend to assist their children’s reading progress by instilling a love of reading - by being seen to read themselves. A survey by the organisers of the Orange prize for fiction discovered in 2003 that 4 out of 10 British adults never read anything for pleasure. For the children of such parents, it is much harder to keep persevering when they find the going very difficult. I dread to think what happens to children like our son, if born to parents who can’t give their offspring the assistance we gave.