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Diana Rene: 0:06

You're listening to The Decluttered Mom podcast, a podcast built specifically for busy moms by a busy mom. I'm your host, Diana Rene, and in 2017 I had my second daughter and it felt like I was literally drowning in my home okay, not literally, but I felt like I couldn't breathe with all of the stuff surrounding me. Over the next 10 months, I got rid of approximately 70% of our household belongings and I have never looked back. I kind of feel like I hacked the mom system and I'm here to share all the tips, tricks and encouragement. Let's listen to today's show. Welcome to this episode of The Decluttered Mom podcast.

Diana Rene: 0:53

Today I have Spencer Russell on, and Spencer is someone that I found on Instagram, I think about a year ago, maybe a little bit longer, and I share this with him on the episode, so this is not new for him to hear. But when I first saw his profile, my first thought was skepticism. I was like I don't know about this and it's because his handle is toddlers can read, and to me, that at the time felt very like just out there, like that's not really a thing, that's not possible. I don't really understand like why would you even want your toddler to read? But I started going through his content. I just found it super, super interesting, and he and I have become friends now over the past year and I think he has a really interesting story of how his business kind of came to life. And also, just, he is a he just has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to literacy and kids and how they best learn to read, and so, even though his handle is toddlers Can Read, he helps parents basically at any age if their kids are struggling to read or if they are just really little and they want to get them off on the right foot for their future education.

Diana Rene: 2:15

So this is actually going to be a two-part episode because we talked for a long time and, as you know, I like to keep these episodes short so that you can listen to them in smaller spurts, and so each episode is going to be roughly 20 to 25 minutes and let's just jump into the first part, all right? So today I'm here with my friend, spencer, and Spencer is someone that I met on Instagram, I want to say, a little over a year ago, and he I was so intrigued by his business because it's something very different than you normally see out there, and so I'm just going to jump right into it, spencer. I really just want you to just share who you are and what your business is and what you do.

Spencer Russel: 3:07

Of course, and thank you. It's been so nice talking with you over the last year or so.

Diana Rene: 3:11

Yeah.

Spencer Russel: 3:11

Getting to know you and your business as well. My big thing is I help parents teach their kids how to read. My business is called Toddlers Can Read and I support parents of all ages, from as young as kids of 18 months to two years, all the way up to parents of kids who are eight, nine, 10, who are in grade school already beginning to read or struggling with reading. If you've got a kid and you want to help them learn how to read, I want to show you that it's much, much easier, more simple, more fun, more engaging than you think, and that, as the parent or caregiver, you can be the best teacher possible for your kid.

Diana Rene: 3:49

I love that, and now you started in the classroom, right.

Spencer Russel: 3:53

That's right.

Diana Rene: 3:54

And were you kindergarten teacher?

Spencer Russel: 3:57

Yep, I taught kindergarten for three years and then I looped up with one of my classes to teach first grade for the next three years.

Diana Rene: 4:03

Okay, and what were some of the things that you noticed while you're in the classroom? That was happening with your students and with reading, either positively or negatively.

Spencer Russel: 4:18

Yeah, I worked at a very, very high need school where a lot of our kindergartners were coming in lacking not just the kind of basic reading, writing, math skills that you might expect at kinder which, yes, there are expectations for kids coming into kinder but also lacking a lot of the social, emotional skills, behavioral things, emotional regulation. There's a lot of gaps and deficits overall. A lot of strengths too, but what I noticed and what my wife noticed too, who is also a former kindergarten teacher, related to reading specifically is that when kids came in with a gap in reading, it impacted a lot of other areas of their day.

Spencer Russel: 5:02

So, the inability to read or struggling with reading or being behind it impacts reading and it also impacts all the other academic subjects that require reading and require kids to be able to kind of see and understand what's on the page. It impacts self-esteem, relationships, how the kid feels about themselves. There's actually research on kids and I found this to be true with my own son in many ways with his development not with reading but with other areas of development, where kids are comparing themselves to other kids really really early on. It's just like a thing that's happening. They can tell who the smart kid is, they can tell what the dumb kid is, they can tell what the fast kid is, who the slow kid is.

