If teaching your child to read was simple, Spencer Russell wouldn’t have more than 1 million followers on TikTok and 1.5 million on Instagram.

Russell, a former Houston kindergarten and first-grade teacher, founded Toddlers Can Read to help parents. He’s also a dad who wanted to give his son an early start and began teaching him to read at 18 months old.

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For parents like me, Russell’s social-media videos are the answers to a thousand late-night prayers. Many of us need a lifeline to help our kids read well.

“Your key to teaching any child to read is … understanding as the parent, as the caregiver, as the teacher, how learning works,” he says in one TikTok video with nearly 800,000 views.

Before I delve into his magic reading formula, I had been following Russell’s Instagram since last summer, but only recently started taking notes when I learned my daughter was struggling with sounding out words and blending sounds together.

EXCLUSIVE: Meet Toddlers Can Read founder Spencer Russell at our live virtual event. Register here.

Russell knows what it feels like to struggle with reading.

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He grew up in New........

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