Why So Many Children Struggle with Reading

 

It's Often the Teaching, Not the Child

In 2010, my mentor, Dr. Richard Selznick, shared a profound insight that has stuck with me ever since: most children on the left side of the bell curve aren't truly "disabled" in the clinical sense. Instead, they are often "teaching disabled" or "curriculum disabled." These kids thrive when given structured, explicit instruction with ample practice and immediate feedback. True dyslexia—where a child struggles profoundly even with the best teaching—is far rarer.

 

Yet, we know that a significant portion of children do find learning to read challenging. Sue Lloyd, the retired infant teacher and co-author of Jolly Phonics—a highly effective synthetic phonics program—has observed this firsthand. On average, about a quarter of children find learning to read difficult. Importantly, she emphasizes that this isn't a sign of low intelligence: "There is a tendency to think that these children are not very bright but this could not be further from the truth. I have known many highly intelligent children who have had problems with learning to read and vice versa."

Sue Lloyd has dedicated her retirement to training teachers in Jolly Phonics across 29 countries, promoting pure, clean phoneme pronunciation without added "uh" sounds (known as schwa). Even with this gold-standard approach, she acknowledges that roughly 25% of children struggle. This raises a critical question: if excellent, explicit phonics instruction still leaves a quarter of kids behind, what causes the difficulty for those who persist in struggling?

The Critical Role of Initial Instruction

Over a century ago, in his works around 1913, educational psychologist Edward Thorndike stressed the importance of correct foundational skills in learning. If these basics—such as accurate letter-sound correspondences—are not taught properly from the start, confusion sets in. Many resilient children eventually figure it out on their own, but a significant portion (around 20%) become predisposed to disengaging or "shutting down" when faced with ongoing confusion.

This concept is powerfully illustrated by Charlie Munger's analogy from behavioral psychology: "The human mind works a lot like the human egg. When one sperm gets into a human egg, there's an automatic shut-off device that bars any other sperm from entering." In learning terms, once a child internalizes a wrong concept—like a distorted letter sound—it creates a cognitive barrier. Correct information struggles to penetrate later, making remediation much harder.

French physiologist Claude Bernard captured this over 150 years ago: "It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning."

Early Contamination:

The Hidden Danger of Baby TV and YouTube

One major source of this "contamination" today is early exposure to misleading media. For years, I've highlighted how programs like Baby TV's Charlie and the Alphabet teach distorted letter sounds, often adding extraneous "uh" sounds (e.g., "buh" instead of pure /b/). This popular series, produced in the UK and available worldwide, has amassed tens of millions of views across platforms, reaching countless preschoolers before formal schooling begins.

Many kindergartens teach distorted letter sounds too. Here is a confession of a kindergarten teacher. LINK

When children enter school with these muddled foundations, even the best phonics programs face an uphill battle. The wrong sounds are already "locked in," triggering that shut-off mechanism Munger describes. Teachers then spend valuable time unteaching bad habits before real progress can occur. What Can We Do?

The solution lies in prevention and precision:

Prioritize pure sounds from the very beginning: Programs like Jolly Phonics model this perfectly—explicit, structured, and free of distortions.

Limit early screen exposure to phonics content: Choose resources carefully, avoiding those that add unnecessary sounds.

Advocate for evidence-based instruction: Structured literacy with explicit phonics benefits all children, especially those at risk of falling behind.

 

Most reading struggles aren't inevitable or due to innate deficits in the child. Often, they're the result of early confusion from poor initial input. By getting the foundations right—clean, accurate, and explicit—we can prevent many children from ever entering that zone of disengagement.

Let's commit to teaching reading the way it should be taught: clearly, systematically, and without contamination from the start.