Spencer Russel: 5:51

And when it came to reading, my wife and I really wanted to make sure that it wasn't a concern that he ever had. It wasn't something that he, you know, entered kindergarten like many of our students did, not being able to read, and then it starts to bleed over into all these other areas. But that reading would be one less thing that would be a concern for him, and so I kind of danced from the classroom to parenting. But I think the takeaway here was there's lots of gaps. They're all obviously important, but reading is one that I think a lot of folks overlook and don't quite understand just how paramount it is to so many parts of a kid's experience in school.

Diana Rene: 6:22

Yeah, I totally can see that, and you were in the classroom pre-pandemic.

Spencer Russel: 6:29

Correct.

Diana Rene: 6:30

How do you think things have changed since the pandemic, if they have.

Spencer Russel: 6:36

It's an interesting question. My wife taught a little bit during the pandemic. Neither of us has taught after, but I'm obviously in touch and close with a lot of current teachers. I think within the profession of teaching there's been a cultural shift since. I've left the classroom of teachers feeling more and more frustrated and disenfranchised and I think entitled isn't the right word but but I think like starting to realize that they deserve more and kind of better conditions than what they're dealing with. Okay, I think in the general population there's an increasing awareness. So this is non-teachers, just folks who are kind of looking at school systems I think there's a bigger and bigger awareness that there are these academic issues that people didn't quite notice before.

Spencer Russel: 7:40

So, for example, kids in America have struggled to read forever. This is not a new phenomenon. The vast majority of kids in America struggle with reading. But post-pandemic you had a lot of parents who then saw it firsthand at home, who all of a sudden became the primary teacher and were trying to teach their kids skills and realized that they had all these gaps and deficits that they didn't know. And then coming back into school it's been kind of front and center and news and media, all the different gaps and delays that kids have as a result of the pandemic, but really, truly, those gaps and delays have been there the whole time. We're just starting to gain a broader consciousness of just how deep the problem is now.

Diana Rene: 8:28

Yeah, okay, it's really interesting. You say that because my oldest was in kindergarten when COVID first happened and so she came home. She didn't finish the last couple of weeks of kindergarten and then first grade she was doing remote learning, which was a lot. I mean, the school was giving her work, but really it was up to me as the parent to help her navigate that work in first grade. And, spencer, what I learned is that I am not meant to be a teacher. That's what I took away from it.

Diana Rene: 9:01

But I also remember in college I was a reading tutor. That was my job in college. I would go to the local elementary school and I would help first, second, third graders after school with reading. And so I have a couple of teacher friends who I've asked about this because, like you said, I have seen so many things on TikTok and Instagram and just in conversations with other parents that the pandemic kind of like really messed up our kids' education and like nobody knows how to read now and all of that. And I have several teacher friends who told me like yeah, there might be like a small percentage more of kids who are struggling, but like this is an. This has been going on forever Like this. This isn't a new thing.

Spencer Russel: 9:50

Exactly, yeah, exactly. I mean it's. This might be like a really, really crude analogy, but if you think of like obesity in America yeah obesity in America. Yeah Like, let's say that the average American put on like five to 10 pounds during the pandemic.

Diana Rene: 10:12

Yeah.

Spencer Russel: 10:12

I don't, I don't, I don't know if this is true, but like, let's just say, because you're home, you're moving less, gyms are shut down, whatever else you're stressed, the average person put on a couple of pounds during you know a year or two of being locked out. Would it make sense to start kind of obsessing and talking about, and um, you know, just just this, this crazy increase in weight as a result of the pandemic and how now, all of a sudden, americans are obese? Or would you say we've actually had a problem for a really long time and we've just never really had to confront it in the way that we have now. And we're kind of at this cultural moment where we're having to directly address this problem that has been festering for decades. And if you look at the reading scores, like, yes, reading scores have dipped, yes, math scores have dipped in the time since 2020, but very slightly.

Spencer Russel: 11:22

And when you're talking about a dip in a valley, it's not that significant For some kids. It very well may have been For some kids I don't know if this is the case with yours or with others it's like they were perfectly on track and then they had a terrible year or two of remote learning and they got off track. But for most kids, like the kids that I taught, they were already behind, like school was not serving them well in the first place. So then to turn around and say, oh, it's, it's, it's a pandemic that makes them behind, it's like well, when, when, when 67% of fourth graders are reading below grade level already, and now it's like 69%, or something like, is that, is that really the pandemic, or is that just bringing to light a larger issue that we've had?

