How Can We Get Our Kids to Like Reading?

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0:35What fresh hell. Laughing in the face of motherhood. I get that it's a metaphor, guys, but wow. With Margaret Ables and Amy Wilson. We should have picked up on how bad those Froot Loops were because I certainly had this out of the box memorized. A podcast that solves today's parenting dilemmas so you don't have to. Oddly, I did spend six hours on the Mormon Wives Reddit page.

1:02Hey, everybody. Welcome to What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Amy. And this is Margaret. Today we're discussing, can we get our kids to read? Just another thing on the invisible workload. Our kids aren't reading. I feel like this is getting harder than it used to be and that many kids are reluctant readers. Yeah, I'm in the valley on this one. So I hope I have some good tips to learn today. It's changed within my household, both because of the age of my children and because of the role of screens. Both of those things have really changed my relationship to reading and my kids' relationship to reading.

1:42Not for the better, as it turns out. Yes, exactly. Like when that option to just check this thing one more time, this, I don't know, jack-in-the-box of constantly changing, stimulating content, this cavalcade that passes by in front of you as opposed to having to imagine something. Right. Why would we want to read when we can watch people do the Opalite dance 600 different ways on TikTok, right? But it's worth it. So we're going to come out, spoiler alert, pro-reading. Right. We're going to talk about some strategies to get to reading, but I also think we're going to be realistic about what's going on.

2:20Like how much of this can we control and how much can't we control? And also who said this was our job in the first place? I mean, the universe probably, but we can discuss it. Right. Tell me about your, this is often called reluctant readers and reluctant we're going to talk about can break down in a lot of ways. Like, am I currently a reluctant reader? I am an enthusiastic reader of Reddit threads about Mormon wives, but I am a reluctant reader of that book I've been trying to read for three years about the redheaded boy that's a retelling of David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead. Demon Copperhead.

2:56Right. I am very excited. We're actually talking in our next episode. We're going to be talking to Meredith Schwartz from the Currently Reading podcast about how to get us to read more. And I can't wait to get into that because I need that. I need this work for me for sure. We have talked about as business partners sometimes. So when we go through like a to do list for our podcast, the things that are on the to do list for six months straight, we have to kind of relook at and be like, what's happening here? This is a problem that we're never solving. And I think reading for me right now is a little bit in that category.

3:31So I want to think about that question, too. Yeah. And well, the point is that when you do read, you feel better, you know, and so getting back to our kids, their brains will be expanded, they will enjoy it, there is a deep enjoyment you get out of it that you don't get out of Instagram. And so it's worthwhile to choose the harder thing. But you were going to ask me about reluctant readers in my house. Correct. I feel like I have, you know, three like could take it or leave it readers, unfortunately, and I have big kids now like high school and college students. I have one kid with a reading disorder.

4:02And so that's hard because reluctant reader for somebody with a learning disability is because it is it's hard. Right. A reluctant reader for good reason who doesn't read because it's difficult. It doesn't, of course, get any easier. And it's hard to be too hard on somebody who has an actual decoding disorder to make them read more. And yet that is sort of a fix for it. So it's a thorny one. I have two strong readers and one struggling reader. Again, a learning disability decoding issue. My reluctant reader is the only person in our entire family who currently reads for pleasure. Wow. Which is interesting.

4:48We've all fallen off reading because of our screens. All of us. I used to read, I would say I read 30 books a year, generally. And now I read five, maybe. I mean, I'm not counting. I read a lot of books for the show. So I'm taking those off the list. Right. There's at least a book a week we're looking at for the show, but you're like, that's work. That's not. That's work. And I'm not reading for pleasure. That category of reading for pleasure. This year, I have read three books, two were audiobooks. I have a drive that I do a couple of times a week. So I tend to have an audiobook going there, which, by the way, counts as reading.

5:27Audiobooks count as reading. Heaven knows. Let's count it as reading. Right. My husband is a hilarious reader because he doesn't read for pleasure. And then eventually I will convince him. What is the book about the video game developers? Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. That book. Did you read it? I sure did. Loved it. It's about game developers, basically. And my husband is an engineer and a computer guy. And I kept telling him, you will love this book. You will love this book. And he read it in 13 hours, basically, from start to finish. He just absorbs a book. On or off. And then I'll find him up at three o 'clock in the morning.

6:03And he's like, yeah, I'm just finishing the book. Like, he'll stay awake all night reading a book. Reading like a chapter at a time. Nah, not happening. This raises an interesting question for me. Like, well, I read a book a week for the podcast. Well, our kids are obviously reading stuff for school, or at least we hope so. But they're not reading for pleasure. Like, I want you to want to read. And is that something we should be worried about, I guess, coming into this? Yes, everybody should want to read and should read for pleasure extra because it's good for you. But should they? Question mark.

