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Following up on my vent post about parents pushing early reading too hard, I wanted to share some excerpts from an article by Susan R. Johnson, a California-based behavioral and development pediatrician for two decades:

Credit: www.Book-Clipart.come

Now if young children especially 4, 5 and 6 years of age are pushed to read or spell, they can only do this activity by using their right brain since the left brain and bilateral integration of their cerebral hemispheres have not fully developed. These childen will try to read all words by sight memory. They will look at the first and last letters of a word and make a guess. A word like stop could be read as stamp, stump, or step. The right brain is working so hard trying to visually figure out the shape of each word, both large and small, that it is no longer available for creating internal pictures of the words.

These children still may read fluently, but they won’t be able to sound out words, spell or have lasting comprehension. The right brain reading pathway becomes over-worked and the children will end up being just sight readers with poor spelling and poor comprehension. Later on, these children often get labelled as having non-verbal learning disabilites since they have bright minds but aren’t performing in reading, spelling, and also math (especially word problems that rely on children’s internal picture-making capacities to solve the problem). (Read more)

Seriously, go read more. It’s worth it if this topic is important to your family.

Pamela Price is an award-winning blogger, writer, editor, and homeschooler in San Antonio, Texas. She learned to read in 1st grade and is still addicted to it. Pamela can be found on Twitter at @redwhiteandgrew.