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Adam Fishman (author of a top business newsletter on Substack with 11K+ subscribers) interviews executives, entrepreneurs, and company leaders in technology companies who are also fathers. They discuss the tough aspects of work, parenting, family, the mistakes made and lessons learned along the way. All episodes at www.startupdadpod.com.
[00:00:00] Matt Pasternack: Five rings on the first page, the book is probably too hard. Zero fingers, great. One finger is probably fine, but even sort of three or four fingers begins to be a bit of an issue. I think parents and many educators don’t fully appreciate this, that for kids to read fluently independently, you really want them reading texts where they can decode or recognize 95% of the words that they’re reading.
[00:00:24] Adam Fishman: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I’m your host, Adam Fishman. Today I’m joined by Matt Pasternack, the Co-founder and CEO of Once, a science of reading based software that teaches three to seven-year-olds to read. That’s company has been creating quite a buzz in parenting circles and for good reason it’s built on evidence-based reading methodologies that are revolutionizing how we think about early literacy. He’s married to Becca, an OB-GYN, and together they’re navigating the adventures of raising three kids ages six, eight, and 10. What makes Matt’s perspective particularly valuable is how he’s applied his systematic thinking from the startup world to parenting itself. He’s building intentional approaches to fostering autonomy in his household. Today we talked about his three essential parenting books that every new parent should read and why they matter so much in those early years.
[00:01:23] Adam Fishman: His philosophy around childhood autonomy development and practical examples of how he implements it at home, the science behind reading instruction and why traditional methods often fall short, how his experience as a founder shaped his approach to systematic parenting, the balance between structure and independence when raising kids and why the location you choose to live might be the most consequential autonomy decision you’ll ever make as a parent. We also discussed his thoughts on technology versus traditional parenting approaches and how evidence-based methods can transform early childhood development. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube or Spotify so you never miss an episode. You’ll find it everywhere you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation with Matt Pasternack. Welcome Matt Pasternack to Startup Dad. I’m so excited to have you here today. Thanks for joining me.
[00:02:16] Matt Pasternack: Great to be here. Thank you.
[00:02:17] Adam Fishman: All right, you are the CEO of Once, which a bunch of people in my network have been going nuts about and Once is a science of reading-based software that teaches three to seven-year-olds to read. Now, I don’t have a three to seven-year-old anymore, so that’s why I had to rely on my network to get hyped about this. I’m going to spend most of my time on this topic, the science of reading, early reading. But before we get there, we’re going to bookend with talking about you and your family, because that’s what we do here. So I want to start, you’ve got three kids, six, eight, and 10, and you have a wife named Becca who is a doctor. I just learned an OB-GYN. Is having a medical professional as a spouse a blessing or a curse or a mixed bag?
[00:03:00] Matt Pasternack: It’s a good question. I mean, I think if your spouse is doing something they love, that’s always a blessing. And in the early years, doctors, medical professionals have very fixed schedules and so it is challenging. There’s just not a lot of room to move things around so you have to work with that. We had our first baby when she was in residency and we had our six week old or eight week old, very, very young in daycare 40 hours a week and then we had no pair for another 40 hours. And then the 40 hours left for us and I was commuting from the South Bay to San Francisco and she was in residency and it was tough to make that work, but she’s an OB-GYN and she knew about the biological clock and so there was no waiting.
[00:03:49] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Oh man. And I imagine too, she was probably on call and had to go to the hospital and deliver babies at all hours of the day, just weird, very, very taxing schedule. Yeah.
[00:04:00] Matt Pasternack: Definitely.
[00:04:01] Adam Fishman: Wow. Well, you all make it work. Now, does she dispense a lot of advice to you as a medical professional?
[00:04:07] Matt Pasternack: If I try and weigh in on my diagnoses of various things, I’m quickly shot down, but that’s appropriate.
[00:04:14] Adam Fishman: She doctor explains you into non-existence as well a she should. Okay. So I wanted to jump into something that you told me, which is that you have this opinion that they’re basically like three Bibles when you have your kids when they’re young. And this is not religious Bibles. These are three things that are very important, like three tones. You’re not talking about the Gideon edition that you find in hotel drawers. Tell me what the three parenting Bibles are for parents of young kids.
[00:04:41] Matt Pasternack: Just to be clear, these are for very young kids. So this is right at the beginning.
[00:04:44] Adam Fishman: Well, this is the wheelhouse of the Startup Dad listener, so this is important. Yeah.
[00:04:49] Matt Pasternack: There you go. Well, I think the starting point is there’s this book, but it’s also a video called The Happiest Baby on the Block. And I don’t know if they’ve updated it since I watched it many years ago when my kids were born, but at the time, I mean, it looked like it was out of the 1980s. And I remember when we first put it on and I think it was somehow streaming on Amazon, which felt weird because of how low the production value was. And I just thought, wait, we are a month away from arrival of first baby and this is how we’re spending our time. But it was just indispensable advice that the five S’s, how you shush a baby and swaddle the baby and sort of all these little tricks to really make life survivable with a very young child. So that was number one.
[00:05:31] Matt Pasternack: You grow out of that pretty quickly, but it’s key right at the beginning. The book I often give friends who are about to have their first baby is The Good Sleeper, which is the next step in that journey. And so how do you teach a baby to sleep independently and sleep through the night? And every child’s different. And so the strategies might not work for everyone, but it was something we focused on a ton. And sometimes there are non-intuitive strategies. A grandparent comes over, someone wants to, a baby’s taking a nap, “Oh, wake up the baby. I want to play with the baby.” And it’s like, no, no, no, we don’t do that. We let sleeping babies sleep. We really sort of work very thoughtfully on how to get them sleeping through the night. So that was a huge one and did lots of reads and rereads.
[00:06:10] Matt Pasternack: And then the last step in the journey, I think at some point they’re ready to get out of diapers. And some people think, well, you have to wait a really long time for that, but you can actually start it quite early. And there was a book, Oh Crap Potty Training that we really enjoyed. And I still remember we would both, on the first day we’d potty train our kids, roll up all the rugs. We’d both take the day off from work. You stay at home with like these bare wood floors just feeding the child as much drink, lemonade or various things as possible. And they’re just peeing nonstop through the day and you’d just bring them over to the toilet or to the potty. Anyway, it was lots of fun.
[00:06:46] Adam Fishman: I’ve read that book and maybe I’d have the PDF of it, I think. And they also, one of the advice is also give your kids salty snacks so that they get more thirsty and then they have to drink more and then it’s like a virtuous cycle or pick a three-day holiday weekend or something like that too and just like batten down the hatches. So I’m very familiar with Happiest Baby and very familiar with oh crap potty training. Definitely leverage both of those. The Good Sleeper less so, but we will make sure to link to all three of those in the show notes. And so I assume like you were a student of these and your wife too. So are these like the only three parenting books that you probably read aside from academic stuff about science of reading and things like that?
[00:07:27] Matt Pasternack: My wife read a ton of books. She sort of read everything there was to read about raising young children. And I guess I was just so busy in startup life. She was super busy too, but I just didn’t make enough time for it. But these were the couple books where she was like, “No, no, you have to. “ And then we would read them and reread them and talk about them and went super deep. So I share these as the ones I did read, but the ones I loved.
[00:07:48] Adam Fishman: And I imagine when the two of you are reading the same book and you’re sort of both dialed in, it gives you a common language to discuss things with each other, which is probably super helpful, especially when you’re struggling for language with sleep deprived parents.
[00:08:01] Matt Pasternack: Yes, absolutely.
[00:08:02] Adam Fishman: Another thing that you are a big believer in is autonomy. People talk a lot about that on this show and I wanted to ask you about some examples of the way that you encourage autonomy in your household because I think everyone thinks about, you think about this for employees, you think about this for your kids, you’re like, “It’s important. Autonomy, everyone needs to have some agency, but I want to get into the details of practical examples where you’ve found success and where maybe you’ve found a little less success.”
