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The Secret of the Invisible Toolbox A Loving Letter from Your Child’s Future Teacher

Dear New Parent:

Congratulations! Your precious little one is here. There is no feeling in the world more wonderful than holding your tiny newborn for the first time. Your heart expands with warmth and love and protection in a way you never could have imagined until now. As you begin a journey with this miraculous new life you have created that will take both of you far into the future, into places known and unknown, you will do everything in your power to ensure your baby’s path is as full of hope and promise as it can be.

As well-meaning parents, we all want our children to thrive. Regular pediatrician visits, vaccinations, sleep routines, proper nutrition, feeding, bathing, cuddling—we do all of these things because we want what is best for them. But there is one more thing that is essential, and it’s one that is as important to our growing child as all the things we do to take care of our baby’s physical needs. This necessary thing is one that you may already know—or perhaps may have forgotten or haven’t fully understood. As someone who has been in your shoes as a parent and taught children just like yours in elementary school for decades, I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned about this essential thing over the years.

Flash forward five years, and imagine with me what your child will look like on their first day of kindergarten. At this moment that day may seem a long way off, but believe me, it will be here before you know it. Can you see your child in the brand-new school clothes that you’ve bought for this special day, down to the sneakers with laces so white because they too have never been worn? Under a fresh haircut, there may be a big grin or perhaps a look of apprehension. Your child knows it’s a big day, just as you do. On their back is a crisp new backpack, and in one hand a lunchbox filled with favorite things. All of this equipment is recently acquired, full of promise and expectation for the future—and probably decorated with a favorite superhero or three. Who will that be, you wonder? The picture is almost, but not quite, complete. There is more. And here is the secret.

In your little one’s other hand, they carry something else. It’s a toolbox, but it’s invisible. Unseen though it is, it will be carried to school on the first day of kindergarten and every day after that, all through your child’s academic career. Whether or not it contains the most essential tools will have an enormous impact on those years and far into the future.

Every child who comes to school carries this Invisible Toolbox. Some children arrive with their Toolboxes brimming with all the tools they need to be successful. They are the fortunate ones. Some children, however, arrive with Toolboxes that are empty. For them, school will be a struggle.

So what is this mysterious Invisible Toolbox all about? It’s very simple. Children who are read to regularly by their parents from very early on arrive at school on day one with Toolboxes overflowing with the essential skills they need to be successful students. Because here is the simple truth: Reading aloud to your child from birth on is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give.

I’ve taught grades one through five for nearly thirty years and began to understand the Invisible Toolbox during a long stint teaching third grade in a public school in California. Valley Oak was a wonderful public school, the kind of place people move into a neighborhood for just so they can send their children there. I often called it a “private school in a public-school body” because its teachers were so dedicated, creative, and hard-working, and the amazing principal knew each of the over eight hundred children by name. The children felt known and cared for at Valley Oak, and most of them experienced success and thrived. Still, there were some who did not, despite the fact that they too had entered a robust kindergarten program taught by outstanding and experienced teachers and had equally strong teachers and curriculum through the primary years. These students entered third grade still struggling with reading and, consequently, other subjects. What is it that makes the difference? I wondered. Why do some children thrive while others fail, despite the best effort of their teachers in the classroom and often in individualized remediation? It became clear to me that these students did not start school on a level playing field with their successful peers.

It was then I realized that each child arrives on their first day of kindergarten with an Invisible Toolbox. Those who have been introduced to the world of books by being read to show up with a Toolbox overflowing with language, stories, and virtual experiences that provide a foundation for understanding the world of school and learning. They are motivated to learn to read because they already know there is something in it for them. Those who have not been read to also arrive with a Toolbox, but theirs is missing necessary equipment for the challenges ahead. They suffer from a deficit of language, have no idea how stories work, and lack the imaginative experiences that provide a foundation for understanding stories and the wider world they will encounter in school. They also need to be persuaded that there is something in this reading enterprise that is immediately rewarding for them. Because of this absence of what educators call “pre-literacy skills,” learning to read is hard work.

The first day of any primary-grade school year, when the class is called to the rug for a story, the observant teacher can already distinguish the students who have been read to from those who have not. Students who have been read to walk right up and sit down expectantly, often as close to the teacher as possible. They already know that what they are about to hear will be worth their while. Children with little or no experience having been read to tend to hang back and sit on the fringes. They often have trouble listening to and following a story because they have not been trained to, and therefore have little to no expectation that what is to come is worthy of their attention.

As a new parent, understanding the importance of reading aloud to your child is as vital as all the other essential things that you learn in caring for your newborn. This knowledge is critical for our wider culture as well, because things aren’t looking very hopeful on the national front when it comes to our children’s reading scores. According to the 2019 NAEP, the nation’s report card that periodically tests a broad cross-section of fourth and eighth grade students in the United States in both public and private schools, 65 percent of our nation’s fourth graders and 66 percent of our nation’s eighth graders did not score at the proficient level in reading.1 When students do not read proficiently by the end of third grade, they’re four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than their proficiently reading peers.2 These numbers do not bode well for our nation’s future or its workforce.3

Literacy problems have often been understood as primarily the domain of lower socio-economic classes, but statistics—and my own experience in teaching children from all backgrounds—indicate that poverty alone is not the only explanation for this crisis. Technology has had an enormous impact on families and children’s readiness for school. Parents often put smart phones and tablets into the hands of their preschoolers without realizing the harm these addictive devices can cause in a child’s still-developing brain. As a teacher, I can walk into a classroom and guess with great accuracy which children spend a lot of time on screens. It shows.

When I was pregnant with my son, I was given three copies of Goodnight Moon at various baby showers. Toward the end of my pregnancy, I began reading one of them aloud nightly to my growing belly before I dropped off to sleep. I hadn’t thought too deeply about the critical importance of reading aloud before then, but as a graduate student in an educational philosophy class at Princeton Theological Seminary, I’d learned Michael Polanyi’s theory of “tacit knowing”—the idea that we understand more than we can say. The implications of that seemed enormous to me, and perhaps that is why I intuited even then that my baby was receptive at a pre-language level. At any rate, I began reading to him before birth and didn’t stop until right around middle school. I didn’t do it because I was hoping to set him up for an Ivy League school; I read to him because I wanted him to know the joy of books as a window to the world from the very start.

That is what reading from birth is all about. As parents, we all—regardless of where we come from—want the world for our children. We do everything we can to help them develop fully into who they are meant to be so they can have meaningful lives. Reading to them from birth—or even before—is a powerful place to start.

With my love and best wishes,

Your Child’s Future Teacher