Diana Rene: 12:07

Okay, wait, did you say pre-pandemic? 60% of fourth graders were not reading at grade level.

Spencer Russel: 12:15

Currently, this is summer 2022, I think it's 2024. I have to check the exact number. Currently, it's 67% of fourth graders are reading below grade level. Wow, okay, and so I'd have to double back and see what that number looked like in 2018.

Diana Rene: 12:30

Mm-hmm.

Spencer Russel: 12:32

But very, very similar.

Diana Rene: 12:34

So yeah, so my oldest is now in fourth grade, the one who was in kindergarten during the pandemic, and I just think about all of her not like reading specific work that she has to be able to read to do you know what I mean? Like it's not like when they're doing actual, like reading groups or something like that, but like even when she's doing her math homework she has to be able to read. And just what you were saying before about how that impacts so many other aspects of their life that would be very difficult if she was struggling with reading to be able to complete all of her other schoolwork.

Spencer Russel: 13:18

Yeah, I was working with a fourth grader last week who she has dys dyslexia. She has her own kind of reading coach at school already, but she's starting to notice, and her and her mom is noticing too, that across subjects, whether reading, science, social studies otherwise she's just can't understand what's going on Otherwise she's just can't understand what's going on?

Spencer Russel: 13:45

She's trying, but she just doesn't get it. And she asked me it's it's, it's, it's, it's heartbreaking, but but but she's asking me she, she, she, she's like, why is it that? Like I know this stuff's not hard, but when I have to, like, read and answer the questions, I just can't figure it out. I was like it's, it's, it's because your brain is spending so much energy trying to figure out what those words in the page say that there's no energy left to figure out what, like what the thing meant.

Spencer Russel: 14:16

Yeah, If if, if, if I read it to you, you'd be fine, you'd understand, like, like, you are a smart girl, but like you haven't learned some of these sound patterns and some of these things. And so it's going to be my job to help your mommy teach you these things so that you don't have to have that that fear and that worry and that anxiety anymore around reading and you can begin to understand the things that you're being asked to understand.

Diana Rene: 14:43

Because if you have that gap, school keeps moving, which is one of the toughest parts of being behind Right, and each year it gets harder and harder. I feel like that ties into decluttering, honestly, just as adults so many adults have a hard time letting go of physical items, and it's not because they're like a bad person or they're a bad mom. They just never learned the skills to be able to do it, which it kind of sounds just like with reading, like it's not that the like you're saying that girl's very smart. She just was having trouble with the actual skill of being able to read.

Spencer Russel: 15:22

Right, it's, it's super, super technical. I think that's a good analogy. It's it's a very technical skill, like there are certain vowel patterns that she needs to know what sound they make in order to read, but it doesn't seem like a specific skill. It seems like it's a bigger thing, like like I'm stupid or or I'm not as smart as this person because I can't answer the question, but it's like. No, like it's. It's it's this very, very minute thing, and once you learn it, the other stuff will click too.

Diana Rene: 15:50

Yeah, oh, and that makes me so sad just to think about, you know, kids thinking that about themselves.

Spencer Russel: 15:58

It is, and I want to draw like a clear distinction because my handle is toddlers can read and we're talking a lot about kind of older kids struggling and yeah, the downsides of this too. I really lean away from this kind of message and these these, these stories publicly, because I don't want parents to feel pressure.

Diana Rene: 16:27

Right.

Spencer Russel: 16:27

And I don't want parents to feel scared or afraid, and I know just how many parents of first, second, third graders there are whose kids are behind and the last thing I want them to hear is like you should be doing more, doing better, or your kids, blah, blah, blah. I want people to feel encouraged and I want people, especially parents of young kids, to teach them because they want to, not because they're, like, scared of some future outcome, totally. But at the same time, like this stuff is real and, um, you know for her to be, you know, 10 years old or whatever. She is wiping away tears trying to figure out why she can't understand basic, basic concepts. Like she deserves better. She deserved better. Like no kid should have to go through that experience yeah, Absolutely Okay.