[00:08:32] Matt Pasternack: You probably see those, you get those little business insider articles online that they push you and it has this headline and you don’t really want to click through what you do. And I remember one that somehow is always in my feed is it’s like, “This mom raised a surgeon and a president and all these things. This was her one secret.” And it’s like after skipping it 40 times like, “All right, what was the one secret?” And she was just like, “I just tried not to do things for my kids that they could do for themselves.” I mean, she’s right. I mean, I think that really is important. I do not regard myself in any way as an expert in this area. I think if I were to do it over again, there’s a lot of things I do differently, partly from some of those books like The Good Sleeper.
[00:09:11] Matt Pasternack: We had certain priorities for our kids that I think maybe are different from some families. We had them sleep an enormous amount and so had probably earlier bedtime than many other kids. We focused a lot on healthy food, focused on exercise, things like that. And so when you start to have your own personal preferences for how your kids develop, it’s hard to balance that with autonomy. But I will say as the kids grow every opportunity we can get to focus more on autonomy, that’s always I think the direction we want to go. In terms of practical approaches, I think there’s a ton to be learned from the Montessori style of teaching. We didn’t send our kids to traditional Montessori preschools. We did outdoor school or forest school, which is another version of that and is very focused on autonomy. So there’s not a lot of structure.
[00:09:58] Matt Pasternack: Kids play in the dirt for hours or days or even years at a time. So I think there’s something there. But a lot of what they teach in Montessori, my understanding is a huge amount of the time is getting out the toys and then putting away the toys and cleaning up. So the transitions are the activity.What you’re really learning and doing is how to take care of yourself. It’s not, oh, let’s do this board game for 15 minutes and then let’s jump and read this book to the kids and then let’s jump and go off to gymnastics practice. Let’s try and slow things down as much as possible and just give the kids as much ownership of the setup and the activity and the breakdown and choice as possible. And again, I don’t think we were great at that, but if I were to do it over again, that’s where I’d focus.
[00:10:44] Matt Pasternack: And now as the kids are growing a little bit older, I do think there’s some products that are helpful. It’s funny, when you first have kids, you might not be a giant personal Amazon user. Your life is busy, you don’t need to buy things all the time. And then when you first have kids, you realize, oh my gosh, there’s a product to solve every problem. So anything that’s going wrong, someone’s had the same problem and has built something for it and autonomy is harder. There aren’t that many high quality products that really focus, but one that’s gaining a lot of popularity is the TinCan phone. I don’t know if that’s come across your radar.
[00:11:15] Adam Fishman: I had the founder of that on this podcast. So we gave away a couple of those too.
[00:11:22] Matt Pasternack: I’m a huge fan. It has a great viral mechanic and it’s been sort of sweeping through the kids’ schools like wildfire and it’s just a ton of fun and encourages independence. Another one is we’ve just started using the think skylight.
[00:11:37] Adam Fishman: Oh yeah. I have not had that founder on, but tell my listeners about the skylight because I think this is very cool. I’ve been thinking about trying it in our house too.
[00:11:45] Matt Pasternack: Yeah. It’s basically a physical pane of glass that you put in your kitchen or somewhere public and it can just load in a bunch of Google calendars. And so the idea is just, hey, rather than the kids every day be like, “What’s happening today?” They can go and see and they can see what mom’s doing and dad’s doing and what they’re doing. So that’s the entry point and that’s sort of why we got excited about it. And then as we’ve been looking for ways to build autonomy, one other feature of it is it has tasks and rewards and sort of a whole little system there. And we’ve just started with that, but the kids have gotten really into it and our kids are systems oriented. And so if you ask them to do something without giving a reason, sometimes it’s harder to get them to do something.
[00:12:26] Matt Pasternack: And when you create a system that they will find all the edge cases and break the system and this is one of the few systems that at least so far, and we’re only probably a few weeks in, but they’ve not broken it and they seem to really be enjoying it.
[00:12:37] Adam Fishman: Oh, that’s awesome. You’re effective salesperson for this product. I’m thinking about checking it out. And I think they have different sizes of it and you can mount it on the wall and stuff like that.
[00:12:45] Matt Pasternack: I will say one just last thought on autonomy is that I think the most consequential decision that a parent will make on autonomy and they’ll make it before they realize it in many cases is just where they’re going to live. And there’s so many constraints on where one lives. You might want to live near your parents or live near friends or various things and obviously it’s very income dependent. But I think that if you live in a place that is flatter, like physically flatter, the kids will be able to bike more easily. If you live in a place where they can get to school on their own, they’ll be able to do that. If you live in a place where houses are closer together or apartments are closer together, it is easier for them to sort of set up their own activities and do that type of stuff.
[00:13:28] Matt Pasternack: If you live in a beautiful rural environment or you live somewhere where there just aren’t sidewalks or aren’t other things, autonomy can be harder even if you don’t sort of realize that at the beginning. And those are things that simple products can’t solve that requires moving.
[00:13:42] Adam Fishman: That makes a ton of sense. I wanted to go even one level deeper with you on this and just ask, so you have a 10, eight, and six-year-old, what is an example of something that you expect each one of your kids to do at those ages? And again, I realize it’s all very kid dependent and an eight-year-old in your household is different from an eiht-year-old in my household and another household, but I’m just curious if there’s any examples that you can provide. Because I think that is a barrier that a lot of parents have is they’re like, “Well, what is the right level of degree of difficulty or degree of freedom to give my kids?” So maybe you could just run through an example at each age.
[00:14:21] Matt Pasternack: My six-year-old’s a girl, mye-year-olds a boy, girls tend to mature a little faster than boys. So I’d say for us, six and eight-year-old are probably somewhat similar in terms of expectations. I think a big one for them, making their own lunch is something that they get to take ownership of and it’s not coming home and complaining. The lunch you made was bad, but it’s like, no, no, you made the lunch. And so that’s one place to get started. And again, I do think Skylight’s been really helpful with chore chart and task chart and then little rewards associated with those things, whether it’s setting out the breakfast materials and plates and all that kind of stuff, putting them away, putting their laundry away, I don’t know, sort of basic things. I think for my 10-year-old, the real push, and she’s leaping into this without stretched arms, is just setting up her own social things.
[00:15:08] Matt Pasternack: And so we are blessed to live right near the school where the kids go to school. And so she can go to school, pop home for a second and say, “I’m going to be so- and-so’s place for the next several hours and go off and do that or not even come home.” And we sort of expect her to make it back home around five o’clock. And so that’s been really empowering, exciting for her. We have not given her a watch or a phone or some kind of communication device. Her friends have ton phone and if she wants to call her, she can, but she’s really in many ways manages her own schedule after school.
[00:15:38] Adam Fishman: Both of those things are things that have been sort of big on locks in our household too. The making of the lunches was a really big one and it’s actually not very hard for kids to do that. There’s also this sort of gatekeeping thing that you have to get over as a parent, which is like, what if my kid makes a slightly less healthy lunch? And it’s like, well, then they do. It’s not like they’re packing a Miller Light or anything like that. They’re going to put an extra cookie or something or you just don’t buy the stuff that you don’t want them to pack. But that’s been amazing for us and it’s just sort of an expectation that we have. And then the social calendar stuff also really, really big. And to your point, the ability to be able to walk back and forth to your friend’s house, it’s harder in a lot of places, but I think there’s been a push to do more of that now, which we find that to be really great.
[00:16:29] Adam Fishman: And I often don’t see my kids until sundown and they’re fun. It’s like how we used to be.