6:32Is it a problem if they don't? Yeah. I think it's a good question. Let's, first of all, I'm going to quickly review six ways to engage reluctant readers. Are you ready? Sure. Is this all ages and stages? All ages and stages. But the stage begins when children can read independently, is what we're talking about. Because reading to your children, please do that from the time they are an infant. Reading out loud to kids, very foundational and important. I did this all when my kids were little, especially because I enjoyed it. I'm a ham. Like we read Harry Potter, we read the Betsy Tacey books. You were like out of work actress available for reading silly voices.

7:1336 voices, all of the series of unfortunate events. And they loved it. And that's a great place to instill a love of books. That work does pay off. So you want to start with an infant reading board books, board books at an early age, reading out loud as a part of a bedroom routine is a great way to establish a base of reading and a love of reading. Then as kids get independent in their reading, it doesn't mean you have to stop reading to them. So my kids were able to read, as I'm sure yours were, when you were reading Harry Potter. They could have read it themselves, but we read it out loud together as a family.

7:52And then we would have it in the car. Harry Potter books, series of Unfortunate Event books, those books we would read at night. My husband was the reader doing the silly voices. And then whenever we were in the car, we would then listen to the next chapter. We basically, okay, we read chapter 27. Now we're getting into the car. We're going to have chapter 28 while we drive over to grandma's house, whatever it was. So that's a great idea to start a basis of reading, that reading is something that happens every day. I did that very, very meticulously for 10 years, probably between the time my kids were born and 10 years old.

8:33Me too. And it has not resulted in a true love of reading for my children. So still good to have done. But who knows what would happen if you hadn't read the idea that reading is foundational and that kids need to be read to and that kids who are read to are set up for preschool and a whole other way than kids who are not read to regularly. I mean, I believe all that to be true. Absolutely. You should be reading to your kids from infancy. Yeah. Great idea. Great practice in terms of other rules. So we said reading is reading any kind of reading. Read me what it says on the back of the cereal box.

9:07Kids today will never know the joy of being like, oh, 30 percent niacin. Like we read every word on the cereal box. We just you would get so bored. You're like packaged at Kellogg's. We should have picked up on how bad those Froot Loops were because I certainly had the set of the box memorized. But I mean, I didn't know what Niacin was doing for me, but I knew what percentage the Lucky Charms had. I mean, you would read the box. Yeah. Comic books and graphic novels are books. Yes. Face value of books, sometimes transparent. You should be reading Little Women. you should not be reading Captain Poopy Pants and the Fart Machine from hell.

9:52Books are books. Sometimes if we push kids to only be reading worthy books, we're turning them off of reading. Although I will say my youngest kid, I would drop her older brothers off at school and then there was still 20 minutes before her classroom opened. So I would take her to the school library. And when it was me reading to my child, that's when I would pick Betsy Tacey or the Laura Ingalls Wilder. books or whatever, even though my kid was pretty young at the time. But I wasn't forcing them into my child's hands to read to themselves. I feel like when you're picking the books, you can pick stuff with a little bit of merit, even if it's storytelling merit.

10:28Unless it's leading to less reading. That's the only thing I would say. Right. When they're reading to themselves, yes, exactly. If they're picking the farty booger man and they're excited about it, then great. Yeah. And if they're willing to read farty booger man with you and not little women, go farty booger man. You know, Oh, that's the key. That's the key. Lots of trips to the library. I mean, this was something, again, that we did religiously. We have a school campus in my town that has the little town library there. And our practice was on Thursdays after elementary school, we went to the library and everybody picked two books.

11:02And then I would keep them forever and get fined for them. And often no one would read them. But I still think the practice of going and the practice of saying to your kids, Go talk to the librarian and find out where the books about rockets are or the dinosaurs you like. And a good children's librarian is going to be lit up by a kid coming over and trying to find books. Yeah. And just like books are a part of our fabric is an important message. I still love going to the library or the bookstore. I love the options around me. And just to be a kid and be like, you can get as many as you want. Where else do they have that?

11:38Nobody's taking their kids to Target and saying you can have the whole toy section if you want. You go to the library, like, sure, bring home 30 books. And then next week we can get 30 more if you want to. Just letting them have that excitement of all of this is available to me. Start young. You know, who wouldn't be excited about that as a four or five year old? I like a trip to the library. They have puzzles there. Like you'll find something to do. And there are certain mean library people who are like the library is for total silence. So don't bring your kid to that library. But a library usually has a playground.

12:11Like a library is a great destination. Sometimes the library is just a great family outing. Go find the thing that you're most interested in, as opposed to I have gone to the library, picked out the four important books that I want people to think you're reading. Right. Because you're going to have conversations with other moms. What's your kids reading? Oh, they're reading, you know, Little Women. And I'm like, oh, my kid is reading, you know. The Farty Booger Man. The Farty Booger Man. And it doesn't feel great, but allow your kids to explore and leave in their path. Reading is fun and full of information about stuff you care about.

