The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
How My 7-Year-Old Learned to Read (Without Me Teaching Him) #40
My oldest son couldn’t read at seven. And me? I was writing a parenting book for a major publisher. Being asked to speak to thousands of parents. Teaching emotional development, brain-based learning, and motivation. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
In this episode, I tells the vulnerable and surprising story of how we stopped trying to teach how to read, and started teaching why to read instead. What happened next wasn’t magic. It was science, patience, and a little bit of kiwi bird trivia.
Along the way, I share:
- Why panic over “late readers” is often just parental shark music
- The real reason traditional reading instruction fails so many kids
- What it looked like to let go of benchmarks and trust the process
- How a graphic novel cracked everything open
- And why motivation, not instruction, is the foundation of literacy
If you’ve ever worried your child is falling behind… this episode is a deep breath. Not because everything resolves perfectly. But because it reminds you what matters most.
“I don’t think we have a how problem in education. I think we have a why problem.”
🎧 Listen now for the story, the science, and the shift that changed everything.
My seven-year-old couldn't read. I had a million people following me for parenting advice. I was being asked to speak to audiences all over the world. I had just finished writing a parenting book for a major publisher and my seven-year-old couldn't read. Was there something wrong with him? Was there something wrong with me? It sure didn't seem like it was him. He displayed intelligence in some areas, well beyond what could be expected of a typical first grader, but yet he could not read at all.
Jon:I started to hear the shark music. For those who haven't heard me talk about parenting, shark music it's the idea that parents often unnecessarily panic when they encounter small but no less triggering, innocuous signs of struggle. We all know the iconic soundtrack from the movie Jaws, the haunting orchestral dun-dun that always signals the arrival of the monstrous great white shark. The truth is, the movie would actually be very unscary without the music. While the eventual appearance of the shark was peak cinematic achievement back in 1975, you're almost an hour and a half into the movie before you even see it. The fear comes from one's own imagination, triggered by that music. An underwater POV looking up at the first unsuspecting teenage victim, the flash of a fin, some barrels surfacing and being tugged along the water. None of these are scary on their own, but the music makes them all terrifying, terrifying. By the first time the shark actually physically appears, we, the audience, are already terrified of it. It happens an hour and 21 minutes in, when our protagonist finally sees the beast and says the iconic line you're, by the way, it's not we're, but you're gonna need a bigger boat. That scene, interestingly, is also the first time that the shark appears without warning, relying on a jump scare rather than the suspense and anticipation that comes from the music. The result of that masterful skip filmmaking is that when audiences watch Jaws, they are, in effect, not afraid of the shark at all. They're afraid of the idea of the shark epitomized by the shark music.
Jon:For me, the shark music around reading went something like this If my child is struggling to read at seven, they will never learn how to read and wind up jobless, with no meaningful relationships, living at home in my basement at 40 or, worse, in prison. Of course, most of us don't think in such clear terms in the moment. It's more abstract. Just oh no, this is really bad, really really bad, but nevertheless. When my seven-year-old could barely read C-spot run, the shark music was there, the soundtrack of my anxiety. The only thing that kept me from going full-on freak-out mode was the guiding principle that I highlighted in last week's post that, according to the best available research, kids will learn to do all of the basic functions of academics—reading, writing, basic math, etc—when they have both the desire and the development to do so. To understand why two incredibly involved and engaged parents with advanced degrees had allowed their oldest son to make it to seven before he could read, you need to know the context.
Jon:When my son was almost five, we, like many eager parents planning on homeschooling, began to implement a popular reading curriculum. The curriculum was phonics-based, which we had determined, through more research than I would like to admit, was definitely the way to go and it was highly regarded. My son, for his part, absolutely hated it. For his part, absolutely hated it. Here is this voracious and curious learner who could do basic math and memorized every dinosaur name with shocking pronunciation and accuracy by two years old, but who absolutely hated sitting down to read. I started to think that he, like me, had ADHD or a reading-based learning disability. It took the better part of an hour to do a simple one-page worksheet and would often just result in abject failure or interminable power struggles. We persevered.