[00:16:35] Matt Pasternack: Yeah, no, exactly. And I’d say even again, these are just the small choices that aren’t obvious when you’re making them, but some folks have the resources where they can decide between private school and public school. Well, lots of news about the downsides of public school and we’re all working to try and improve those. But one downside of private school is, in many cases, kids get driven or bust in from a pretty wide geographic area. And so you might have the best school in the world, but the kids can’t make their own plans outside of school and it can hold them back a litle bit.
[00:17:04] Adam Fishman: Yeah, we found that to be very true. We did one year of private school very young and that was a big challenge for us. It’s hard to build community too. Okay. I have one more question for you and then I want to get into science of reading. So you’ve been a company founder since way before you had your three kids and your wife was in residency when you had your first kid. So I wanted to ask what the decision was like and maybe what the conversation or series of conversations would like with your wife Becca on starting a family. And I mean, especially because you both have demanding schedules. Doctors have really demanding schedules, startup founders crazy schedule. So what was that like?
[00:17:43] Matt Pasternack: Again, I think given my wife’s background in OB-GYN, it was a pretty data-driven conversation, which is essentially there is a curve of the likelihood of birth irregularities or defects or whatever you want to call it. And that curve, I think if I remember correctly, it’s been a few years, but it basically grows exponentially. And so when you’re 32, 33, it’s growing exponentially, but it’s so low that the incidence is really, really small, but then it just keeps with that exponential growth rate and by mid- 30s, late 30s, it’s really high, especially if you’re considering having multiple kids or whatever the case might be, for a woman, there’s just not a lot of time to wait, unfortunately, unless you do much more invasive things like freezing eggs and various types of things, but we wanted to avoid that.
[00:18:31] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Okay. All right. So let’s talk about science of reading. It’s where I want to spend a lot of time today, because I have never had a guest to talk about this before and this is a thing that you live. So first, what is the science of reading?
[00:18:45] Matt Pasternack: The science of reading is basically it is the collection of evidence that has largely been built up over the last 50 years on how to teach kids to read. The evidence-based for how to teach kids to read goes from the very earliest moments. There’s been brain imaging that you can begin to see, I believe, brain differences in how kids process written information. I believe I remember the last study was starting around 18 months of age if you begin putting kids in these MRIs. So the changes happen really, really early and then the evidence base continues all the way through teenage years and adulthood and just what do all the studies say about how to teach people to read? The background to the science of reading is that for a long time there was something called the Reading Wars and there were two very divergent approaches to teaching kids to read.
[00:19:37] Matt Pasternack: One was based on science and based on evidence and we can get into the details, but a pretty heavy focus, especially initially on decoding because if you can’t sound out words on the page, you won’t be able to read. Unfortunately, in English, only 75% of words are phonetic. And so even if you teach a kid, “All right, well, start sounding out words very quickly, they’re going to hit a whole bunch of words they can’t sound out. “ You can imagine if it’s like you teach a kid to walk, but every fourth step they’re going to fall through no fault with their own. They’re not going to be quite as excited about walking. The nice thing about walking is as you get it, every step is predictable. And then as you grow older and as you begin to read more complex material, there is still science of reading.
[00:20:22] Matt Pasternack: How do you teach high schoolers deep comprehension and that type of thing, but it is more nuanced than I’d say the evidence based on exactly what works is a little bit thinner. So that was one approach. And then there was this other approach called sort of a whole language approach and this was the foundation of the Reading Wars, which was essentially that if you expose children to books, if you give them tricks and clues and just kind of help them to read initially easier books and over time, harder and harder books by looking at pictures and guessing what words might be based on recognizing a first letter, things like that, then you’ll be able to build sort of a natural love of reading. And one fact I’ve heard is that about half of kids are going to learn to read largely through whatever method you give them.
[00:21:07] Matt Pasternack: If a child never exposed to books, it is important to note that our brains, we have not evolved to be able to read. We’ve evolved to be able to speak. And so that is literally a natural thing that you do not need to be taught how to speak. It just happens. Reading our brains have not evolved to read. Reading’s only a few hundred years old for many people, obviously, a litle bit older for a very small number of people. And so we didn’t evolve this way and so how do you actually do it? Well, one thought was basically expose kids to materials that are quote on their reading level. And again, for a lot of kids, that’s going to work. And so that was sort of the root of the fallacy. If you’re a classroom teacher and you say, “Well, look, half my kids are learning how to read.
[00:21:44] Matt Pasternack: I’m doing things perfectly fine.” You might feel fine about your instruction. The problem is those kids would’ve learned to read anyway. And so it’s the other half of kids who need a truly evidence-based method and the problem is you don’t know which half of kids any given kid is. And so I think there are so many parents when you think about raising kids, look, we all make a million mistakes and I’ve made them as much as the next person. We don’t love just rolling the dice on things. And so I think reading is an area where parents are unconsciously rolling the dice and just thinking, well, if I try to go to good schools and I try to fill my house with books and I don’t know, a couple other things, like I’m going to do the best I can to help my kid learn to read.
[00:22:31] Matt Pasternack: And that’s actually not enough. And it’s been pretty widely studied, but some of the most highly regarded education systems like Massachusetts is well known for having really strong education system has been a laggard in many ways on the science of reading and those results show up in testing. It’s very clear what’s happening. Mississippi has been, there’s been more and more stories, an absolute leader in the science of reading. It’s known sort of informally as the Mississippi miracle. It’s not just curriculum, it’s a curriculum and accountability and coaching and support, different things they did, but they’ve had unbelievable growth in reading and they went all in on the evidence.
[00:23:08] Adam Fishman: I had no idea because I think my perception and maybe my bias is Mississippi is sort of towards the bottom when it comes to educational outcomes, but here’s one example where they’re like completely doing the opposite of what I might expect.
[00:23:20] Matt Pasternack: No, they’re leading the way and it’s really impressive to watch.
[00:23:23] Adam Fishman: I think my own kids’ school flipped on this. I think they were doing the point and look at pictures and fill in the blank or guess on the word, that sort of second version that you described. And there’s a huge pushback from a lot of parents in our community, some of whom are academics and educators. And then we changed recently I think to a more science of reading backed curriculum. And again, the outcomes take a little longer to see and also how hard it is to switch an entire curriculum too.
[00:23:54] Matt Pasternack: Not only are you switching the curriculum, but you need buy-in from the teachers. And in many schools, once class starts, the door is closed and the teacher’s doing really whatever they want to do and in many cases they’re fun curriculum, but if they’ve been teaching for a while and they have a different way they think works, they’re going to do that. So again, I just think it’s wonderful as schools adopt more evidence-based models for teaching reading, but I don’t think parents understand the risk they are taking when you just send your child off to kindergarten no matter what curriculum they’re using and just sort of hope for the best.
[00:24:26] Adam Fishman: So obviously your company helps with this, but if you are a discerning parent and you are somebody who’s like, “I want to follow a science of reading kind of curriculum,” is that an appropriate thing to ask of your school administrators or what is our philosophy in our school district or at our school? Is that a thing that parents can do?
[00:24:46] Matt Pasternack: Realistically speaking, if you ask your school, what are the evidence-based practices or your preschool? For teaching reading, they’re going to share with you what they are currently doing. And again, that may or may not be working and the teacher may or may not be actually following the practices that the school or the school district has laid out. So it is one area that I just, yes, this is something our company focuses on. So I do have skin in the game here, but no one assumes their kindergarten teacher is going to teach their kid how to ride a bicycle. It’s nothing school teaches and kids who learn how to bike have a lot more autonomy than kids who don’t learn how to bike. And I think reading is another one of these things. When you think about autonomy, going back to our earlier conversation, having a child who beginning at the age of four, five, six, while you’re making dinner is able to just be in the corner reading a book and then at dinner tell you about that book, there is no greater autonomy in the early years than kids being able to pick a book off the shelf that they chose and read it without your intervention.
