If your child is behind in reading and the school has told you to give it time, you are being handed the most common advice in early literacy. It is also the advice the evidence supports least.

I got that advice when my daughter scored in the bottom 20 percent on her DIBELS early reading screener. I believed it for a while, because the people saying it were educators and I wasn't. Then I looked at what catching up actually looks like.

What the numbers say about waiting

The recent 2026 NWEA research brief followed more than 400,000 students from kindergarten through third grade. Among children who started kindergarten in the bottom 20 percent in reading, about 1 in 7 reached proficiency by the end of third grade. For children still in the bottom 20 percent at the start of first grade, it was about 1 in 17. For those still there at the end of first grade, about 1 in 40.

The researchers are clear that this doesn't mean a child's future is fixed. But it does mean "she'll catch up" is a bet, and the odds get worse every year nobody acts.

Where the responsibility sits

I recently got some pushback on this thinking from a literacy advocate whom I respect, and she's right about the core of it. Parents are not responsible for teaching their children to read. Schools are. And most parents don't have a skillset that even translates to education. But when they ask the school what they can do, they're often told to wait. To me, that always felt like a system failure, not a parenting one.

So I agree that parents cannot be expected to do the work that the school district is meant to do. But, I also think that looking solely to the school district to improve its practices does not help a 6 year-old who's struggling today.

Responsibility isn't the same as reality

So here's where I land. Parents shouldn't have to help their child learn to read. They should do it anyway.

Not because schools don't matter. Schools should carry most of the load, and the ones using systematic, Science of Reading instruction carry a lot of it. But for a child who's already behind, waiting for a system to fix itself is a luxury. Curriculum changes take years. A child in the bottom 20 percent doesn't have years.

What that child does have is the adult at home. And asking that adult to take 30 tired minutes to teach is probably too much to ask. But 30 minutes is not what I ask of them...

Five minutes is the whole ask

I'm not asking parents to become Science of Reading experts. I'm asking them to use a device that has the Science of Reading built into the routine. I'm asking for five minutes, maybe ten, a few times a week, done consistently. After bath, before bed, whatever sticks. Five minutes four times a week usually does more than an hour of intense work on Saturday.

I genuinely believe that's a small enough ask that almost any parent will say yes to it. So why doesn't it happen more?

The barrier isn't willingness

In my experience, it's rarely that parents won't give five minutes. It's that they don't know what those five minutes should look like. They think reading to their child is enough. And that is lovely, but it isn't the same as practicing the sound skills a struggling reader is actually missing.

That gap is what I ended up building Word Nuts Reading to close. Not to replace what happens at school, but to make the five minutes at home an obvious way to support what happens at school. A parent shouldn't need training to know what to do next.

Both, not either

Schools should teach every child to read. Parents shouldn't have to fill the gap.

But nearly every literacy plan I've read treats the home as a nice-to-have, and I think that's the most expensive blind spot in the field. Five minutes a night, across millions of households, is the largest pool of untapped instructional time in the country. We spend almost nothing making it usable.

I'm biased here. I built something because nobody handed it to me. The bias came after the problem, not before it. But if we equipped parents the way we equip classrooms, I don't think the numbers in that NWEA brief would look the way they do.

Michael Land is a parent, designer, and founder of Word Nuts Reading, a hands-on phonics system designed to make sound practice more visible, tactile, and easier to repeat. Originally designed to help his daughter, it has since grown into a broader tool for parents, tutors, and educators working one-to-one with developing readers.

Word Nuts Reading is launching to the public on Kickstarter this fall.