“Reading readiness” was a concept grounded in the tenets of mental
hygiene and its attendant maturation theories, whose influence upon reading
advice in the 1940s was documented earlier in this chapter. Arnold Gesell’s
(1940) “ages and stages”
approach to marking children’s development
helped to shape the view that children under the age of five or six were not
emotionally or physically mature enough to read, and many should wait until
they were even older (1940, p. 209). Gesell developed “reading readiness”
criteria to judge children’s readiness to read. The criteria included
a “mental age”
of 6–6.5 years, a “relatively mature
personality,”
“normal vision and hearing”
and the “ability
to adjust to the requirements of school routine”
(Gesell, 1940, p. 209).
He also suggested that picture book reading could be used as a diagnostic tool
to further gauge reading readiness for children aged 12 months to six years.
Although Gesell did not advise parents directly, his criteria for reading readiness,
and his use of mother-child story book reading practices as a diagnostic tool
for assessing children’s reading abilities, has translated into many varieties
of “checklists and tips” for mothers on how to get their children
“ready to read” which continue to circulate well into the Twenty-first
Century.
Interestingly, few of these “Gesellian-inspired” checklists had
much to do with getting meaning from print. Indeed, getting ready to begin formal
schooling was equated with getting ready to read. In both the 1950 and 1971
editions of Up the Years from One to Six, published and distributed at no cost
by the Department of National Health and Welfare of Canada, mothers were urged
to build criteria for school readiness into their parenting practices. The criteria
included sound health, security of love and affection, a healthy attitude to
following instructions, the ability to get along with other children, dress
themselves, and be without their mother for several hours a day, and “providing
your child with information about the world by answering his questions and pointing
out similarities and differences”
(Department of National Health and Welfare
of Canada, 1950, p. 114). This list spanned two editions of the Up the Years
manual, twenty years apart, suggesting that the reading readiness paradigm guided
advice for a whole generation of children and changed little even in the face
of the “rapidly changing society”
that motivated many commentators
to offer literacy advice in the first place.