[00:25:46] Matt Pasternack: And it is magic, right? Sitting on an airplane and all these kids are just glazed out in front of screens and your kids are just reading books. It’s a really special thing to see. And the neat thing is that it is something that parents can actually deliver. The idea for Once grew out of the pandemic. So during the pandemic, schools closed. My oldest was supposed to be in kindergarten. Kindergarten went to Zoom, we skipped it. We just said this wasn’t going to work particularly well for us. And my wife during just 15 minutes a day just did a little bit of reading instruction with my oldest and taught her how to read. My wife’s a former kindergarten teacher before she became doctor. She was a kindergarten teacher. So I said, okay, unfair advantage, that’s not going to work for most people. We got really lucky.
[00:26:26] Matt Pasternack: But then I was chatting with a buddy of mine from Teaching Days. That was my first job out of college and he was a middle school teacher just like me and he had taught his kids to read during the pandemic using the same model, 15 minutes a day, just very, very deliberate instruction. And we thought to ourselves, we said, wait a minute, why couldn’t every parent teach their child to read? If you look at the statistics, reading proficiency in the US, about a third of fourth graders are considered proficient in reading by national measures, which is a national disaster and it hasn’t moved in 50 years. So while I would like to believe that everything is going to change nationally in the next couple of years, and as a company, we are doing everything we possibly can to put a thumb on that scale. I don’t think that parent should just leave this up to chance.
[00:27:14] Matt Pasternack: And I think that it’s like teaching kids to write it back and it’s such a wonderful experience because you get 15 minutes a day sitting next to your child, no one’s falling and getting cuts and crying and all that. You’re sitting there snuggled up and starting with the first letter A and just going through this progression and the way we approach it, by the end of 200 lessons, the child’s reading at a mid-second grade level. So it is not like you’re just learning the ABC. It’s like you are learning to read and that’s pretty exciting.
[00:27:41] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I want to come back to the software base of this and what you said about reading proficiency, but I want to rewind to something you said a litle bit earlier where you talked about your earliest career, which was in education. I want to ask you, how did you develop your background in science of reading? I assume it was not ChatGPT.
[00:27:59] Matt Pasternack: It was not ChatGPT. I lead the company Once and I think it is frequently true of companies. I am not the most expert person in our company on the science of reading. So one of my co-founders is truly an expert in this area. And the interesting thing about education is sometimes in some fields when pharma, if you’re inventing a new vaccine or a medicine or something, there’s probably a lot of academic letters after your last name based on all your degrees. Education’s a bit different. And my co-founder is not a PhD, he’s not had years and years of higher ed on this topic, but he has just relentlessly reviewed all the literature for so long and has just such a strong frame on how you do this and based on the success we’re seeing in the field, it’s highly effective. So I’ve learned everything I’ve learned from him that includes in our earliest days of teaching.
[00:28:50] Matt Pasternack: I was a year ahead of him. So it was my second year teaching and he was a first year teacher. We were on different floors and I wandered down to his classroom to, I figured observe and give some feedback and some advice. The first day I saw him, he was in his classroom and all the desks were on their sides and everything had been emptied out and he was just sweeping and there was just this giant pile of trash in the middle of the floor and he said, “This is never going to happen again.” And the kids had sort of hidden food and papers and all this stuff in their desks and that was over and he just ran an incredibly tight ship and I just never stopped learning being in his classroom and he was a first year teacher and I was second year teacher, so go figure.
[00:29:30] Adam Fishman: What a great co-founder relationship too. Oh man. Okay, so let’s talk about software for a second. So we’re going to touch on this later, but I know you’re not big on screens in your own household and yet you built software that helps kids with reading. So when I read that, and this is a bit of a provocative question, my sort of reaction is like, “Well, shouldn’t kids just be reading books with their parents? What is software doing here?” And so tell me how that works. Maybe I’m thinking that kids are just zoning Going out on a piece of software on a screen to learn how to read, but I think it’s different than that, right?
[00:30:05] Matt Pasternack: Totally, totally. We spoke before about the science of reading and a huge focus in the earliest part of the science of reading applied to the early years, three year olds, four year olds, six year olds, seven, eight years old is decoding. Kids need to be able to decode these words in a page including the weird rules in English, the silent E, the way T and H make a different sound when they’re next to each other than they would make separately. Some letters are silent sometimes in words for no apparent reason. And so how do you decode because you are interpreting a code in spite of all of these exceptions and irregularities. And so as people have focused on this, a lot of energy has gone into, well, let’s teach kids how to associate the sounds of each letter with the symbol of the letter and then how to blend those together, which is wonderful.
[00:30:52] Matt Pasternack: But if we’re avoiding screens, let’s give them quote decodable books. And so you can see lots of books online advertised as decodable books and schools buy decodable books and parents sometimes will buy these decodable books. Well, the question is decodable by whom? Because based on exactly what you’ve learned to read, what you can decode is going to be different from someone else if they’ve moved a little bit further. And so by having software, we actually have a set of physical books that accompanies our software. So the kids are reading physical books as well, but they’re precisely aligned to what the kid is learning on the software in front of them. And the way our model works is there is a screen, the child and the adult sit right next to each other in front of a laptop or a tablet or something like that. And the adult script is on, the parent script is on one part of the screen and what the child’s doing is on the other part of the screen.
[00:31:41] Matt Pasternack: Child can’t read the script yet. And so it’s not like, oh, they’re going to read ahead and get bored. No, no, they can’t read yet. By the end of the program, it’s really cool. Even five-year-old, six-year-olds are just reading the script. They can read the adult script, which is so amazing and just absolutely wonderful. But at the beginning, they’re not reading the script. Everything that I’ve read on screens, screens are not great when you have a kid off in a corner just tapping things on a screen, getting that instantaneous feedback, not even listening to their parents because they’re just getting buzzes and dings and virtual rewards and animals and all that kind of stuff. That’s not great if you want to develop things like attention and you want to develop interpersonal capabilities and various things like that. Having a shared screen, like if you and your child sit down and watch a movie together and you’re talking about it during the movie, you’re laughing together, you’re having a conversation, I don’t think that’s bad.
[00:32:29] Matt Pasternack: I think that’s perfectly fine. And I think we follow a similar principle. So yes, there’s a screen there because without the screen, there’s a stat 95% of parents teach their kids the ABCs and yet reading proficiency is bottom of the barrel essentially. So it’s not that people aren’t trying, they just don’t know what to do. The screen help gives the parent the exact guide of what to do, but the interaction is really between the parent and the child. The other reason you really need a screen and there are books you can buy that are just teach your child to read and you can read this book. The problem is they don’t actually pronounce the sounds for you. So you’re a parent, you’re sitting there and you see, let’s sound out this letter and you see an A. And so you might say, “Okay, this letter is A.
[00:33:11] Matt Pasternack: “ And then the text says like Apple and you’re like, “Oh, well, I guess it’s ah, like Apple.” And now you’re going back and the kids thinking it’s the first lesson. My dad doesn’t even know what the first letter is. Why am I going to trust this person? And so a great thing about screens is the audio component as well. So we can model, you can show the lips, you can show exactly how the sounds are made, what they sound like, which is something that no book is able to hold a candle to. And it also empowers parents where English isn’t their first language because you have many parents where they may be a non-native English speaker, they want their kids to learn how to read English. And so we have the script for them in Spanish and there’s audio in Spanish. Now they’re still learning to read in English.
[00:33:50] Matt Pasternack: The challenge here is learning to read in English, but you can facilitate that using a screen in a way that you couldn’t with a book alone. And then we have a hundred books that go along with the curriculum so the kids are reading books.
