Thanks for that contribution aeh - that's really fascinating!
Although the original poster is long gone, I'll throw in my two cents worth for current readers, as I can actually talk to both sides of this debate.
DS was a late reader, who wouldn't voluntarily pick up any kind of book, long after most of his friends were tackling Harry Potter. He refused to read, even though we were almost certain he could if he tried. Reading finally started in grade 1, when his teacher sent home a book to read every night (in a second language - he's in an immersion program). He zipped through his nightly book and their reading levels quite quickly and with little trouble, but still refused to read anything else voluntarily. Not until grade 2 did he actually read his very first-ever book in English (Wimpy Kid), followed by his second (Harry Potter, of course). His book report was on his favourite sections of his Encyclopedia of Science. I wouldn't say he really started to read by choice and for pleasure until grade 3 - when he became just as likely to be reading Stephen Hawking as Rick Riordan.
All this was very weird to me, an early read-a-holic (my own Mom says I came out of the womb with a book in my hand). But since it seemed more like a could-but-won't, we didn't push. By then, we had also gotten used to a clear pattern of total refusal followed by developmental leaps - won't, won't, won't, mastery. And he certainly loved books - from about 18 months, he was insatiable, and had me read to him for 3 - 5 hours a day. At the time, we suspected that he might simply refuse to read until he was capable of handling the kinds of long, complex chapter books he liked to listen to - easily 5 years or more beyond his age.
So when his younger sister also refused to read, I just kept waiting for that magic day when suddenly she too would be happily devouring encyclopedias. And so, I waited way too long. But her daily readers from school were a nightmare, and she fought them harder and harder, and though she seemed to progress there were all sorts of weirdnesses about it (which I have detailed at length in other posts) that we should have been paying a lot more attention to. Eventually, between grade 2 and 3, we discovered DD is dyslexic, and since, have realized DH and his family is just rampant with previously-unrecognized dyslexia.
Now, when DS was young, I knew nothing about giftedness, and nothing about dyslexia or reading. If I knew then what I know now, I would have been freaking about about DS's reading. 99.9th VCI but won't read in grade 2? And lots of weird red flags, too. For instance, he would always make me read all the people's names, even when they were simple. He would always tell me he couldn't read even when I knew he could, and explain, "Mommy, I'm not reading, I've just memorized the words," and I'd just laugh, and say "silly, that's what reading is!" In retrospect, I realize that he was telling me in no uncertain terms that he couldn't decode, he could only do sight words, but at the time it meant nothing to me. So was he just a late bloomer, gaining the developmental capacity to decode rather late? I suspect the more-explicit phonics and reading instruction he received by being in an immersion class was important for him; while he learned fast, I don't think he was "self-taught". Was he just too perfectionist to do less than 100% correct? Don't really know, but that may have been in there too. However, no amount of paranoid scrutiny since his sister's diagnosis has given me the slightest reason to think he too is dyslexic (while other, still-undiagnosed LDs are certainly affecting his ability to get ideas written down, his fluency, spelling and grammar are all excellent).
So, knowing what I know now - on one late reading-kid I would have been needlessly panicked, and he just needed time to grow into it. On the other, I waited too long, and left her in deep misery and anxiety, falling (unrecognized) much too far behind, creating a huge hurdle to get over when we finally started to remediate. These kids aren't always the easiest to figure out. My best advice? Follow your gut. If something feels wrong, it probably is. The biggest red flag, I think, is if something just feels *too hard*. Not that they can't do it, but it seems painful and miserable to do, even if they can. So while both kids avoided reading like the plague, there were some very different behaviours involved. With DS, it seemed like he could read, easily, but didn't want to. With DD, in contrast, it seemed like while she could read, it was horrifically hard, and the easy stuff never got easier. Again, with later-gained knowledge, I now realize that she just wasn't gaining any kind of automaticity. Over the course of grade 2, she took on harder and harder reading tasks, with enough success to satisfy her teachers, but the simple ones were never getting faster or more automatic.
