The Why Problem: How a Kiwi changed my life...

Is intrinsic motivation really enough for our kids to overcome the most challenging obstacles?

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My 7-year-old couldn’t read.

I had a million people following me for parenting advice; I was being asked to speak to audiences all over the world; I had just finished writing a parenting book for a major publisher… and my 7-year-old couldn’t read.

Was there something wrong with him? Was there something wrong with ME??

It sure didn’t seem like it was him. He displayed intelligence in some areas well beyond what could be expected of a typical first grader… but yet, he could NOT read.

I started to hear the shark music.

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Shark Music

For those who haven’t heard me talk about parenting Shark Music, it is the idea that parents often unnecessarily panic when they encounter small (but no-less triggering) innocuous signs of struggle.

We all know the iconic soundtrack from the movie Jaws– the haunting orchestral “dunnnn–dun” that always signals the arrival of the monstrous great white shark.

The truth is, the movie would actually be very un-scary without the music. While the eventual appearance of the shark was peak cinematic achievement back in 1975, you’re almost an hour and a half into the movie before you even see it. The fear comes from one’s own imagination, triggered by that music. An underwater POV, looking up at the first unsuspecting teenaged victim; the flash of a fin; some barrels surfacing and being tugged along the water. None of these are scary on their own… but the music makes them all terrifying.

By the first time the shark actually physically appears, we the audience are already terrified of it. It happens an hour and twenty one minutes in, when our protagonist finally sees the beast and says the iconic line, “You’re (not we’re) gonna need a bigger boat.” That scene, interestingly, is also the first time the shark appears without warning, relying on a jump scare rather than the suspense and anticipation of the music.

The result of the masterful filmmaking is that when audiences watch Jaws they are, in effect, not afraid of the shark at all. They are afraid of the idea of the shark, epitomized by the shark music.

For me, the shark music around reading went something like this:

If my child is struggling to read at 7, they will never learn how to read and wind up jobless with no meaningful relationships, living at home in my basement at 40 or worse, in prison! (dunnnnnn—dun)

Of course most of us don’t think in such clear terms in the moment. It’s more abstract… “Oh no… this is bad… really bad.”

But nevertheless, when my 7-year-old could barely read “see spot run” the Shark Music was there… the soundtrack of my anxiety.

The only thing that kept me from going into full on freak out mode was the guiding principle that I highlighted in last week’s post; that according to the best available research, kids will learn to do all the basic functions of academics (reading, writing, basic math, etc) when they have both the desire and development to do so.

How we got here…

To understand why two incredibly involved and engaged parents with advance degrees had allowed their oldest son to make it to 7 before he could read you need the context.

When my son was almost five we, like many eager parents planning on homeschooling, began trying to implement a popular reading curriculum. The curriculum was phonics-based (which we had determined through more research than I would like to admit, was definitely the way to go) and highly regarded.

My son absolutely hated it.

Here is this veracious and curious learner who could do basic math and had memorized every dinosaur name (with shocking pronunciation and accuracy) by two years old who absolutely HATED sitting down to read.

I started to think he (like me) had ADHD or a reading-based learning disability. It took the better part of an hour to do a simple one page worksheet and would often just result in abject failure or interminable power struggles.

We persevered.

Weeks stretched into months as we would take turns going to the library with him to try and turn abstract random symbols into meaning…

And then, one day, we all had enough.

We stopped trying to teach him how to read.

Changing the Goal

At this point, we felt like giving up entirely and to you it may sound like we did.

What really happened was we decided to think longterm.

Ignoring the shark music we said to one another, “Our kid is plenty bright. One day, he will learn how to read. We just have to give him a reason to.”

And so we changed the goal.

From that point on, instead of teaching him how to read, we decided to teach him why to read.

The next day the “See spot run” books were put away and we launched into chapter books. Charolette’s Web, the Hobbit, Harry Potter. I read for what felt like an eternity out-loud, each and every day, and it still wasn’t enough. He downloaded audiobooks and listened to them independently. He began to span out into books I hadn’t read yet.

He fell in love with stories.

Then, he started to write his own. There were no words on the page but hand drawn pictures or, in some cases, his own recorded audio.

We were doing it, I thought. It had worked! Our six and a half year old LOVED books…

But then he turned 7 and he still had no desire to read.

The shark music came back in full force. If this new unconventional way to teach reading was working, where were the results?

I will not downplay how much I doubted our approach at that point.

But in spite of all of that, there was one single glimmer of hope.

Every night, lying in bed, he would read non-fiction Smithsonian science books for kids. I put read in italics because, as far as we could tell, all he did was look through the pictures.

We were pretty sure the only reason he did it was to avoid going to sleep. He didn’t like the idea of falling asleep alone in a dark room and looking at the books helped him acclimate before actually trying to sleep.

As a parent, you are often trying to help your child develop numerous skills at once. To be honest, the books for us were not really about reading at all. They were about having an established bedtime routine that didn’t involve him coming out 25 times a night.

Yet every night, when lights went out, he would ask for his headlamp and whichever book he was in the mood for and I thought to myself “Can’t hurt right?”

Then, one day, a kiwi bird came up in conversation and we were blown away.

The Day Everything Changed… maybe?

“Bird’s don’t rely on their sense of smell. They don’t even have noses. They have beaks.” I said.

“Kiwis have noses. They have terrible eyesight and they’re nocturnal so they have to rely on their sense of smell to find food,” he replied.

“I don’t think Kiwi’s are nocturnal though are they?”

“Yes. They’re nocturnal. Like bats and owls, but they don’t rely on sonar or really big eyes. They smell their way around.”

“How do you know that, did you see it on Wildkratts?”

