I know why your kid can't read -- it's you!

[Ashes_Ashes]

@Larry Mudd

“It’s ti… ti…”

Uh…

‘It’s time to party!’ Poor Larry Mudd, we should take you in and get you a CAT scan. There must be a brain tumor pressing on your optic nerve which is effecting your vision.
[sup]Forgive me Cecil, for I have snarked…[/sup]

Actually, I must say fiddlesticks! No psychic link here-- I was sending you a visual. If it’s any consolation, you would have enjoyed it.

C’mon now, featherlou– this is the SDMB. Nobody has trouble spelling masturbation and the hamster/hampster situation is a trick question! But thanks, I’m now headed to dictionary.com to check on dependant/dependent. I’m gonna have to start writing stickies, I swear…

[saoirse]

I don’t see what the problem is here.
She read the t-shirt slogans to him. Parents are supposed to read to their children. It says so on tv.

[Penchan]

Haha it’s kids like this that made my parent’s motto of “do your homework and excel or you will be punished” seem justified in retrospect. I’m grateful to them for pushing me so hard to do well in school.

But now there’s a problem. According to my mother I read too much! She told me to stop wasting money on books that I buy from Half Price Books and save for a house. Ah kids these days. Always hooked on something . :rolleyes:

[Elysian]

@Ashes

‘It’s time to party!’ Poor Larry Mudd, we should take you in and get you a CAT scan. There must be a brain tumor pressing on your optic nerve which is effecting your vision.

Ashes, I hate to tell you this, but you should probably look up affecting/effecting also.

ducks and runs for cover from shrapnel

That’s funny, Penchan, my parents have been telling me from second grade that I read too much. Parents are funny creatures.

[Hokkaido_Brit]

@Mirror Image egamI rorriM

I was out shopping for clothes today, and I saw a similar thing happen. There was a mother and daughter, looking at some slippers. The daughter was about 12, and her mother was reading the slogans on the slippers to her.

I am fairly sure that the kid in the OP simply couldn’t read, for whatever reason - that is the most likely explanation.

But I have been the mother on the other end of this - my kids are half Japanese but look more or less western. This past holiday in England, reading captions and signs in museums etc for my kid drew scornful looks at him and us on a LOT of occasions, and even comments from four or five people over the month, ranging from “That boy can’t READ!” from another similarly aged boy (my son is 8) to “Go and read the label for yourself!” from a shopkeeper when asked by my son what a mineral a specimen on display was, and a few other comments about “Can’t read yet then?”, “You don’t read during the holidays, I see” etc. We didn’t bother explaining to them except to the kid, who was very scornful, so I told him that indeed my boy can’t read English very well, but he can read and write Japanese!

Still, I am sure that types like us make up a vanishingly small percentage of the illiterate kid population…

[Saint_Cad]

@big_dogs

I’d like to say I’m suprised, but…

My wife spent a year or two working as a reading assistant in an elementary school. Kids who had trouble reading would come to her office at a scheduled time a couple times a week.

Every time she suggested to a parent that they needed to spend time at home reading with their child they all said “That’s your job!”

I’ve been a teacher for 8 years and I’ve seen many cases where a parent absolves themselves of their child’s academic or discipline problems alternating between “It’s your responsibility” and “It’s your fault”.