How To Help Your Child Improve Reading

Everyone naturally wants to feel successful in what they do. Success is a feeling you get when you know you've moved forward with something. Children are smart. They know when they have or haven't improved. Often, their response to a feeling of failure is avoidance. Adults also.

I've worked with many children who found it very difficult to approach reading at all because of their past failure to improve. Generally, the older the child, the more negative experiences he's had, and the better he is at avoiding having any more of them. Often it's far more acceptable to a child to be naughty than bad at reading. In a way, the naughtiness is a form of success...success in avoiding feeling humiliated.

The avoidance can show up as outright defiant behaviour. A child can be very convincing when he lets you know that he doesn't care a fig about reading. But declarations like this about 'not caring' are never true. He cares very much indeed. The trouble is that he doesn't know why he can't read and may well believe that he'll never be able to do it.

When a child like this experiences some success, behavioural problems start to disappear.

What to do if a child can't or won't read

Not all children who have reading problems avoid reading. A 6-8 year old child may believe he can read because he recognises many of the words and can work out the unknown ones if he tries really hard. He thinks that reading is all about decoding words and has either missed the point that text carries a message, or just can't think about what the text is saying because he's too busy with the words. He can feel success just by getting through the text. An older child will probably be aware that he has 'comprehension' issues but won't know how to fix them and may even believe he has some sort of reading disability. In fact, he just needs to be taught simple comprehension strategies and given easier texts to read.

What to do to improve his reading comprehension

What to do if his books are too difficult

Struggling readers can improve dramatically with the right help. It doesn't have to be a battle. It doesn't have to take up much time. Try out some of the recommendations on this site.