It’s important to point out that at this point in the conversation, nothing was out of the ordinary. My son has an incredible memory for animal facts and he regularly watched educational shows on PBS like Wildkratts that might contain information about kiwis being nocturnal or hunting by scent. But what he said next shocked me.

“No. I read it in ‘All About Birds’”

I looked at him in stunned silence. “I’ll show you,” he said, interpreting my silence as skepticism, and ran up to his room to get the book.

Sure enough, in black and white, Kiwis have nostrils they use to sniff out insects and earthworms.

For the next week or two I felt totally differently handing him his nightly Smithsonian text.

I started letting him stay up much later believing that he was doing invaluable reading practice. He still showed absolutely no interest in reading during the day but just before bed he would crack open a book and do his thing.

Then, one night a month or two later, I asked him which book he wanted.

By that point he had requested every book in the set at least a dozen times and some far more than that. He responded with, “None of them. I’m done with them.”

“Okay…” I replied. “Do you want to try a chapter book?”

“Nope. It’s fine. I’ll just go to sleep. I’m tired.”

The next night, the same thing. And the next. For weeks.

I started to hear the music again.

I slowly began to realize he had read barely any of the books.

The kiwi experience was unique. He had developed a particular fascination with the bird and it had given him the motivation to painstakingly sound out most of the words in the three or four sentences about Kiwis and make educated guesses at the rest of them. The majority of the time he was, for the most part, still just looking at pictures. I even started to doubt the whole kiwi breakthrough.

Was I really sure my wife or I hadn’t read that to him without realizing it? His reading abilities had seemed to improve some but how much of that was just age and brain-development and not actual practice?

We stayed the course but I was, to say the least, still deeply concerned.

The Levee Breaks

Then, finally, came what we were waiting, wishing, and hoping for.

My son picked up a book that had been gifted to him by his older nephew… a book I had been encouraging him to try for months.

Dog Man.

For those unfamiliar, Dog Man is a graphic novel written by Dav Pilkey (the author of Captain Underpants). What began as a fun Captain Underpants spinoff has become a series to rival the original, spawning even more spin off series and a blockbuster movie.

The first night my son read Dog Man it didn’t seem like he liked it. As a veracious fiction reader myself I assured him that almost all chapter books take time to “get into.” The next night he asked for it again. And the next. And the next.

About a week later, I came downstairs from putting him to bed to find Dog Man, the book I thought he was reading upstairs, still sitting on the couch… Confused, brought it to him.

“No, I don’t need that. I finished it. I’m reading the next one.”

I looked down at the book in my hand. It was well over 200 pages long. Granted, some of those pages only had a handful of words on them but still…

“Okay…” I replied.

Three days later he finished Book 2 on Friday, not at night at all but around lunchtime. He had started reading during the day for pleasure….

He finished Book 3 in the car on the way to church on Sunday and complained that he hadn’t brought book 4 with him.

Within two months he had read the entire series, including the spinoffs, most more than once. 19 Books in all. Thousands and thousands of pages.

He moved on to the Bad Guys series, another graphic novel, with far more words per page and devoured those too.

Today, three days after he turned 9, he’s almost through book 3 of Narnia; books that, because they are written in British English and are now more than 70 years old, my wife and I often trip over reading aloud.

Looking back at the five year experiment it’s inescapable that it worked.

Interestingly, I’m still not convinced that he doesn’t have a reading disability. Even though he’s now reading above grade level (which, by the way I put absolutely ZERO stock in ‘grade level’ assessment anymore), he still struggles with certain reading skills that even his 5 year old brother doesn’t. For his privacy, I’ll not go into details.

But the one thing I can say, without a doubt, is that, as long as no one kills it, this boy will spend the rest of his life loving to read… and what we love, we do, and what we do, we get better at.

Which brings it all full circle for me.

My Reading Story… the point of telling you all this.

I have alluded thus far to the fact that I struggled to read. That’s a massive understatement.

My reading issues were so extensive that I was given an IEP and medicated. While my friends learned Spanish and French 7th-10th grade, I sat in a room with a handful of other students with learning disabilities trying to learn to spell the days of the week consistently.

After school while my friends played video games, I would walk downtown to the library to meet an expensive reading specialist to give me extra practice and help with homework.

My mom, resourceful woman that she is, got me most of the books I needed to read (including some text books) on audio. That kept me above water, but reading for pleasure seemed totally out of reach.

Without my parents resources, I likely would not have succeeded.

I remember one day being told by an encouraging (and exasperated) teacher, “That’s okay. Not every job requires a lot of reading and writing. You can just do something else and still have a great life…”

It was not until I was a senior in high school that anything changed. I had a teacher, Fred Schenck who finally stopped trying to teach me how to read and instead taught me why to read.

By the time I graduated college four year later, I did so as one of the best written communicators in my class and got a job writing position statements for a fortune 100 company. Five years later I graduated from an extremely reading/writing intensive masters program with honors.

In 2025, I published my first book.

Why do I say all of this?

To pull what I have been trying to say though the whole Back-To-School series into focus.

Here it is in a nutshell.

I don’t think we have a “how” problem in education.

I think we have a “why” problem.

We have spent so long, put so many of our resources in to trying to teach kids how to read and do math and make friends and hit a baseball and play the violin that we have neglected to teach them why those things will make their life worth living.

We need to take it seriously when our kids say, “Why am I EVER going to need to know this?” because how we answer that question probably matters more than how we answer any of the functional, mechanical “how” questions.

So I turn it back to you, parents.

Look at the skills you are hoping to teach your kids this year. Look at the goals you have for them, not just today but in their life. Look at where you are putting your invaluable resources. And ask yourself one question:

Why?

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