🔊Talking to Parents (and others) About Reading

How communication and collaboration support parents on the Waldorf literacy journey

I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a parent when I was teaching second grade. She came to me, worried. Her child wasn’t yet reading fluently, and she was hearing from friends and family—some well-meaning, some just opinionated—that Waldorf was “delaying” reading. “I trust what you’re doing,” she said, “but it’s hard when I don’t always know how to explain it to others.”

I could feel the weight of her concern. It’s a heavy thing, to choose an educational path for your child. Every parent wants to feel they’ve made the right choice, that their child is not only safe and happy but also thriving and well-prepared. And when the prevailing narrative about Waldorf education is that we delay reading instruction, we have to be intentional about what we say and how we reassure parents that their kids are doing just fine.

The truth is, we’re not delaying reading. We’re preserving something precious—the child’s ability to take in the world through story, through movement, through imagery, through sound. We’re giving them the full spectrum of human experience before they are tethered primarily to the written word. Because once reading becomes the primary mode of learning, it tends to push out other ways of taking in the world.