Yes. I know that feeling of sitting in angsty wait, wondering if something is off because it feels like an anomaly for your child. Like platypus' son, my DS4 has an intense tendency toward perfectionism that seems to be innate. He has a lifelong pattern of letting skills "slip", then apparently lapsing into dormancy I that area for an extended period of time before revealing an enhanced skill set. reading is no exception, but I'll provide some context.
Speaking. Reading. Bike riding. Swimming. Toileting. These are some of the more memorable casualties of DS' perfectionism. I've learned that DS is a child who needs a good, supported nudge to take off. He needs a tangible safety net and industrial quantities of cheerleading to overcome self doubt and second guessing.
Take speaking. DS started speaking in short sentences for a few days at 5 months, only to go mostly SILENT for the next 9 months, at which point the verbal faucet was welded to "fire hose" mode. I actually worried there was a neurological or hearing problem, but DS identified a tapejara in a book we were reading just as his pediatrician came into his 1-year well child visit, and all worries dissolved. He's a selective performer. On his own schedule and with the right audience thank-you-very-much. Two more months of quiet were followed shortly by voluble speech, 24/7 (yes, he's a big sleep talker).
Swimming was a 2 year induction period of nothingness and sensory apprehension (his existential musings on death and its various causes at that age didn't help) followed by a sudden decision overnight last summer that he'd fling himself into the deep end of the pool on a noodle to chase me. Something similar happened with balance bikes. A major downtown road was closed off for a cycling road race one weekend, and DS decided he wanted to ride with the professionals on X Street because "no other 3 year old would". And so he did. He seems to personally revile intermediate steps. It's like he dreams up an outlandish goal and refuses to be seen doing any less, so he clandestinely practices until he feels he is good enough.
With reading, he did the similar "slip then sleeper mode" trick. He figured out how to decode words himself before 2, spent a weekend as an orgy of playing a spelling game until he was satisfied he could spell the whatever amount of words they covered, then stopped showing any interest in reading. I did almost nothing on the reading instruction front until this fall except for reading to him copious amounts of books on demand. Anytime I asked him to try even one word in a book, he'd flip around like w fish out of water, doing anything to avoid putting his gaze anywhere near the book. So, for more than 2 years, I didn't intervene or push. His trajectory seemed way off family norms (I was reading my dad newspaper articles at 2 and taking books with me to the potty, DH was reading chapter books in pre-k. In an insane way that only makes sense to this community, what I saw in DS seemed alarmingly slow for him.) Outside this forum, my parents, DH, and an IRL friend, I could never say that without being thought a total loon.
I bought an OG reading series last summer with the intent to homeschool reading as a precaution, because DH has a dyslexic sibling and there is no harm in teaching a non-dyslexic child to read phonetically. I wanted to deter his skillful habit of inferring from context and drill down on phonics. I spent September to late November gradually warming DS up to reading with little nonsense word games once or twice a week for half an hour. Last week, I finally started "teaching" him the lessons covertly in play. The method we use is flexible enough to allow me to blitz telescope 10 or 12 lessons into a half hour play session. Anything slower is rejected.
There is a HEAVY executive function component in all this for DS. In the last 4 days, DS has gone from literally flopping over and playing dead when asked to read a short book aloud and requiring 50+ prompts to focus and attend to the book to reading 3 or 4 books voluntarily in a day with under 5 prompts to focus. He is SO pleased with himself at being able to read entire books, and his fluency is picking up speed quickly. He can keep a 10 word sentence he decides in mind and anticipate inflection based on punctuation. In 4 days! After playing dead before and feigning lack of ability convincingly.
I'd like to say the motivation was intrinsic, but it wasn't. I suddenly required him to have to earn all junk TV (Star Wars, Batman) by reading. It's not linear, but translates into roughly one book per 20 minutes of screen time. With movies I'm more generous; half a movie is 2 books. Surprisingly, his reading has prompted him to use his executive function much more recently. He asked to learn to play chess last night, and we spent more than 3 continuous hours of doing puzzles and playing turn taking games together. His impulse control was at personal best levels.
All that is to say that many factors that look similar in effect can cause a child to not read. I hesitate to make sweeping statements on this n=1 limited trial, but in my son, he is highly skilled at making "won't" look like "can't." HTH, or at least you can laugh at my idiocy.
