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DuxBellorumUthred OP t1_jdvf08d wrote

In all fairness I will admit I was exaggerating when I said that. That said, my son's neighborhood friend is in the same grade as he is and is in public school and she does struggle with reading to the point where the school required them to get a tutor because she was not meeting their "milestones" for reading.

I also struggled with reading until I was in high school and it just took the right book at the right time for me like it did my son. (For me it was Dean Koontz' Fear Nothing audiobook on a two day drive to New Mexico, for my son it was Peter Brown's The Wild Robot.)

My wife and I are big proponents of not adhering to arbitrary developmental milestones and letting our child develop at their own pace because every child is different and forcing children into tutoring and into learning things when they are not ready does more often than not will instill resentment of something rather than the love of something. I remember this was a problem for me in school.

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TargetMaleficent t1_jdxrs5k wrote

100% agree about not forcing, but you can gently encourage and expose kids to a wide variety of books to see what motivates them. Sounds like this is what you guys did and I'm glad it works out. I think we book lovers sometimes forget that we don't actually love ALL books, on the contrary its really specific authors and genres that are responsible for our motivation. It can be very difficult for kids to find the joy of reading when they are limited to graded readers and other phony school books.

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