Jon:Weeks turned into months as we would take turns going to the library with him to try and turn abstract, random symbols into meaning. Then, one day, we had all had enough. We had all had enough. We stopped trying to teach him how to read. At this point we felt like giving up entirely, and to you it may sound like we did, but what really happened was that we decided to think long term. Ignoring the shark music, we said to one another our kid is plenty bright. One day he will learn how to read. We just have to give him a reason to. And so we changed the goal. From that point on, instead of teaching him how to read, we decided to teach him why to read. The next day, c-spot Run books were put away and we launched into chapter books. Day C-Spot run books were put away and we launched into chapter books. Charlotte's Web, the Hobbit, harry Potter.
Jon:I read for what felt like an eternity, out loud, each and every day, and it still wasn't enough for him. He downloaded audiobooks and listened to them independently. He began to span out into books that I hadn't even read yet. He fell in love with stories. Then he started to write his own. There were no words on a page, but a hand drawn picture or two. In some cases he would record his own audio. We were doing it. I thought it had worked.
Jon:Our six and a half year old loved books, but then he turned seven and he still had no desire to read. The shark music came back in full force. If this new, unconventional way to teach reading was working, where were the results? I will not downplay how much I doubted our approach at that point, but in spite of all of that, there was one single glimmer of hope. Every night, lying in bed, he would read non-fiction Smithsonian science books for kids. I put read in italics here because, as far as we can tell, all he did was look through the pictures. We were pretty sure that the only reason that he did it was to avoid going to sleep. He didn't like the idea of falling asleep alone in a dark room, and looking at the books helped him acclimate before actually trying to sleep.
Jon:As a parent, you're often trying to help your kids develop numerous skills at once. To be honest, the books for us were not really about reading at all. They were about having an established bedtime routine that didn't involve him coming out 25 times a night. Yet every night when the lights were out, he would ask for his headlamp and whichever book he was in the mood for, and I thought to myself it can't hurt, right?
Jon:Then one day a kiwi bird came up in conversation and I was blown away. Birds don't rely on a sense of smell. They don't even have noses, they have beaks. I said Kiwis have noses, they have terrible eyesight and they're nocturnal, so they have to rely on a sense of smell to find food. I don't think kiwis are nocturnal, though are they? Yes, kiwis are nocturnal, so they have to rely on a sense of smell to find food. I don't think kiwis are nocturnal, though, are they? Yes, kiwis are nocturnal, they're like bats or owls, but they don't rely on sonar or really big eyes. They smell their way around. How do you even know that? What did you see that on Wild Kratts it's important to point out at this point in the conversation. There was nothing out of the ordinary.
Jon:My son has an incredible memory for animal facts and he regularly watched educational shows on PBS, like Wild Kratts. That might contain information about kiwis being nocturnal or hunting by scent, but what he said next totally shocked me. No, I read it in All About Birds. I looked at him in stunned silence, I'll show you. He said, interpreting my silence as skepticism, and he ran upstairs to get his book Sure enough, in black and white. Kiwis have nostrils. They use it to sniff out insects and earthworms.
Jon:For the next week or two I felt totally different. Handing him his nightly Smithsonian text, I started letting him stay up later, believing that he was doing invaluable reading practice. He still showed absolutely no interest in reading during the day, but before bed he would always crack open a book and do his thing. Then, one night, a month or two later, I asked him which book he wanted. Then, one night a month or two later, I asked him which book he wanted. By that point he had requested every book in the set at least a dozen times, and some far more than that. He responded with None of them. I'm done with them, okay, I replied. Do you want to try a chapter book? Nope, it's fine, I'll just go to sleep, I'm tired. The next night, the same thing, and the next For weeks I started to hear the music again. I slowly began to realize that he had read barely any of the books.
Jon:The Kiwi experience was unique. He had developed a particular fascination with the bird, and it had given him the motivation to painstakingly sound out most of the words in the three or four sentences about kiwis and then make educated guesses about the rest of them. The majority of the time he was, for the most part, still just looking at pictures. I even started to doubt the whole kiwi breakthrough. Was I really sure that my wife or I hadn't read that to him without realizing it? His reading abilities seemed to improve, but how much of that was just age and brain development and not actual practice. We stayed the course, but I was, to say the least, deeply concerned. Then finally came what we were waiting, wishing and hoping for.
