Insecurities

Well, mark it down: Celia's first real anxiety about school came tonight, August 25, around 8:40 p.m. I was putting her to bed, and I asked whether anything was bothering her. She had had a few rough moments with Andres and Lucia tonight, and she didn't seem like herself.

Sure enough, something was on her mind.

"I'm stupid," she told me through her favorite blanket, and then tears. "I can't read. Other people can read and I can't read. I'm stupid."

My heart went out to her. What a miserable way to feel. And at only 5 years old!

I consoled her as best I could.

"Celia, honey, you're not stupid," I said. "You're such a smart girl! There are lots of kids who are going into Kindergarten who can't read. You are good at so many things."

It didn't work. She remained resolute.

"I'm stupid. Brother could read when he went to Kindergarten. I'm stupid."

Sadly, there was no arguing that point about her brother. Andres was able to read some books by the time he entered Horace Mann, and my recollection (though foggy) is that he picked it up without too much frustration. We didn't push him to read; he just began showing an interest at some point, and many, many Bob Books later, he was turning letters into words, and words into sentences. Also, it helps to be married to someone with a masters degree in literacy.

Celia has been a different story. As with Andres, we have taken a hands-off approach, though Natalia has been more patient than me. The times when I have pushed Celia to read have not ended well. She knows the alphabet, but she can't yet push one sound against another. Surely it will happen someday. But it hasn't happened yet. All that my efforts had done was to instill in her a fear that the letter patterns would just never make sense. I should not have pushed anything.

And now here she was, in tears, telling me that she was stupid.

I told her all the things that I loved about her, and shared all the things that I thought she was great at, and tried to build her confidence by saying that when Andres was her age, he didn't have half the verbal skills she did. None of it mattered. Even my hugs had no effect. None! My hugs! Those always worked.

So, finally, I asked if she wanted to go downstairs and talk about it. She said yes. From her crib, Lucia yelled her disapproval.

I reported the situation to Natalia. (Celia was either too sad or too embarrassed to say it herself.)

"So, Celia is sad. She feels like she is stupid because she can't read," I said. "And I have told her that it takes kids a long time to learn how to read, and that it's totally ok if you don't know how to read before you go to kindergarten."

I think Natalia was surprised that Celia felt this way, since this had never come up before. But she's a truly fantastic elementary teacher and went to work.

"Celia, learning how to read is hard work! It takes a long time," she said. "I help my students learn how to read all year. And they are in 1st grade, not kindergarten!"

Finally, a bit of a smile.

"Do you want to practice some reading now?" she asked.  Celia nodded, her blanket still scrunched up against her face.

We sat on the couch. Natalia took out a small book of sight words that Andres had made in Kindergarten. Each page had a single word printed on it; Andres had copied each letter with a stamp, and then written out the whole word. Natalia read the word, then asked Celia to identify the letters and repeat the word again.

"To," read Natalia.

"T-O. To!" said Celia.

"Go."

"G-O, go!"

"See."

"S-E-E. See!"

I sat and listened as Celia's confidence was restored over the next 10 minutes. The tears ended and the smile came back. Things were, once again, as they should have been. She went to bed happy.

It took me a bit longer to recover. I want Celia to grow into a kind, resilient, happy, tough, and confident kid. And, on most days, she is all of those things already. It's hard for me to believe that she is not yet 6, especially when I compare her verbal skills (considerable) to those of her brother when he was the same age (less considerable).

But confidence can be such a fragile thing for young girls. For example: the summer before my second year teaching fifth grade, I was told that the girls in my incoming class--all the girls--were convinced that they were no good at math. No good! This seemed crazy to me. I knew many of them, and they seemed like the smartest, most well-adjusted kids in the class. How could they already be convinced en masse that they would fail math? (The reports of their ineptitude were horribly wrong, though it took the balance of the year for me to convince them otherwise.) And back to my own flesh and blood: where was Celia getting the idea that she was stupid?

I don't want Celia to be afraid to do new things. I also don't want her to be afraid to fail. But already, I see small fissures in her confidence, and I worry that these will expand as she gets older and life gets more complicated. Today, she's feeling stupid because she can't read. But she's also had a hard time learning how to ride a bicycle, and seems perfectly happy with her training wheels. I can't tell whether she is more afraid of falling or failing.

Kindergarten should be a remedy for all of this. She'll see that not everybody is reading Harry Potter yet, and that learning to read is a long process. Maybe she'll commiserate with a new friend about how hard it is to learn to ride a bike. And then, poof, in a few months she'll be doing both with no problems. Right? I have nothing to worry about, right?