The Adults at the Base of the Literacy Crisis

We did foster care respite for a short while. For the uninitiated, this is basically extended babysitting for foster kids. Now something you run unto a lot with foster agencies is that they’re faith-based and ours was no exception. It was pretty common that any child entering the foster system, through this agency, that came in with no religious education would get a Southern Baptist Convention version of Christianity from their foster parents. I have my specific opinions on this that are choice, but then I’d drift a little from the point that I promise I’m getting to.
We had one set of kids that got hit with the parochial school hammer pretty hard. Led to an interesting week of mini theological discussions (kids ask weird questions about God and Jesus, if you didn’t know). What was very interesting to me, though, was a conversation with the seven year old in which she said “I don’t want to read books [note: this was a lie, she loved bedtime reading], I just want to read my Bible.”
Now why this was interesting to me was because she didn’t have a Bible with her. She “didn’t want to read books. She only wanted to read her Bible.” But she had not been sent with one. I was also raised Southern Baptist Convention, and I was gifted my Golden Children’d Bible (with illustrations!) at age five. But the time I was this girl’s age, I had graduated to my first Kid’s Devotional Bible. And if I had been away from home for six days like these kids, that Bible would have been in my bag. I might not have read it, but taking it was simply a given. I asked if she wanted me to go dig out my kid’s Bible (something I was absolutely willing to do if she wanted to read it and had simply forgotten hers), and she quickly decided she liked secular books afterall.
Obviously my parents were my first reading influences, and they let me consume whatever I could get my grubby little hands on. But from a community perspective, the Church was right after school in supporting the functional elements of reading. You have to be able to navigate the Bible in order to be a soldier of God and fisher of men, and all that good stuff. And because obviously we weren’t philistines, that extended to other Godly and righteous literature that expanded on the Word. A lot of my early non-academic reading and writing was in Church. The Woodlawn Church Children’s Reading Room was a source of a good quarter of my first picture books.
The Church would then turn on me in this regard in upper elementary and middle school because Harry Potter is witchcraft and dragon’s are symbolism for the devil and the existence of aliens spits in the face of God’s perfect creation in the form of Man, but that is a completely different story. It’s just one of those things where I can look back as a adult and go, “wow, what an interesting early building block on the foundation of my literacy.”
And with the amount I’ve worked in childcare over the years, I’ve seen how few and far between those building blocks can be.
These foster kids we cared for? None of them came with their own books, and a couple of them weren’t read to at night regularly. One of them, a very smart ten year old, was enamored with The Little Prince when I read it to her, so I just sent her with it when I took her back to her primary foster parents. When I mentioned I had gifted her a well-known, totally innocuous, award winning children’s book that’s never even been challenged by a single, ban-happy school board in the US, they looked at me like I had grown seventeen heads. The favorable interpretation was that they were just surprised, but even that points to what I see as a deficit among these caregivers at a larger scale. Obviously, these are foster children, and statistically that is a population of children that will have a lot of educational and developmental gaps. But I saw very little evidence, personally, that literacy was a high priority for their foster parents either. This is not to dog on all foster parents (though there’s a few I’d like some choice words with) because when you’re dealing with kids with trauma and trauma recovery, sometimes something has to give for the sake of creating stability. But that just highlights the broader issue of systemic non-academic literacy support.
In my twenties I was a short-term nanny for a few different families. Two of them had books all through the house and the kids asked to read them and you could actively tell how it encouraged their ability to imagine and reason and think, even at a young age. Another family, older kids, there were no books in the house. And it was nice house. Money wasn’t an issue. Having books around just wasn’t something they prioritized. The kids would come home from school. I’d help them with their homework. They’d do their required fifteen minutes of reading happily, then they’d be off. And they were wonderfully intelligent children. Curious and inquisitive. But their energy was just so much different. They slammed through at math, did okay with grammar, but you could see a distinct difference when it came to verbal skills and softer reasoning abilities.
When I worked in more formal after school care, there was no way to guarantee a dedicated reading space for every kid who wanted to do that as their after school activity. If I was running an activity room and a kid wanted to read instead of doing the activity, I just let them. If a kid would rather read than do origami, I’m not stopping them.
I worked as a substitute teacher for a few years. At the middle school level I often had teachers leaving me a lot of busy work to hand out when the kids were done early with their assignment. This wasn’t because they wanted to assign this work, I would find, but they simply couldn’t seem to encourage their kids to voluntarily read when given free time. Instead they were prone to more disruptive activities that derailed order. The busy work kept them occupied while still teaching. I thought this was the most disappointing until I heard what’s been happening in other school districts. In these schools the teachers aren’t allowed to let kids just read their books if they finish early. In a school that pushes a “bell to bell” approach to teaching, I’m hearing about teachers having to trick school admin into finding ways for kids to engage in non-specific educational activities while still in the classroom. According to teachers and recent students on TikTok, you can’t even read after tests in some schools nowadays.
And now libraries in Iowa are making it impossible for kids to even get access to books. And we wonder (not much) why we feel like literacy is dying.