This piece ran in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on November 23, 2025

Here’s an important tip from Maya Smart on how parents can help their children get ready to succeed in school and in life:
When her daughter was young and Smart was looking to enroll her in an early childhood program, Smart paid close attention to what she saw. What did she see going on? Was the place clean? Did it look safe?
Now, Smart says, she knows parents should not only look, but listen. Are the people running the center talking with the children, including babies? Are they doing things that build a child’s intellect and awareness of the world around them, as well as vocabulary? Are the adults responding to the cooing and babbling of kids who are not old enough to talk, but who are definitely old enough to learn and to develop their brains power?
Even more important, are the parents engaging in these things at home? Child development experts for decades have known that even the youngest children can follow what is going on around them and benefit from stimulating contact with their parents. If parents do a good job on these scores, their children are much more likely to arrive in kindergarten big steps ahead of where they would be otherwise.
As Smart put it during a program Nov. 12 at Marquette Law School, parents “provide language nutrition for kids. We give them the words that describe the world – and it’s an overlooked powerful lesson that anyone can give.”
Smart has a growing role in helping children in Milwaukee and a voice that is being heard nationwide. A paperback edition was published recently of her 2022 book, Reading for Our Lives: A Literacy Action Plan from Birth to Six, and she is working to build a “Reading for Our Lives” campaign in Milwaukee, connecting with several early childhood programs to help advocate for what parents can do to enhance the literacy skills of children.
Smart also has become involved in advocacy for increasing the success of Milwaukee children in school. She is a member of the newly-formed Milwaukee Reading Coalition and regards efforts to improve the training of teachers in all Milwaukee schools in good practices for teaching reading as essential.
Smart is an affiliated faculty member with the Marquette University College of Education. And, yes, she is the wife of Shaka Smart, the Marquette basketball coach. They have a daughter who is now in eighth grade.
During the Marquette Law School program, Smart emphasized the importance of building literacy skills both in pre-school years and in school years.
Focusing on early childhood, she said. “We need to have parents who recognize they are not only providing food and a roof over the head of their children. They are really their first teachers and their first educational advocates.”
Talking with children includes listening to a child and engaging in two-way exchanges, even with babies. Adults in a child’s life can do beneficial things such as describing almost anything going on around a child. The squirrels you see while going for a walk? The things on the shelves at a grocery store? Colors, letters, numbers? All that and more can lead to constructive interactions. Smart said she likes to use an acronym for the word “Talk” to describe what parents should do: Take turns talking. Ask questions. Label and point. Keep the conversation going, including responding to a child within a few seconds.
Reading books aloud to children at bedtime is the classic piece of advice for parents, and Smart said that is good. But there is much more to building a child’s reading readiness. And even when a parent is reading a book, talk about the story or the illustrations with a child.
Then there is the crucial matter of what can be done by teachers in school. Smart said she supports the call of the Milwaukee Reading Coalition for quality training of all teachers involved in teaching kids to read.
“None of this works if the child arrives in a classroom with a teacher who doesn’t know how to teach them,” Smart told the Marquette audience of more than 100. She suggested it could take a decade to get all teachers in Milwaukee trained in good reading education practices.
What would it take to see major improvement in reading proficiency among children, especially those in schools serving low-income children? “For sure, shoring up classroom instruction so that every child who enters kindergarten . . . is greeted by a teacher who knows how to teach reading,” Smart said. “I think teaching reading is the most important thing in elementary school.”
Are screen time, social media, and smart phones reasons why reading achievement is weak for so many children? Smart is cautious about how much exposure to screens children should have and she said parents’ own screen-time practices influence children, sometimes not for the better. But, she said, she didn’t think screen time was the only problem “because we had terrible reading outcomes before we had iPads.”
Developing readers is “an all-hands on deck” undertaking that goes beyond school walls and starts well before kindergarten. “Parents, families, communities, we have to do our part,” she said.

Video of the one-hour program with Smart may be viewed at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FQ5CSaP3lk