BTT: Early and Often

Suggested by Barbara H:

How can you encourage a non-reading child to read? What about a teen-ager? Would you require books to be read in the hopes that they would enjoy them once they got into them, or offer incentives, or just suggest interesting books? If you do offer incentives and suggestions and that doesn’t work, would you then require a certain amount of reading? At what point do you just accept that your child is a non-reader?

In the book Gifted Hands by brilliant surgeon Ben Carson, one of the things that turned his life around was his mother’s requirement that he and his brother read books and write book reports for her. That approach worked with him, but I have been afraid to try it. My children don’t need to “turn their lives around,” but they would gain so much from reading and I think they would enjoy it so much if they would just stop telling themselves, “I just don’t like to read.”

Oh, I have no idea. I’d like to say that if you let your child catch you reading early and often then he or she will learn that reading is like eating: it simply must be done. My parents read around and to me constantly and I am, well, obviously, a big reader. My husband is not a reader, at least not of books (he loves his Huffington Post) and his parents were not big readers, at least when he was little (they are, now).

I would like to think, because I read my books, his books and other people’s books, to my son that he will pick up the habit simply because it’s there. They say habit and family culture are the biggest factors in raising a reader but who knows? My son will be two a month from tomorrow and loves to “read” and be read to. He likes to pick up his books and babble on and point out pictures. He falls asleep to me reading every night. We sit at the book store or library and he gets two stacks of books off of the shelf, one for himself one for me, and he’ll tell me what his books are about and expects me to do the same. When we’re “done”, he’ll have us switch. It’s a little bit like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie but I do’t mind.

Does all of this translate into a middle school, a high school or even an adult reader? There is absolutely no telling. All I can hope is that by providing books on my bookshelf and his, taking him to the library, bookstore, storytime and readings, and showing him how to work my Nook that he will at least give it a shot.

All of this said, I am encouraged by this:

The other day, we were sitting on the potty (which he is still trying to master at 2) and he asked if he could please have a book while he was on the potty. If he’s reading before he’s potty trained, I think it might be safe to say that I’ll have a life long literature lover…