• As a formerly insecure person, just offer to teach them if they want, and then never mention it again. Once they’re ready to get over their insecurity, they will contact you, or not.

    • 4 months

      This right here. Constantly nagging them about something they are ashamed of will only make them more resistant to help.

    • Agreed, also recommend doing this completely in private so they don’t feel like there may be other people listening to your offer.

  • Write them a convincing argument in a letter as to why it is important to learn how to read.

  • I grew up very poor. In my street lived an older lady and a few doors down lived her daughter and son-in-law. The older lady was illiterate and when her first grandson was about to learn how to read, her daughter asked her to help teach him by keeping them company. So the daughter taught her toddler and her mother the bascic alphabet. That inspired the old lady to seek help and my mother arranged for a high school student to come tutor the lady three days a week. The old lady taught the next two grandkids how to read using the pamphlets she learned to read herself.

  • My family are the kings and queens of refusing to do things that will make thier lives better. I have learned through bitter experience that there is no helping anyone who does not want to help themselves.

    Without knowing your family member there really isn’t much useful that anyone can tell you.

    I recommend that you find a way to maintain whatever level of relationship you want with that person that insulates you from their “issues”.

    • 4 months

      It helps another human being in a significant way isn’t that good enough

    • what does that get you?

      Isn’t it obvious? People help each other all the time.

      You probably didn’t mean it like that, but why did you want to dig deeper into something so obvious tho?

    • Why are you questioning the motivation behind someone trying to do a selfless act? An act that could even be described as altruistic. How does knowing OP’s motivation helps you and OP convince their relative?

      I’m just asking questions so I can help you help OP.

            • Even with the “worst” motivation, why couldn’t OP apply the “best” strategy towards helping?

                • Just use your interpretation of best when you said “better” advice in your original comment. Seems like the metric towards “best” is “more likely to actually help”.

                  Also, you can give a few example of motivations that would end up with the strategies most likely to actually work. Maybe OP didn’t think of these motivations themselves, but they would adopt when you state them out loud for us.

                  But coming back to my main point, I still don’t see how the motivation could dictate strategies most likely to help.

  • Text to speech scanners are already available.

    Get them one that lets them ‘read’

    mho

    • We speak a language that’s not much spoken and therefore we don’t have that facility.

      • Check the local libraries and societies for the blind.

        Sometimes things are available but aren’t widely known.

  • Are they dyslexic or have other obstacles you may not know about?

    • If they do, we don’t know. Because they have, as far as I know, never tried to learn. They’ve never been to school. They say it would be ridiculous at their age to learn school stuff.

      • What I’m getting at is there may be LDs they are embarrassed to share.

        • Oh, you right. They’re the type of person to hide something like that.