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 5 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. (To be continued)/PN