[00:34:00] Adam Fishman: Wow. So cool. That’s so much more involved than I thought. I’m glad we had this conversation. I want to come back to the reading proficiency thing because you mentioned again when you were telling me about this like we’re bottom of the barrel. The thing that stuck out to me is this idea that we’ve been stagnant in the US for the last 50 years. Now I realize that education is one of the most antiquated industries and the slowest to change and the most sort of stuck in the past. I’m sure this is not true everywhere in the world. So why has reading proficiency in the US been stagnant for 50 years? That is a staggering statistic.
[00:34:40] Matt Pasternack: Reading English is harder than reading some other languages that are more phonetic. We mentioned Spanish a moment ago. Spanish is a phonetic language more so than English. So it is actually much easier to learn how to read Spanish than it is to learn how to read English. And so English is a challenging language to learn how to read and we for a number of reasons as a country, a combination of in many cases, schools not adopting the right curriculum for far too long. There’s a great podcast sold a story that goes deep into that history. It’s very popular for anyone who wants to learn more about that history. And then parents just not taking this on, right? Not saying, look, I can’t just wait around for schools. We know that when kids don’t learn to read, their life outcomes suffer enormously. Their income is substantially lower.
[00:35:26] Matt Pasternack: They’re more likely to be incarcerated. There are really, really big problems that go along with not learning how to read and yet too many parents have this sort of spin the roulette wheel approach to it where it’s like, I hope my child’s school is good enough at teaching reading. And I just think that that is not reasonable in a world where we’ve seen the stagnant low scores. I think another issue is as we’ve looked over the last 50 years, there have been some major technology changes in the last decade that I think for many children make reading less fun unless you’ve really mastered it and your parents really encourage it. And so the idea that every kid has pretty easy access to a little computer with a screen with fun videos and attention grabbing apps and then you go and say, all right, now let’s wrestle through this harder text and let’s visualize it.
[00:36:19] Matt Pasternack: Let’s imagine what’s happening in the story that’s hard to do. And so I think that if there was urgency to teach your kids to read 20, 30, 40 years ago, I think the urgency is 10x now. If you do not do this, your kids are likely to get lost.
[00:36:34] Adam Fishman: It’s one of those things where I think about the developments that are happening now and I think about also like, well, God, what if your kid missed that cycle? What if they were the COVID kid and they didn’t have this curriculum like my kids. Now, my kids have caught up, but what would you say to a parent who’s maybe beating themselves up about this because their kid’s a little bit past that like three to seven age and they’re like, “Oh no, I’ve missed this. My kid is going to be not proficient in reading for the rest of their life.” Do you offer them any hope?
[00:37:09] Matt Pasternack: Look, first of all, every kid is different and every kid’s life path is different and there are a lot of things that go into that and reading is one factor. The current governor of California is quite vocal and open about the fact that he’s dyslexic and the ways that that has challenged him, but also has given him new strengths and special skills and special powers that have gotten him to where he is. So I don’t think that folks should be sort of despairing. I do think that if a child is dyslexic or if a child is behind on reading, a lot of things will be very hard for a long time, including high school and college and many other things. And so if a parent can afford tutoring, tutoring is the most effective intervention to help children who are behind in reading, learn how to read.
[00:37:52] Matt Pasternack: It’s expensive. And so that is a challenge. There is some software out there that is focused on just giving kids lots and lots of practice and lots and lots of at bats. And so I’d say that the two things that are most helpful is huge amounts of practice with feedback. And that might just be, “Hey, we’re going to sit down and read together for half an hour each night.” Decodable text. It might not be a grade level text, but it is something that is at your level and you’re going to read it and when you mispronounce a word, we’re going to work on that together or actually going to hire a specialist who’s a tutor and can focus on this. So no kids are lost, but as every year goes by, the brain does get rewired. You look at MRIs of kids who are avid readers and kids who aren’t in the middle school years and high school and entirely different zones of the brain light up, which is just wild.
[00:38:41] Matt Pasternack: You can see it right there. Certain kids, you’re going to see virtually the whole brain is lighting up and other kids, they’re reading the same thing and there’s one tiny little area of the brain that’s lighting up, which is probably primarily decoding the words, but there’s none of the connections, visualizations, inference, comprehension, just all the pieces that go around that and that’s really hard.
[00:39:03] Adam Fishman: Interesting. And so it’s like if you develop that stuff early, then it sort of builds those pathways to connect to the rest of the brain as you get older and continue it. That’s fascinating. Wow. Okay. I wanted to revisit selfishly the reading program at my kid’s school, but it has broader implications. So we had this raging debate about the reading program. We were one thing and then we went to a different thing. I think for most parents, so most parents who probably aren’t as intimately involved as me couldn’t even tell you what the schools eventually settle on because how the hell is a parent supposed to keep track of it? You study this, your co-founder is a student of this and that’s probably still hard. But what I want to ask you is why is this such a big debate in schools? Is it because of calcification of belief?
[00:39:57] Adam Fishman: What drives the fact that this is a raging debate?
[00:40:01] Matt Pasternack: Yo put a bunch of educators in a room or a bunch of education technologists in the room and I’ve seen this happen over and over and over again to try and solve the problems with education and pretty quickly the conversation devolves into a debate about essentially the meaning of education or what are we trying to do. I think that makes education unique among many of the fields related to human thriving. If you look at health, there’s broad agreement that there are health metrics that matter and yes, everyone dies, but during people’s lifetime there are metrics we want to improve. If you look at the environment, if you look at government service delivery or various types of things, the metrics are pretty well agreed upon. The challenge is how do we get there? And when you look at education, you’ve got a lot of people who say that a child’s able to read a grade level paragraph online and correctly answer multiple choice question, like that does not show a love of reading, that does not show any indication of the creativity the child brings to that work and the creativity the child will later show in the future and sort of on and on, like all different objections to any assessment you give.
[00:41:10] Matt Pasternack: And so I think at its root, I believe that is really what’s held education back is there just is not alignment on what the point is and what the purpose. Not to mention some people would like to see more of a religious emphasis. Other people, not at all a values emphasis. These are really contentious discussions. So again, as I would say to the parents out there, I would hope that the school year children are in, are developing them socially and emotionally are giving them some foundation in the content areas. But if you have strong opinions on sort of what you want your child to be learning or how they could be learning it or what you want them to be exposed to, I don’t think that going to school board meetings is the most effective way to get that to your kids. I think you can take it into your own hands.
[00:41:55] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Okay. I want to come back to listeners who are thinking about their own kids. And in my experience is the kids are very different when it comes to reading. You’ve got some kids who are bookworms and they’re voracious readers and sometimes maybe that’s not even driven by something the parent did. It’s just like how they’re wired or maybe it is. And then you’ve got other kids and this is probably where it becomes more challenging for some parents where they just don’t really like reading that much and the whole thing becomes a fight. It’s like they’re counting down the minutes of required reading that they have to do every night and then you’ve got some kids that are right in the middle. And so I want to ask you actually on both of these things. So what do you do if you have a bookworm kid who only wants to read, they never want to do anything else?
[00:42:40] Adam Fishman: Is this something that you lean into or should you try to pull them back from the brink and have them go out and touch a blade of grass? What do you think on this?
[00:42:48] Matt Pasternack: Letting kids read, giving them the opportunity to read is something you probably don’t want to take away from kids. And if you try and take it away, they’re smart and they’ll figure out how to do it. So I think it’s a bit of a lost cause. I do think that with the reduction of autonomy in child raising in a lot of places today, there’s also just a reduction in kids spending time outside. And so I do think it’s really important just to get kids outside to make sure they’re outside. If they want to read outside, that’s one thing, but just to move their bodies and be outside. But I don’t think that many parents are concerned their kids are reading too much. I don’t think that’s like a widely experienced fear. I think probably a much more gnawing pain is for the parents who think their kids aren’t, they’re only reading what they’re forced to.
