I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old

Summary

Over a year has passed since I began teaching my toddler—then two years old—how to read (a process chronicled here).Now, I’m prepared to answer a burning scientific question that has kept absolutely zero researchers up at night: Can a three-year-old read The Hobbit?Turns out: yeah, pretty much. Here’s Roman reading from Chapter 1:In a hole, in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry bare, sandy, hole, with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.Of course, there are still plenty of words he can’t read! While he could handle a lot of The Hobbit, I haven’t let him read the whole book himself (there’s too much violence, and the small font size, confusing names, and enough unknown words would likely wear him down). But for the class of books that he has any business reading alone, like early readers and chapter books, he can do so. He reads by himself for pleasure every day now, quickly and silently plowing through his growing library, and his decoding abilities have met the limits of his comprehension.As you can tell, I’m quite proud of how well he’s done, to the degree I risk coming across as supercilious about the whole thing (now there’s a word he probably can’t read). A few months ago, I gave him the SDQA test, a simple way of determining reading level, and he got all the 3rd-grade-level words correct (so somewhere around eight or nine-year-olds).Estimating reading level isn’t very meaningful from a practical perspective, however. Goodhart’s law of measures becoming targets has made vicious work of education. For example, in a study wherein researchers had college students read the first few paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, only 5% of English majors could passably describe what was going on.Instead, I think the only literacy milestone worth caring about is whether a child reads for pleasure, because…In the Adolescent Brain a...