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 Child a Reader Program IECARP). 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 U.S., 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 in 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./PN
