By Herman Lagon
A child struggling with reading is often met with pointed fingers at the school, the teacher or the system. But maybe we need to take a closer look at what happens before that child even gets to school — at home, around the dinner table, beside a parent tuning in to latest news, or quietly flipping through the day’s paper. Long before children meet the alphabet in classrooms, they meet habits — our habits. What they see, they absorb. What we model, they mirror.
If my mother were to recall it — and she does, fondly — I started reading at age three. She was a college professor then, balancing her lesson planning with homemaking, with the same care she prepared our puchero. I, however, remember learning to read and write more vividly at four, sitting by the kitchen table as she taught me how to write and read words and phrases between stirring pots and preparing her lessons. By the time I was five in 1980, I had just been promoted from a visitor into a full-fledged pupil due to my reading level. The rule in school was firm then: You simply cannot proceed to Grade 2 unless you can decently read and write in both English and Filipino. The stakes were high — but so was the support at home.
My father, on the other hand, never taught me reading explicitly. He just lived it. Each morning began with a newspaper in one hand and a pen in the other, marking numbers on ledgers or quietly crafting short stories in Hiligaynon and English. His discipline was subtle, consistent and powerful. He read. He wrote. He listened. So I did, too. Without anyone telling me directly, I grew up believing that literacy was as routine as brushing your teeth. Reading was not a task; it was part of how the house breathed.
This kind of modeling matters. According to the National Early Literacy Panel (2008), children’s language development and eventual reading proficiency are strongly shaped by exposure to oral language and storytelling at home. Having a wall full of books or the best phonics app is not the sole solution. It starts with adults who read and talk to kids like they are worth listening to. Whether it is a bedtime kwento, a headline over milk tea, or a shared laugh in a picture book, these quiet habits shape how kids pay attention, imagine and understand. They are small, but they stick.
According to the 2024 FLEMMS, 18.9 million Filipinos aged 10 to 64 still struggle with functional literacy — not just reading words, but making real sense of them. This includes many high school and even college graduates. So the issue is not just schooling. It is rooted in the environments where children first learn language and logic. The way we build meaning with children is through stories and shared conversations. Functional literacy is the ability to read your world. That skill begins where your world begins — home.
This is not just about reading. A strong home literacy foundation also sharpens numeracy. Reading and purposively playing with kids trains more than just the tongue — it shapes how they see order, patterns, flow, and reasoning. That same kind of thinking helps with numbers later on. My dad’s quiet discipline — writing fiction and balancing ledgers — taught me that language and math both start with clear thinking. The habit of making sense of things — whether sentences, sums or systems — was caught, not taught. And I saw it daily.
Let us be honest: Teachers cannot do this alone. No matter how trained, passionate, inspiring, or creative they are, a teacher’s effort can only do so much if children return each day to homes where reading is not part of the rhythm. An action research training-participant in Barotac Nuevo once shared during a focus group that some Grade 4 learners she had in a public school still struggled with syllables, not because they were slow, but because they had never been read to — ever. Schools are doing their best, especially with the rollout of MATATAG, the Marungko phonics approach, the Catch-up Fridays, the Literacy Remediation Program (LRP), the Bawat Bata Makababasa, and the Every Child A Reader Program (ECARP). But systemic reform is slow. Daily parental modeling is immediate.
I have seen this firsthand with my own daughters. We never had to force reading — it was simply part of the rhythm of how we lived. They saw me regularly writing columns, delivering speeches, reading essays aloud, discussing issues of the day and, yes, overanalyzing stories during movie nights. Like my own parents before me, I never made a ceremony out of literacy. It was just there, always present.
One of my daughters now teaches in the US, grounded in empathy and the kind of communication that makes students feel understood. The other works in medicine, blending science with extraordinary care to a fault. They took different paths, but both were shaped by the same home where words mattered. Both write with depth, speak with purpose, read chess plays with grit, and carry a grounded sense of social justice. (Forgive me — that’s the father in me speaking). None of that came mainly from gadgets. It came from daily, analog love … plus their Ateneo and Taga-West education, of course.
This is not to guilt busy parents. You do not even need perfect English or teaching skills. You just need to be present — reading street signs, sharing how your day went with your child, listening to their stories, or laughing over a bedtime kwento. Kids remember that. They learn to love words when they see us loving them, too.
We cannot fully close the literacy gap in schools without also closing the silence at home. We must ask: Do our children hear more commands than conversations? Do our children spend more time on screens than they do on stories? Are they exposed to more noise than subtleties? Raising readers in this distracted age is not impossible — but it is intentional. We need not be perfect. But we must be present.
So tonight, as the dishes dry and the day winds down, pick up a short story. A magazine. A Bible passage. A coffee table book. A scrabble, Wordle or Word Connect. A funny childhood anecdote. An anime or K-Drama on Netflix with subtitles. Read it. Play with it. Watch it. Talk about it. Then listen. In those moments — small, precious and real — we are not just helping our children learn to read. We are teaching them to make sense of the world, one word at a time.
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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with./WDJ