How one man became a stay-at-home dad and cured his son’s speech delay with books
The effort of Nosakhere A. Griffin-EL, Ph.D., to help his son overcome a speech delay led to the discovery of the power of reading aloud, and he is now sharing the process to urge all parents to use reading to unlock their child’s potential.
The boy, his oldest son, was 3 years old when he was diagnosed with a speech delay. So, the Pittsburgh dad and his wife did what any concerned parent would do: they requested that he have speech services from the public school system.
Griffin-EL told Essence, “Though the district acknowledged that our son needed support, they denied our request. Then, a district official said something that forever changed my life: ‘Don’t worry, your son can receive these services until he is 21 years old.”’
Being an educator, Griffin-EL was aware of how the school system often fails Black students, so he and his wife took steps to ensure their son’s success. When the school failed to provide the necessary support, they sought assistance independently. Eventually, Griffin-EL decided to be a stay-at-home dad to focus on his son’s education and development.
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The dedicated dad recounted, “Through our insurance, we signed him up for speech therapy sessions at the local children’s hospital and took copious notes. After each of my son’s sessions, I would chat with the speech pathologist and ask for things I could do at home. At the end of our 16 sessions, the pathologist advised us that reading aloud to our son and having a conversation about what’s going on in the story would assist in his speech development.”
Griffin-EL and his wife followed that advice and made their kitchen a place for learning. They put a whiteboard on the wall for phonics lessons and pocket charts underneath it for practice. They made phonics lessons, bought educational games and school supplies, and had a section for books.
Griffin-EL took both his sons to the library weekly, letting them choose books that matched their interests. He then created learning activities based on those books. He even made personalized books where the children were the main characters, which thrilled them and encouraged them to read more.
He explained, “That summer, I read more than 600 books to our boys; books like Let’s Go on a Drive by Mo Willems, Trombone Shorty by Troy Andrews and Flossie & the Fox by Patricia C. McKissack. And, just as the speech pathologist suggested, I made sure to intertwine each read-aloud session with questions that helped them understand the beginning, middle and end of each story as well as social emotional questions to help them understand how the characters were feeling.”
The children loved Peter Reynolds’ The Happy Dreamer, a whimsical book about a boy learning to be a resilient, holistic dreamer. So he read it to them weekly. One night, he and his wife heard a scream. Running in, he found their youngest son excitedly reading his favorite line, “TRUMPETY, ZIG ZAG JAZZ!” He photographed the moment before tucking him in. Years later, he remembers this as proof that joyful reading inspires children to read independently.
By the close of summer, the older son had significantly improved his speech, astonishing the school’s speech therapist. Now a seventh grader, he no longer requires therapy. The dedicated reading over that summer also had a positive effect on Griffin-EL’s younger son, who was reading by the age of 2 1/2.
Griffin-EL stated, “Years later, this learning experience with my sons served as the foundation for the founding of our family business, The Young Dreamers’ Bookstore. Many of the books I read and the learning experiences I designed, I took into the community and helped families, schools, and community organizations support children in their reading journeys.
“Some people might say that it is the educational system’s job to provide the necessary services for a child to succeed in school and that I should not have had to become a stay-at-home dad. And that may be true. But the greater lesson is this: Creating learning experiences like reading aloud to our children has the power to transform their futures, to help them flourish and to pursue their dreams.”
Besides being the co-founder and CEO of The Young Dreamers’ Bookstore, Griffin-EL is also a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, collaborating with the National Black Child Development Institute.