[00:43:30] Matt Pasternack: There’s these stats, I see them all the time. High school boys I think often are typically reading now one book a year, which it’s like baffling if that’s what’s going on. Part of that is that reading levels are so low that in many cases, teachers are not even assigning full books. They’re assigning excerpts of books and various things, which is a whole nother thing. I think that to the extent one is able to, first of all, helping kids find books that interest them and the library is just an invaluable resource. And so taking kids to the library and helping them, maybe they’re finding one book that’s interesting, but just something that is actually interesting. So getting the right books in their hands that are at the right level and that is the tricky part. But there’s something called the five finger test where you have a kid read the first page of a book and they raise a finger each time that each time they come to a where they can’t read.
[00:44:17] Matt Pasternack: And again, depends a litle bit on exactly how dense the material is, but five rings on the first page, the book is probably too hard. Zero fingers, great. One finger is probably fine, but even sort of three or four fingers begins to be a bit of an issue. I think parents and many educators don’t fully appreciate this, that for kids to read fluently and independently, you really want them reading texts where they can decode or recognize 95% of the words that they’re reading.
[00:44:44] Adam Fishman: I want to stop you for a second. Is that because of a confidence thing? You want them to be excited and not frustrated or is there something else?
[00:44:53] Matt Pasternack: It actually goes a lot to comprehension. So it sounds crazy, but if you remove just a few words from sentences, from a paragraph, it can completely change the meaning of the sentence or paragraph. The child was very anxious before going to school. Well, if you can’t read the word anxious, all you’ve got is the child was very something before going to school. And then when you read that next sentence, you’re missing the context. What emotion did the child actually have? And now this book just is not very interesting. So doing something like the finger tests is a way to just see, is this book sort of roughly the right level and then finding space. I had the wonderful opportunity recently to go away with my family actually for a few months and we were outside the United States. We didn’t have devices, kids didn’t have their friends.
[00:45:38] Matt Pasternack: All we had were Kindles. And so that was their thing and that was actually like their connection to home. Not saying that that type of travel is possible in many cases, but even just going away, drive an hour, go away somewhere for a weekend and just being away from all the things that usually grab kids’ attention and all they’ve got is a book or a Kindle and suddenly it’s amazing how much more exciting that becomes. And then of course, if your kids are struggling, if you’re in the early grades and you’re working on the very basics, just teach them how to read, take it into your own hands. And again, a program like what we’ve developed at once makes that possible for any parent.
[00:46:13] Adam Fishman: So it sounds like what I’m hearing from you there is on the flip side, if you have a kid who says they hate reading and they’re fighting about it, it may be that they’re just not being given a skill appropriate book. And so maybe start there as a parent, do that finger test, which I’d never even heard of, by the way, that’s fascinating. And this idea that they should be able to comprehend 95% of the book, I’ll bet that’s a big driver of whether a kid is frustrated or satisfied with their reading.
[00:46:44] Matt Pasternack: A hundred percent skill level and interest. And again, we’ve got these libraries, you walk into a library, there’s usually a bunch of librarians there and they often aren’t talking to people. And so if you go up and you ask them, “My kid doesn’t like to read, but the one book he loved or the one book she loved was X.” And they’ll say, “Oh, I’ve got another book that’s similar to that. Let’s go try it out. Let’s read some pages together.” So they’re there to help you on that journey.
[00:47:09] Adam Fishman: Ah, awesome. Okay. So on a personal note, are all three of your kids really into reading or have you had to do some intervention or nudge them at some point?
[00:47:20] Matt Pasternack: Yeah, it’s a good question. My oldest is a bookworms bookworm, so she’s sort of often her own league. The younger ones love to read, but one thing I’ve noticed with all of my kids is kids at their ages just get immersed into series and then sometimes you finish a series and you loved it. When you were reading this series, reading at the table, can’t put it down. I can’t talk to them because they’re so deep in a book and then finish a series and it’s like no idea what to read next. And finding that next series actually bought a bunch of series just because sort of my hobby and I have an interest in this. And so we have a lot of books in our house, but even having the books available for my oldest, that was enough. She was like, great, next one, next one, next one.
[00:47:57] Matt Pasternack: But for the younger ones, helping them kind of find their way into the next series is still a thing. And so I do play a curator role and I’ve always dreamed of AI or software that’s like the perfect curator, but it’s tricky. It’s not an easier, obvious problem.
[00:48:13] Adam Fishman: I mean, as an adult, I struggle with this problem where I finish a series and I’m like, “Oh my God, there’s a void in my soul now. What do I do? “
[00:48:21] Matt Pasternack: I will say as an adult, a buddy of mine recently started a book club. When I was a kid, I read constantly. But then as I got older, it was more newspapers and various things and a little bit magazines and a little bit less books. And starting a book club, it’s social time, time to be with peers, often with other parents and it forces you to read a book a month, which is a gift.
[00:48:42] Adam Fishman: Awesome. Okay. Speaking of which, what is your favorite children’s book?
[00:48:47] Matt Pasternack: There’s so many. It’s sort of hard to find the best one. I would say as a book series that I’m just such a big fan of is the Magic Treehouse Series, just because it is written at a mid-second grade level, although the level actually increases in difficulty over the course of the series, which just shows what an ear that author had for what kids need. It takes kids on adventures through time and space and history and it’s written for the level at which kids can really read fluently and independently. And there’s 50 books. And so once you get through that, your world opens up. So a big fan of that, but of course there’s the Ramona books, which are such a perceptive view into what it’s like to grow up as a kid and yeah, there’s so many.
[00:49:30] Adam Fishman: Okay, awesome. All right. I want to take a break from reading for a second. We’ll come back to it. I want to ask you some stuff on a more personal level, but what advice would you give to a founder who is starting a family or a dad who’s about to start a company?
[00:49:44] Matt Pasternack: It is definitely tricky. I’ve gotten to watch my peers and friends and those who have started a company as they have very young kids versus those who have done it at other stages. I would say if I could play everything out perfectly, I think starting a company in your 20s and then gaining some freedom in your 30s to either maybe you got acquired and you work at a larger company where there’s sort of more boundaries and cushions built in, or maybe you’ve earned some freedom for yourself and don’t even have those responsibilities and then to have a kid. I think that is the happiest path possible. I didn’t take that path, but that does always seem very seductive. I’d say when you have kids and you’re starting a company at the same time, you just have to remember that 95% of the time they will ever spend with their kids is from zero to 18.That’s it.
[00:50:32] Matt Pasternack: Once they become 18, it just falls off a cliff. So these are your years and if you don’t find a way to spend time with your kids, it’s a loss that you won’t be able to get back.That’s not advice. Maybe it’s more adding pressure, but it’s definitely tricky. I do think that there are some hacks to think about like, well, how do you actually spend more time? One is structuring time and scheduling and time. One thing that was neat about Once, obviously it’s my company and so teaching my kids to read as work made sense because it was literally part of my work, but just bucketing out and saying, no, I’m going to put on my work calendar 15 minutes a day every single day where I’m teaching at that point, basically my youngest or the child who was learning how to read to read.
[00:51:13] Matt Pasternack: That was amazing. And I did it because that was my job, but if I could go back in time or I worked at a different job, I would do the exact same thing, even if it had nothing to do with my work because that’s structured high impact time together that just builds a relationship and builds a skill. So that’s one piece. Personally, I don’t kind of travel to conferences as much as I used to before I had kids. I’ve used LinkedIn maybe as a poor substitute, but I find that you can reach a lot of the people who maybe you otherwise would’ve met with at conferences by trying to be active in the ways you can, understanding there might be some compromises and maybe there’s someone on your team at a different life stage or with different family dynamics who is able to travel more.
[00:51:53] Matt Pasternack: And so they can lean a little bit more into that while you step back a little bit from travel if possible. Or if you have travel a lot, you just find when you are not traveling, you are just 100% dedicated to your kids. And so that’s what they’ll remember. They’re not thinking about percentages of time. They’re just thinking when you were physically there, no matter how long or short that was, were you focused on them or were you focused on your phone?