Diana Rene: 17:19

So knowing that and I know maybe you can't break it down this simply, but can we talk about, as far as a parent of a toddler who you know maybe wasn child, is maybe struggling, like for those two scenarios, what would be the very first step for a parent to take to be able to help their child?

Spencer Russel: 17:53

Very similar in both cases. Okay, for the toddler, the first thing is going to be to teach them the letter sounds. You're picking two or three sounds. There are sounds you can pick that are easier, sounds that are harder. You want to focus, depending on the kid's age, on sounds they can pronounce. That's going to be important for kind of building their confidence. And then you're just playing games with those sounds. You're getting them looking at them over and over and over again so they're able to begin to recognize oh, that A, it says ah, or that S, it says s. It's just games. Find something that your kid likes now Work in the letters. By the end of the week your kid's going to know their first three letter sounds and you're going to move to three more.

Diana Rene: 18:33

Okay.

Spencer Russel: 18:34

Potentially for that kid. As you start to build a good routine, you want to start teaching them how to blend the sounds together, which can be done out loud, where you're showing them two sounds like at, and you're beginning to stretch them together for them At, at, at, so the kid starts to see how the sounds combine together to make words. Or you can write them down and have the kid look at the sounds and say the sounds begin to stretch them together into words. But either way, what we're doing is we're learning some basic letter sounds, then we're starting to stretch together some small words and then the words get progressively bigger and bigger and bigger as the kid's reading improves and those two things together can happen relatively quickly. This is where a lot of folks think of reading as this, this huge thing. You've got to be able to read chapter books and read this and read that. And of course a two or three year old can't do it because it's so complicated. But you know those two steps are not complicated. It can be done really, really, really early. And once kids start to combine those words together, you'll see it's like a light bulb goes off. They realize that they get it, they're doing it and then you can make even more progress moving forward.

Spencer Russel: 19:57

For a first second grader who's struggling, the steps of learning to read are the same, but the difference in approach is you want to start with assessment to figure out exactly what the kid knows and what they don't know quite yet. So if I'm working with a parent of a two or three-year-old, I'm going to assume the kid knows nothing. If the parent's never taught it before, the kid doesn't know it. So I'm just gonna start with some sounds. If I'm working with a seven-year-old who's struggling with reading maybe they're towards the beginning of first grade I want to assess their letter sounds and see okay, out of these 26 basic letter sounds, which do you know, which do you not know yet? Because we don't need to practice the ones you know, we need to practice these seven or eight that you don't know yet.

Spencer Russel: 20:44

Then I'm gonna assess their blending. I'm gonna say, okay, can you blend two sounds? Can you blend three sounds? Can you blend four sounds? And very, very quickly. It takes about five minutes to assess an older kid. If you do it well, you can figure out. Is the biggest gap with single letter sounds, is it with blending or is it with some of the more advanced sounds. So maybe they've got the basic stuff down. But when you put two vowels next to each other they don't know what they say. Or you put the C-H together, they're saying C-H instead of CH. So we begin to assess that later stage. But after we have the assessment we're running through the exact same process we would with a two or three-year-old. We're teaching whatever that thing is in a couple of minutes a day and trying to make it fun and engaging.

Diana Rene: 21:32

Yeah, okay, I love that. So just really going back to the basics, but making sure you understand what they already know and where you can kind of fill in that gap for them.

Spencer Russel: 21:42

That's right.

Diana Rene: 21:43

Yeah, Okay. So I don't know if I've ever told you this or shared this with you, but when I first found your account you probably have heard this from other people before I was very skeptical. Like I read your handle and I was like toddlers. Toddlers can't read Like that's not a thing. And I started watching your content and I didn't even have a toddler at the time. I just found it really interesting. And do you get that a lot?

Spencer Russel: 22:12

I get that a ton. Okay, there's, there's, there's people who read, toddlers can read and they think toddlers don't need to read.

Diana Rene: 22:22

Yeah.

Spencer Russel: 22:23

And it's like, yeah, that's why it's not called toddlers need read, yeah. And then there's people who read toddlers can read and, like you, they're like toddlers can't read, yeah. And it's like, oh well, yeah, yeah, they can, you know. And there's people who read it and they think toddlers should read, and I think everyone kind of has their own impression of it, based on a number of things. I think largely it's based on their own experience learning how to read.

