The foundation of a child’s education is built long before they ever step into a kindergarten classroom. To solve Utah’s literacy problem, we must empower and educate parents (in all their types) on their indispensable role as their child’s first and most influential teacher.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox recently held a conference in Ogden to address the literacy crisis among children in the state of Utah. This is a bold and important initiative to expand resources, implement early interventions and boost literacy skills. These initiatives should be commended and show an important commitment to our children and future.
However, while state initiatives and classroom interventions are vital, they’re often playing catch-up. When a child enters kindergarten without basic exposure to books, language patterns and other pre-emergent literacy skills, they are starting the race from behind. Research shows that some children have exposure to 30 million or more words by age 3, while others start with exposure to less than 2 million words. The difference can occur when there are limited opportunities to learn throughout the day through conversations, meaningful experiences with humans (not screens) and story time on a parent’s lap to build bonds and brains.
The effort to improve literacy is not only about phonics and basic reading. Literacy is deeply rooted in the relationships between parents and children. When a parent reads with a child, they aren’t just teaching them how to decode words; they are fostering a sense of security and curiosity and a love of learning. These early interactions build neural pathways and loving bonds with family members to create a love of reading, a love of learning and trust with their parents.
How can we support and help parents in their critical role as a child’s first and most important teacher? For the past 18 years, I have directed Weber State University’s Family Literacy Program, a free community resource that focuses specifically on mentoring and teaching parents to connect with their children and learn together every day. With generous support from the Jay Glasmann family, we serve 150 low-income families in Weber and Davis counties each year. Approximately half of our families speak Spanish at home.
Program activities focus on teaching parents the importance of including special time for reading as part of daily routines. Trained family life educators regularly visit with families in their homes to provide one-on-one mentoring, offering bilingual support so both English- and Spanish-speaking homes can benefit. We focus on teaching parents to engage in dialogic or shared reading strategies. This encourages reading a story together in a conversational and fun way. We provide parents with techniques to replace screen time with people time.
The program also connects families to learning in the community with organizations such as libraries and the Treehouse Children’s Museum in Ogden. Through generous support from the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation, families in the program receive an annual membership to learn and bond together at the museum as they “step into a story.”
The WSU Family Literacy Program is shown to be effective in improving family engagement in reading and learning activities, improving healthy guidance and discipline strategies, reducing screen time, and increasing pre-emergent literacy skills among our most needy populations.
We must include parent education as a pillar of our state’s literacy strategy. This means expanding community resources that teach parents how to engage in high-quality literacy activities. It means shifting the conversation from “What is the school doing?” to also asking, “How can we support children and their families at home?”
The literacy problem in Utah is not a failure of our teachers (I am the proud father of two public school teachers in Utah); it’s a call to action for our communities and government to support families. The investment we make in educating parents today will pay dividends for generations. I encourage Gov. Cox and the state Legislature to add families with young children as an important area of intervention to solving the literacy crisis in Utah. Let’s give Utah’s parents the confidence to be that most important teacher in their child’s life. After all, the most essential school a child will ever attend is the one held on their parent’s lap.