Your child can read every word on the page correctly and still not understand what they just read. Research puts that at somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of students. That's not rare. That's a real number of families listening right now.
I wanted to bring in someone who sees this up close every single day, so I sat down with Pearl Flanders, the reading specialist at my center and a recent Georgetown University graduate in English. She's been with us about six months, and in that time she's already worked with over a hundred different students — enough to start seeing the patterns most parents never get to see.
Where Pearl's Love of Reading Started
I asked Pearl what pulled her toward English in the first place, since her path wasn't a straight line — she started college as a biology major with a music minor before she let herself follow what she actually loved. We say it all the time on this show: your child doesn't need a perfect parent, they need a present one. And a present parent is one who watches their child closely enough to notice what they're actually drawn to.
For Pearl, that noticing came from her mom. Every single week, her mom took her to the library and had her pick out a stack of books, plus audiobooks for the car. That early spark is exactly what built her relationship with reading before she ever knew it would become her career. And it's completely free — the library is one of the most underused resources parents have. If your child genuinely enjoys reading, you don't need to buy piles of books. Let the library be their second home instead.
What a Struggling Reader Actually Looks Like
I asked Pearl what she notices in the first five minutes with a student who's struggling. Her answer: they're not looking for the pieces that build understanding — who the main characters are, what's actually happening, whether they're indoors or outside, the basic elements of a scene. They skip over exactly the small details that let a reader assemble the bigger picture. Pearl pointed out something I'd never quite put into words after fifteen years of teaching math: reading and math build the same way. Letters and sounds become words, words become sentences, sentences become paragraphs, paragraphs become the whole book — the same way digits combine into an infinite range of numbers. Skip a foundational piece anywhere along that chain, and everything built on top of it gets shakier.
Physically, a struggling reader often looks like a child staring at nothing, or rereading the same lines over and over without it sinking in. But Pearl was careful to draw a line here: everyone has an off day. The real tell isn't one rough afternoon — it's a pattern. Her test: ask your child to reread a sentence or two, then ask what's happening in it. Some kids genuinely need a couple of sentences before the picture comes together, and that's normal. But if they can't tell you what's going on even in the simplest terms, starting from the very first line, that's where Pearl knows there's a real gap.
The Gap Parents Don't See
Here's what surprised me most in this conversation. A child can turn pages fluently, without stumbling over a single word, and still not be comprehending any of it — sometimes leaning on the pictures to guess at what's happening rather than actually processing the text. Pearl said parents miss this constantly, because it's easy to assume reading equals understanding. If you're not stopping to ask what's going on in the story — what a character just did, what's about to happen — you can watch your child “read” for months without ever finding out whether it's actually landing. That's the ten-to-fifteen-percent group Pearl sees again and again: kids who can say every word correctly and still can't tell you what any of it meant.
It Shows Up in Writing Too
Reading struggles don't stay contained to reading. Pearl told me about a student she'd asked to paraphrase a passage, who instead copied it nearly word for word. Pearl walked her through what paraphrasing actually looks like, gave her an example, and asked her to try again — the student changed one word. That's not a writing problem on the surface. It's a comprehension problem underneath it. If a child can't fully process what a sentence means, they can't restate it in their own words, and they can't write a complete, accurate sentence about it either. Pearl's fix is the same one she uses for reading: go back to the foundation, break the text down piece by piece, and ask why it matters before asking what it says.
Three Things to Try Tonight
Pearl gave me three concrete things any parent can do at home, starting tonight, with no special training required.
Ask what's happening in the story. Who are the characters, what's taking place, where does it begin and end. Don't let your child breeze past a page without being asked to account for it.
Go beyond names to relationships. Use who, what, when, where, why, and how — but push past just naming characters into how they're connected. Knowing Sally's name isn't the same as knowing she's Joe's sister, not his mother.
Have them write one complete sentence about what they read. Even something as simple as “Sally went to the store to get grapes” tells you whether the material is actually landing, not just whether the pages got turned.
When Home Isn't Enough
I asked Pearl how a parent knows when it's time to look for more than what they can do at home. Her answer wasn't to panic at the first sign of struggle — kids learn at different paces, and some of this genuinely resolves with time and consistent practice. But if a parent is doing the work — reading together, asking the right questions, staying consistent — and there's still no real movement, that's the signal to loop in the teacher or look for additional support. She pointed to the jump into high school and college as a natural pressure point, when students suddenly need to write full essays and break down much harder texts on their own. Waiting until then to notice a gap that's been there for years makes the climb steeper than it needs to be.
Pearl left me with something I think every worried parent needs to hear: good things take time. Reading is a process, understanding new material is a process, and none of it happens overnight. She wasn't always strong in English herself — she calls herself a late bloomer — and she grew to love the subject anyway. Struggling now doesn't mean struggling forever. Read together at least twenty to thirty minutes a day, keep the screens down, and let the library do what it's always done. If anything in this conversation sounds like your child, that's exactly what a proper look at where they stand is for — not to label them, but to know where to meet them.
Listen Now
You can catch this full episode of Raising Scholars wherever you listen to podcasts:
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Raising Scholars helps parents of elementary school kids build confident, independent learners without nightly battles. New full-length episodes every Tuesday and Sunday Reset episodes every Sunday.
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