Diana Rene: 22:53

Yeah.

Spencer Russel: 22:53

People whose experience sucked where it was so, so hard. They think, no, like I learned this when I was eight and it was hard for me. How can a two-year-old do it? And that thought makes sense. And then there's other people who think about it through the lens of their kid, and their kid is a toddler and they don't even want to begin to think about this other parenting thing that they could be doing. It's very uncomfortable and they're like you know, no, like it's much easier to say like toddlers can't possibly do it than it is to acknowledge maybe there's this thing that your kid could be doing right now that could be really beneficial for them.

Spencer Russel: 23:31

So you know, I've got a lot of people who, from the name, have been put off. A lot of people who love it too, a lot of people who love it, but a lot of people who've been put off from the name. But when they watch the content, they get it. They get it, it's, it's, it's not it's, it's. It's not about pressure, it's not about force, it's not about anything that your kids should do. I'm big on parent choice, yeah. So if you choose to do this as a parent, I just want you to know like your kid can do it. They really, really can. And if you choose not to do it, like a third to maybe 40% of my audience are non-toddler parents. So whenever it is that you come around, I've got resources to support you and you'll, and you'll see. There are kids in the videos who are not toddlers, who are also learning how to read.

Diana Rene: 24:27

Yeah, yeah. And are there any cons to a toddler learning how to read?

Spencer Russel: 24:37

I'm trying to be diplomatic here, because you can find cons to anything I mean, according to your comment section there's, you know a billion.

Diana Rene: 24:49

but from your professional perspective, I'm curious if there are any, or if those are all self-imposed judgments that you know, as adults, we may make that you know, as adults, we may make.

Spencer Russel: 25:06

No, there's not cons, there's a lot of misunderstanding, there's a lot of misconceptions. I can knock through the top ones, I think pretty, pretty quickly people will say, uh, don't teach your kid to read too young because the brain's not ready. This is people who are kind of misquoting and misrepresenting neuroscience, who don't understand the left occipital temporal cortex and the role that it plays in the brain. This is the area called, kind of nicknamed, the visual word formation area. Okay, and scientists and researchers are still not 100% clear on the role that this structure plays in reading. They just know that it lights up during, during some literacy related processes. And so people will say this particular part of the brain is not fully developed until seven or eight. Therefore, kids can't read until seven or eight. And what we know is like yeah, like your, your prefrontal cortex, which deals with like judgment, isn't fully developed until you're an adult.

Spencer Russel: 26:12

Like that doesn't mean that you can't make judgments as a kid or as a teenager or in college Right, like, like, just because something's not fully developed. My legs were not fully developed until I was like 17. Yeah, I could still walk and run right, like, like, like it's, it's. It's just like a gross perversion of basic neuroscience. There's there's other people who talk about eyes and and and eye tracking, but it's, it's, it's. It's very easy to take these things Like. This part of the brain isn't fully developed until this age. Therefore, kids can't do it.

Spencer Russel: 26:49

Put it in a pretty post with some pastels on social media circulated around.

Spencer Russel: 26:54

And if you're really good about yourself, because it's better to say I'm actually helping my kid by not working with them than is to say I could be harming my kid by not giving them this opportunity.

Spencer Russel: 27:06

The other kind of two major major pieces of pushback or criticism outside of neuroscience, people will look at these Scandinavian countries and they'll look at something like like Finland and they'll say, okay, well, in Finland kids don't start school until seven or eight and the literacy rates in finland are way, way better than it is in the us. So why push something so early when it's clear that waiting longer is more beneficial and more advantageous? And it's, it's. It's this kind of cross-cultural research and analysis that the average person on social media isn't qualified to understand. Which is to say, like when you have a different phonetic system and you're trying to teach a kid to read in Finnish, it is fundamentally different than trying to teach a child to read in English, which is an incredibly complicated language, borrowing a lot of different sounds and patterns from other languages, where the letter to sound correspondence doesn't always make sense.