Jon:My son picked up a book that had been gifted to him by his older nephew, a book that I had been trying to encourage him to read for months Dogman. For those unfamiliar, dogman is a graphic novel written by Dave Pilkey, the author of Captain Underpants. What began as a fun Captain Underpants spinoff became a series to rival the original, spawning even more spinoffs and a blockbuster movie. The first night my son read Dog man. It didn't seem like he liked it. As a voracious fiction reader myself. I assured him that almost all chapter books take some time to get into. The next night he asked for it again, and the next and then the next.
Jon:About a week later I came downstairs from putting him to bed to find Dogman, the book that I thought he was reading upstairs, still sitting on the couch. Confused, I brought it to him. No, I don't need that. I finished it. I'm reading the next one. I looked down at the book. In my hand it was well over 200 pages long. Granted, some of those pages only had a handful of words on them, but still Okay, I replied.
Jon:Three days later he finished book two on Friday, not at night, but around lunchtime. He had started reading during the day For pleasure. He finished book three in the car on the way to church on Sunday and complained that he hadn't brought book four with him. Within two months he had read the entire series, including the spinoffs, most more than once. Nineteen books in all, thousands and thousands of pages. He moved on to the Bad Guy series, another graphic novel with far more words per page, and devoured those too. Today, three days after he turned nine, he's almost through book three of Narnia.
Jon:Books that because they were written in British English and are now more than 70 years old. My wife and I often trip up when we're reading them aloud. Looking back at the five-year experiment, it's inescapable that it worked. Interestingly, I'm still not convinced that he doesn't have a reading disability. Even though he's now reading above grade level which, by the way, I put absolutely zero stock in grade level assessment anymore he still struggles with certain reading skills that even his five-year-old brother doesn't seem to. For his privacy, I won't go into the details, but one thing I can say without a doubt is that, as long as no one kills it, this boy will spend the rest of his life loving to read. And what we love, we do, and what we do we get better at her out. Which brings me full circle.
Jon:I have alluded thus far to the fact that I struggled to read. That is a massive understatement. My reading issues were so extensive that I was given an IEP and medicated While my friends learned Spanish and French. 7th through 10th grade, I sat in a room with a handful of other students with reading disabilities, trying to learn how to spell the days of the week consistently. After school, while my friends played video games, I would walk downtown to the library and meet an expensive reading specialist who would give me extra practice and help me with homework. My mom, a resourceful woman that she is, got me almost all of the books that I needed to read, including some of my textbooks on audio that kept me above water, but reading for pleasure seemed totally out of reach. Without my parents' resources, I likely would not have succeeded at all. I remember one day being told by an encouraging and exasperated teacher that's okay, not every job requires a lot of reading and writing. You can just do something else and still have a great life. It was not until I was a senior in high school that that changed. I had a teacher, fred Schenk, who finally stopped trying to teach me how to read and instead decided to teach me why to read by the time I graduated college. Four years later, I did so as one of the best written communicators in my class and got a job writing position statements for a Fortune 100 company. Five years later, I graduated from an extremely reading and writing intensive master's program with honors. In 2025, I published my first book.
Jon:Why do I say all of this? To pull what I've been trying to say in this whole back to school series into focus. Here it is in a nutshell. I don't think we have a how problem in education. I think we have a why problem. We I think we have a why problem we have spent so long put so many of our resources in trying to teach kids how to read and do math and make friends and hit a baseball and play the violin that we have neglected to teach them why those things will make their life worth living. We need to take seriously when our kids say why am I ever going to need to know this? Because how we answer that question probably matters more than how we answer any of the functional, mechanical how questions.
Jon:And so I turn it back to you parents. Look at the skills that you're hoping to teach your child this year. Look at the goals that you have for them, not just today but for their life. Look at where you're putting your invaluable resources and ask yourself one question why? The Whole Parent Substack podcast and social media are entirely funded by giant corporate interest groups, political lobbying organizations and venture capital money? Just kidding, that's the other people. Like public radio and TV, my work is entirely funded by you, the people learning from and loving it. I would and usually do try and make all of this for free. But if you wanted to say thank you and keep the lights on and keep the articles coming, the best way to do that is to subscribe for a few dollars a month. Thank you.