[00:52:16] Adam Fishman: So LinkedIn over conferences is one of the three frameworks that you have. And so I think that’s pretty clear. You have two other ones that I wanted to cover. The first one is find the sweet spot between no screens and kids not complaining about boredom. So what does that mean?
[00:52:33] Matt Pasternack: I’ve read compelling, I don’t know if it’s sort of data or anecdata, but lots of writing essentially that boredom being bored is good for creativity. Having kids have spaces where they need to come up with an activity or come up with something to do is really great for encouraging creativity. And if there’s always a screen within reach, that’s just never going to happen. On the flip side, being in a house where every single day is a battle about, “I want to use a screen, I want to use screen, I need a screen,” or, “I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m bored,” is not ideal. And so trying to thread that needle and again, maybe if a child gets a certain allotted amount of screen time on a daily or weekly basis and knows that’s what they get, but then they’re encouraged to do other stuff outside of that.
[00:53:20] Matt Pasternack: So on all the other days of the week, that’s not going to be an option that might kind of get away from some of the battles.
[00:53:25] Adam Fishman: Okay. The second framework of those three, when mom is nursing, dad can take the kids out of the house in the morning to let mom sleep in. So that seems pretty straightforward. Is that a thing that you tried to practice in your household?
[00:53:40] Matt Pasternack: Yeah. I mean, I think it is hard often for men to appreciate just how much physical stress a woman goes through in the month when they’re pregnant in the months leading up to having a baby and then in those, especially those early months after first having a baby and even if you’re there and emotionally supportive in various things, you didn’t have the baby and you’re not nursing the baby. And so what can you do as a dad to provide some level of just physical relief essentially? And so in our house, that was the thing. It’s even when kids were sleeping through the night, still up at six in the morning. And so I would toss the kids into a jogging stroller and boom, we were gone and we’d be out for hours sometimes wrapped up in jackets or whatever it might be and with some bottles of milk and some snacks and that was the least I could do.
[00:54:30] Adam Fishman: It’s one of my favorite things to se around my neighborhood in the morning if I go out early and I just see a bunch of bleary-eyed dads pushing their kids into stroller and I’m like, “Hey, I’ve been there.” I know exactly what that’s like. You’re doing a service there. You are a fan of the concept of free range kids. And so I wanted to ask you what that means and why you’re a fan of it.
[00:54:53] Matt Pasternack: Again, just it goes back to autonomy. I just think that it is far less stressful on parents when kids take control of their lives. And I think developmentally it’s just really appropriate for kids as they grow up to get more and more responsibility. I don’t think that almost any kids living today are as free range as they were several decades ago, but I think one can try to make strides in that direction. There’s a New York article from several years ago about, I think it was a parent in Palo Alto who managed to knock down all the fences between himself and his neighbors on maybe an entire block and they had this sort of informal, just no fence zone where kids just ranged at least along an entire block. That’s amazing. I’ve not been able to knock down fences with all of our neighbors, but I think sort of things like that are really interesting.
[00:55:39] Matt Pasternack: And the same story he described, kids like standing on top of roofs and jumping and that might be going maybe a step too far. But I think that what parents can do is make real efforts to engage in the community around them. They’re physical neighbors. They’re not your best friends. It’s like, can you have people over to a dinner or an outside thing on a frequent enough basis that as the kids grow up, they feel comfortable like, “Oh yeah, I can go over to my neighbor’s house or I can go around the neighborhood and people are looking out for each other.” And so doing what we can to try and recreate that. I remember when I had mentioned that when we had our first one born, my wife was in residency and I was working these crazy hours and so we had no pair and she was from Columbia.
[00:56:20] Matt Pasternack: I remember when she first came to the US the first weekend, I walked around the neighborhood with her and she said, “It’s so weird.” We were living in Santa Clara at the time. She was like, “There’s no kids outside, zero kids on the street, just no one was outside.” And I said, “Yeah, it’s just sort of this weird American thing.” And then she said, “Yeah, I mean, where she came from, there would just be kids everywhere. It was a weekend. They weren’t in school and can we get that back? I don’t know, but we can try.”
[00:56:45] Adam Fishman: We can inch towards it, I think. Is your wife on the same page with you on the free range approach? Because I’m wondering, she’s a doctor, so she maybe sees injuries and things like that differently than you do, but are you two fairly well aligned on that?
[00:56:58] Matt Pasternack: I think we try our best. It’s not like our kids are zipping all over the neighborhood or anything totally crazy like that. But yeah, I mean, I think we both understand that there’s sort of risk reward trade-offs and if you want kids to get some truly special experiences and to grow and be proud of themselves, you need to accept some level of risk. And in most cases, even if they broke an arm or something like that, it would heal and they’ll be okay and there just aren’t really kidnappers out there. So there’s not that much to be scared of.
[00:57:26] Adam Fishman: Okay. So you’re aligned on that, but what’s something that the two of you don’t share the same opinion on when it comes to parenting?
[00:57:33] Matt Pasternack: My wife favors structure over myself. I like the idea of having structure, but then I’m perfectly fine to break the structure when the moment calls for it. And I think she will more typically feel like, wait, we set up this whole plan to have the structure and now you’re just going off and breaking the structure and that’s undermining the structures that we set up. So I think any tension’s probably come back to that in some way.
[00:57:55] Adam Fishman: I think that’s fair. That’s actually a really good segue to one of the last few things I wanted to ask you about, which is you like to push yourself to do really challenging things with your kids and we’re not necessarily talking about rock and roll marathon, but in some cases kind of. So what are some examples of the really challenging things that you’ve done with your kids?
[00:58:13] Matt Pasternack: Yeah, so especially when the kids were younger, my wife had more weekend shifts than she does now. And so I would just be on my own with three kids and I just sort of felt like I was going to go out of my mind basically if we were just going to sit around the house the whole day, which maybe the kids would’ve preferred and then they’d be crawling around or doing various things and I’d be just trying to keep things in balance. So I typically kind of packed up in the car and we’d just go on these big adventures. I live in the East Bay, California. There’s a large mountain for where we live an hour away, which has this area called Rock City where there are lots of large natural slabs and cliffs and caves and various things. And so I would take them there and I’d have one strap to my chest and the other two holding my hands and we’d be delicately dancing along these slabs and even had a rope with me and there’s some areas where I’d be roping the little ones and it would sometimes get pretty involved.
[00:59:06] Matt Pasternack: And if you zoomed out, it’s like, what are you doing? I’m not sure I would’ve been able to answer that question, but by the time we got back to the car, the kids couldn’t see straight. They were asleep within one second we’d get back home and I’d put them into bed and I could exercise or something and I would look back on it as a day well lived.
[00:59:24] Adam Fishman: Amazing. I think actually the most challenging thing that you shared with me was hosting a solo sleepover party for your 10-year-old with seven of her friends at your house. So that’s kind of wild. I have anxiety just thinking about that.
[00:59:38] Matt Pasternack: Again, that sort of goes to structure and lack of structure. I’m okay with lack of structure sometimes. I did not appreciate exactly what that was going to be. And so at first she was going to sleep with one kid, then it was two kids, then it was three kids, then it was seven kids. And so they all came over and they were from basically seven to 11, they were great and they were totally taking care of themselves and having a blast. And It was bedtime and then one of the girls, because my wife was at work and I was trying to make sure basically they were all getting their sleep bags and going to bed and this girl looks at me and is like, “I’m changing. You can’t be here.” And I was like, “Okay, I definitely don’t want to be here if you’re changing.” And I just realized that was the moment that I’d lost control and then I go up to bed and it’s like it is just going to be … I think the girls went to bed at four in the morning that morning and it was just raging all night.