Spencer Russel: 28:10

But, if you talk to someone who speaks Spanish, for example, they'll say very, very likely, learning to read was pretty easy for me, because Spanish is a pretty easy language to learn how to read. You've got a letter. That letter says a sound. Very predictably, you put those sounds together into words, you've got it. English has lots and lots of different rules, lots of exceptions. It's a very complicated system. When you're in kindergarten, you learn the basic sounds, how to combine them together, how to read, and when you're in first grade, second grade, third grade, you are learning rules, you're learning exceptions, you're learning vowel patterns, you're learning all these complicated things. So to look at a different phonetic system and say they start later, therefore starting later is better, it kind of misses the entire nature of what learning to read is and just on a very, a very like practical level that people miss like a third of those parents are teaching their kids to read before they hit school anyways.

Spencer Russel: 29:10

So, it's not that the work isn't happening, it is. And then we also have a different socioeconomic climate, a different culture, healthcare, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a different system fundamentally. Is this too nerdy?

Diana Rene: 29:29

No, not at all. I find it really interesting and I I like I'm sitting here and I'm like I feel dumb because I did not even consider that, like that English would be a difficult language, and I think maybe it's just because I don't know any other languages and so I just wouldn't. I never thought about that.

Spencer Russel: 29:49

Yeah, english is very difficult. This, this is like a fun example. But I recently revised my third course, which is called reading rules, because, like it's a play on reading. It's awesome and also we're going to go through a lot of rules in this course and it's specifically designed for kids who are either younger and very ahead or kids who are older and very behind. It should hit kids anywhere from really four to 12.

Spencer Russel: 30:21

And I had to do so much reading, so much learning. It was, it was. It was fascinating to understand why and how a lot of things are are are spelled how they are, because I've got to kind of for parents, figure out what are the most important rules you need to teach a kid, and I and I came up with 30 of them. And one of the most important rules you need to teach a kid and I came up with 30 of them. And one of the most fun examples for me was understanding why the word pause P-A-U-S-E is spelled how it is and why the word pause P-A-W-S is spelled how it is, and so this is an example where, out loud, it sounds exactly the same, but do you have like a guess as to why?

Spencer Russel: 31:11

like to pause something would be a very different spelling from like an animal's paws no, I have no guesses yeah, and this is part of why saying you know, in Finland kids don't start until eight and they're fine, like it. Just it just doesn't hold up when you start to think about this. So there's this fun rule that I turn them all into rhymes, and so the rhyme is words in English don't end in I, j, u or V. That's why some words like have or give include one extra E, and so we've got in the word let's do P-A-W-S pause. The root word is paw, so you drop the S and you say okay, let's deal with the word paw. Paw would typically be P-A-U, because A-U says the aw sound.

Diana Rene: 32:13

Yeah.

Spencer Russel: 32:13

But since words in English don't typically end in U, we sub the U out for W. There's many of these switches. If a word ends in AI, we switch it to AY. That's why pay is P-A-Y instead of P-A-I. If word ends in U, like cow C-O-U or paw P-A-U, that U changes to a W and so that's why we have the aw spelling in in paw and then the s just gets added to the end to make a plural. So that's the p-a-w-s.

Spencer Russel: 32:50

Pause, as in to. To pause the tv is a singular, it's it's. It's not like pauses, but it a singular. And that ah happens in the middle of the word. So there's another rule that kind of complements the first one that says in vowel teams the letter U just loves the middle space. At the end of many words a W takes its place in P-A-U-S-E. The U is in the middle of that syllable, it's in the middle of the word. So it is the A-U, p-a-u, and then we have S. But if we left the word there it would look like it was a plural. It would look like it was P-A-U and it was some plural version of it. So we have to add the E at the end, even though the E isn't doing anything functionally in the word, it's indicating to the reader that it is a singular.

Spencer Russel: 33:52

Okay, that's not confusing at all way to say. There's a lot of rules and a lot of complications and you can see why, why kids and why even adults really really struggle with reading.

Spencer Russel: 34:09

But there are ways to kind of break this down, to make it into little rules and rhymes that we can explain to kids, right, you know. But the to kind of wrap up your your last question of people's pushback there's people who think this is something kids learn naturally obviously not, and you can probably see from that example this is not going to be a natural process. And then, and the people who think that it's, it's you know, you're just gonna be forcing them and turning them off from reading and you're going to make them hate it. And it's like nothing's going to make your kid hate reading more than being bad at it.

Spencer Russel: 34:47

As a former bad reader, I can tell you I hated reading. My parents didn't teach me about how to read.

Diana Rene: 34:56

Yeah.

Spencer Russel: 34:56

Had they done it, I probably would have liked reading more, to be perfectly honest with you. So, um, if, if, if. My like call to action for folks is like, if you want to teach your kids to read, do it. It can be a lot of fun and you can really help them out in the longterm. But if you believe any of these kinds of myths that it is going to be too hard, that their brain's not ready, that they're not going to enjoy it, that you know, any of that to me is a self-fulfilling prophecy and I would say just just hold off. Like, if you think your kid's going to hate it, don't do it. If you think you're going to build this like hatred of learning, don't do it, because your attitude and your mindset towards it is probably going to get what you're thinking about.

Spencer Russel: 35:38

You know like you're coming to the lesson and you're going to create the environment where it sucks because you think it's going to suck.

Diana Rene: 35:45

Right, right, and you, as the adult, are the one who kind of dictates how that environment is Like. I know when I watch your content it's not like a two-year-old is sitting at a desk being quiet. It's like fun games that they're excited about and they're having fun doing. And I think that maybe that could be a misconception. People have too is because they think about learning and learning how to read as like kindergarten, where they're like sitting down and in a group, and so I think it could. It probably looks very different than what we may have in our mind.

Spencer Russel: 36:24

Yep, yep.

Diana Rene: 36:25

Yeah. I agree when you're talking about the pause example. I need to find this guy on TikTok and send them to you, because he has a whole series of it's like him acting out two different characters and they're making up the English language characters and they're making up the English language and it just shows how ridiculous the English language is and how so many words have so many different meanings and it's really funny. I'll have to send that to you.

Spencer Russel: 36:54

I've seen it.

Diana Rene: 36:55

Have you.

Spencer Russel: 36:56

His first name is Bobby.

Diana Rene: 36:58

Okay.

Spencer Russel: 36:58

And I can't remember the last. It has an F or a W in it. I think it's Bobby Flynn.

Diana Rene: 37:04

Okay.

Spencer Russel: 37:06

That's my guess.

Diana Rene: 37:07

Yeah, they're funny. It's like it really points out how ridiculous the language can be and I guess now, when you look at it in the way of learning it for the first time and learning how to read, it makes sense why it could be so difficult. Yeah it is.

Spencer Russel: 37:27

And and I think what's what he's done is he's helped people realize that this is, that this is complicated. I think the downside of what he's done is he's made people think well, who am I to be able to have any shot at figuring this out or teaching my kid? You know, it's definitely funny, like if her mom is watching those videos and she comes onto Instagram or TikTok trying to find some advice on how to teach her kid to read, that's what she leaves with she's probably giving up.

Spencer Russel: 38:16

Yeah, like she's like what hope does she possibly have among all of these rules and all these comments talking about how, how tough english is?

Spencer Russel: 38:27

And you know, you didn't know why, why pause first pause was spelled how it was. I didn't know until learning some more of the kind of advanced english rules and systems, but yet we can both read those words. So I think two things can be true at a time. The system can be complicated and it can be complex, and we can also teach our kids enough of it that they can get a solid footing and a solid start and then kind of build onto it from there. Like you and I learned how to read by learning enough phonics, enough words to be able to read them, and then we just kept reading and over time we just kind of learned and intuited new rules and new sounds and new things as we read. So we don't have to know every single technical piece of why it is how it is. We just need to get kids reading so that they can continue reading and continue to build those skills.

Diana Rene: 39:27

Totally and I think it goes back to what we were saying before is that, like everything that we like our perception of basically anything we see online. It comes back to like our lived experiences, right. So, like for me, seeing that video, it was just funny. But I don't have my kids are not behind with reading but if I see a video that's kind of making fun of food allergies, like that's going to affect me more where someone else might think it's funny because my kid has food allergies. We view the world and how we perceive everything we see on social media, which is probably why social media comments are so frustrating. Thanks for hanging out and listening to The Decluttered Mom podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world if you could write a review or share this episode with a friend or your Instagram stories. And if you're on Instagram, be sure to follow me at thedeclutteredmom and send me a DM to say hi. I'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. I hope you'll come back next week and hang out with us again.