[01:00:24] Matt Pasternack: I think I woke up at two and all the lights were on. There was music on. Kids were yelling and I was like, “Whoa, this …
[01:00:31] Adam Fishman: “ Yeah. One thing that rarely happens at a sleepover is actually sleep. You pay for it the next day or several days later. But hey, bold, you learned a valuable life lesson there. Okay, couple final things. I know you’re not big on screens in your house and I wanted to ask you though, you and your daughter did something really interesting with AI together after you took a trip. So what was that thing that you did?
[01:00:53] Matt Pasternack: We recently took this extended travel, which was really fun and she just kept a really thorough journal. We wanted all the kids to journal. She was the only one who really picked up the mantle, but she just kept this very detailed journal handwritten of what we did, which is a treasure because now we have 50 pages of documentation of what we did. And in the past when she’s done these, I’ve typed them up basically and it’s a labor of love. I hate copying things over, but for her I’m willing to do it. And she’s a good enough typer now that she could do it, but it was so much writing that it would’ve not been fun. But we just were able to scan the pages and dump it into Gemini. And the output was not only would Gemini write down everything she had written and offer summaries, which I didn’t want, but all of that.
[01:01:38] Matt Pasternack: But it would even say, “And these were the notes in the margin and these are the crossed out words that could have been spelled differently.” And anyway, it was quite impressive.
[01:01:46] Adam Fishman: Very cool. Very cool. Okay. To end, how can people follow along or be helpful to you?
[01:01:52] Matt Pasternack: I really believe that we have the opportunity to start a movement around parents teaching their children to read. I think it’s as simple as that. If you can teach your kid to ride a bike, you can teach your child how to read. The way to grow that movement is not by just talking about it, it’s doing it and then sharing what worked. We have an offering at Once, at my company, where a parent and a child sit together in for an open laptop 15 minutes a day and 200 lessons later the child is reading at a mid-second grade level. That includes three, four, five-year-olds, really, really young kids. So going through that experience, sharing the journey along the way and then afterwards sharing with other parents who can benefit is the number one thing. I try to be pretty active on LinkedIn. And so if folks want to follow along, I will share what I’m learning and what I’m seeing.
[01:02:39] Matt Pasternack: And so hopefully there’s some tidbits there that folks find exciting.
[01:02:43] Adam Fishman: Awesome. Well, we will absolutely link to Once to your LinkedIn. I know you got a lot of fans in my community, so maybe some of them will chime in when we publish this episode, which I think would be awesome. Okay. Do you have a few minutes for lightning round?
[01:02:57] Matt Pasternack: Let’s do it.
[01:02:58] Adam Fishman: All right. What is the most indispensable parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[01:03:03] Matt Pasternack: I mean, this is lame, but diapers. I mean,
[01:03:05] Adam Fishman: Without
[01:03:06] Matt Pasternack: Diapers, I know there are people around the world who don’t use them and I’m amazed. I don’t know how it works.
[01:03:11] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is the most useles parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[01:03:14] Matt Pasternack: So earlier I recommended this book, The Happiest Baby on the Block or video, which is absolutely amazing. The doctor who was behind that went on to build this invention called The Snoo, which is a, sounds like you know about it. Very expensive. It’s a very expensive bassinet that rocks and sort of shakes kits. We borrowed one or bought one secondhand from a friend and tried it out with one of our kids and I just walked in and it looked like the child was having a seizure. I mean, it was just so vigorously shaking the child. This is insane.This is
[01:03:45] Adam Fishman: Just
[01:03:46] Matt Pasternack: Totally nuts. The underlying concept of gentle shaking made sense, but a human can do that. You don’t need a robot sort of just shaking the crap out of your child.
[01:03:55] Adam Fishman: Okay. Okay. What is the weirdest thing you found in your kids’ pockets or in the washing machine?
[01:04:01] Matt Pasternack: The worst thing I found in the washing machine, every once in a while when the kids were younger than anymore, a diaper would go through the washing machine and then it’s just I shudder thinking about
[01:04:11] Adam Fishman: It. Talk about the science of something. It’s not reading it.
[01:04:14] Matt Pasternack: I’m not talking about a used diaper. I’m saying just a clean, empty diaper
[01:04:17] Adam Fishman: Just
[01:04:17] Matt Pasternack: Disintegrate these little particles and it’s just miserable.
[01:04:21] Adam Fishman: Okay. True or false? There’s only one correct way to load a dishwasher.
[01:04:25] Matt Pasternack: False.
[01:04:27] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is the crazier block of time in your house? 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM or 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM?
[01:04:34] Matt Pasternack: 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM tends to be more structured. Kids have a clear sense of what they need to do. 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM is less structured. Sometimes that makes it more crazy. Sometimes it makes it less crazy and
[01:04:45] Adam Fishman: Just
[01:04:46] Matt Pasternack: Sort of depends on the day.
[01:04:47] Adam Fishman: Okay. If your kids had to describe you in one word, what would it be?
[01:04:51] Matt Pasternack: I think it would be, I hope it would be, but I’ve heard them say it would be nice, which sounds sort of silly, but I do think they think I’m nice to them.
[01:04:59] Adam Fishman: Okay. How many dad jokes do you tell on average each day?
[01:05:04] Matt Pasternack: I tell a bunch. Mostly they’re kind of teasing things to just instigate my kids. So my youngest got into rolling her eyes and then I, so I always roll my eyes at her and she hates it and things like that.
[01:05:15] Adam Fishman: What is the most absurd thing that one of your kids has ever asked you to buy for them?
[01:05:20] Matt Pasternack: Nothing comes to mind. There’s occasionally talk of buying an enormous house and then we say, “Well, what would we do with this house?” Except clean it all the time and then that goes away.
[01:05:30] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is your favorite kids movie?
[01:05:34] Matt Pasternack: I don’t actually watch that many movies with my kids. My wife does more of that, I’d be a pass on that one.
[01:05:40] Adam Fishman: All right. Do you have a nostalgic movie from maybe your childhood that you can’t wait to force your kids to watch with you?
[01:05:48] Matt Pasternack: Yeah, I remember really loving and I haven’t watched it since, so it’d be fun to re-watch it. There was this movie, Battery’s Not Included, I think it was called.
[01:05:56] Adam Fishman: Yes. I was just telling somebody about that movie. It’s wonderful. So good. It’s so good.
[01:06:00] Matt Pasternack: I don’t remember anything about the movie other than loving it.
[01:06:04] Adam Fishman: It’s like hamburger sized spaceships. It’s awesome. Great film. Love that. We’re like kindred spirits, the two of us. How long can a piece of food sit on the floor and you will still eat it?
[01:06:14] Matt Pasternack: Yeah, I’m sort of a germaphobe. So for me, I’d rather it not sit on the floor.
[01:06:20] Adam Fishman: Okay. How often do you tell your kids back in MyDay stories?
[01:06:25] Matt Pasternack: Hopefully not very often, but you’d have to check with them.
[01:06:28] Adam Fishman: Okay. I’ll follow up on that with them. Finally, three kids, but you do live in a very outdoor inspired place. So what is your take on minivans?
[01:06:38] Matt Pasternack: I think they’re great. I love the idea of a minivan. We went shopping for them at one point and I forget, I think it was the low gas mileage that ended up killing it for us, but if one has a minivan and you kind of round up all neighborhood kids or you’re taking your kids and their friends somewhere, what a fun social time. They probably make electric ones now that solve the mileage problem. Awesome.
[01:07:03] Adam Fishman: Awesome. Well, with that, Matt, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on here. Thank you for joining me and talking to me at length about the science of reading and your own family. And I wish you, your three kids and your wife all the best for the rest of this year. Thank you.
[01:07:17] Matt Pasternack: Likewise. Thanks for having me.
[01:07:19] Adam Fishman: Thank you for listening to today’s conversation with Matt Pasternack. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next week.