12:50I mean, we're getting to takeaways already, but that's all really good advice. We're hitting the takeaways early. We'll be back with even more. For some of us, tax season is one of the only times that we look at our finances fully. And once it's over, well, that was terrible. And it is completely understandable not to want to think about it for another whole year. But using Monarch and being intentional with your finances in an ongoing way helps you see where your money is going and how you can put your refund to best use. We are here to tell you, simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier.

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16:16Get a spring-worthy glow with clean, clinically tested skincare from Osea. And right now we have a special discount just for our listeners. Get 10 % off your first order site-wide with code FRESH at oseamalibu.com. That's 10 % off your first order with code FRESH at oseamalibu.com. We both have a child who has some reading processing issues. This is a great like detective thing. What's the obstacle to reading? Struggling readers who have a skill deficiency, either dyslexic phonics decoding comprehension, They may have gaps that are making reading hard to access. That's worth figuring out. What is the obstacle here?

17:02And I have kids for whom audiobooks were really helpful and kids who had a lot of trouble picturing the story and would just fade out during an audiobook. At the end of the chapter, I would say, OK, so what happened there? And two of my kids would say, well, Harry found the one that time. And one would be like, I was definitely staring out the window. I didn't listen to a thing. More than one of my kids uses for like English class, high school novels kind of things that they are listening on audio book and reading at the same time because they have to annotate. And I'm glad teachers are still doing this.

17:37You have the paper copy of To Kill a Mockingbird and you are I should see multiple circles and margin notes on each page. So they have to do that. They annotate, but they're listening at the same time. Both of them feel like it just pulls them through the book. One of them just had to read As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner. Oof. So complicated. Thank God for audiobook narrators. I mean, it was barely coherent as an audiobook, but it really helped because I was listening to it on some of our commutes. It helped unpack some of what was not coming across on the page. Yeah. I just reread Scarlet Letter.

18:12Whoa. Man, those descriptions of the forest go on for like 15 pages. I'm like, I get that it's a metaphor, guys, but wow, we're deep into the forest. The longer, the better, right? The more pages, the better. I can't wait to read this super long book. We also have the disinterested reader. This is the category we've talked about. I had a kid who loved those I survived books. I survived, and it's a guy whose raft got blown up, but he had to eat seaweed or things that will kill you or farty McPoopy pants. Whatever the things are disinterested in certain topics, are they interested in other topics?

18:46There's a great series. I want to give a shout out to a series called You Wouldn't Want to Be a, and it's like, you wouldn't want to be a pilgrim on Plymouth Rock. You wouldn't want to be a union soldier in the Civil War. You wouldn't want to be like a person who built the pyramids. And it takes you back in time. All kinds of gross facts and fascinating stuff and beautiful comic book drawings and lots of information. but right between the eyes of a 10-year-old who wants to know cool stuff. The other categories, I think, are an avoidant reader. They don't like to read. They're bored. There's something behind that.

19:20And similarly, fixed mindset. I dislike reading. I don't enjoy reading. And watching the story for your kids, for me, it's like, I don't have time to read. Oddly, I did spend six hours on the Mormon Wives Reddit page. Like, I do think that if you're in AP English and you're reading and dissecting four novels a semester, you may not have time for reading. That's fine. But I try when we're going on vacation. What's the book you're bringing? Like an expectation of reading. I was just having a little yelling time about this in my house that we're going to find an hour a weekend that's like reading.

20:01Everyone's got to be reading something for an hour, including us. build into the conversation and expectation that you're going to be reading. It's hard, you know, because I'm looking at these different types of readers and I think it's, I'm wary as we're talking about it, like don't paint the person with a skill deficiency with a reluctant reader brush. Right. And don't let the reluctant reader paint themselves with a fixed mindset of I'm just not a reader. You know, there's different reasons this can happen, But I think the judgment, we're fearing the judgment of others that we're leaving the library with the wrong kind of books for our kids, right?

20:36That other people must be doing a good job of getting their kids to read or their cousins when we go on vacation, sit there and read what is happening. I've been that person. I've felt that way. But I think it's to be careful not to project onto our kids that there's laziness when there might be something else at play. Make very sure that there's not something else at play. And then they still need to read. And then it isn't like, and then stop asking them. Then they need to read even more. But it's hard. I think in general, getting curious about what's going on with any kid's relationship with reading is a huge first step.

21:06I've heard this term in school. You may have heard it as well. The just right book. Yes. And so finding books that are at the correct skill level. And there's a five finger rule, Amy, for this. Do you want to know the five finger rule for reading a book? Sure. You ask a kid, raise a finger for each unrecognized word in a book, a chapter, a page, maybe if they're really struggling. Zero to one finger is probably too easy of a book. Two to three fingers is a just right book. Four to five fingers, too hard or best read aloud with a parent or a friend. Yeah. I mean, it's a simple sort of guideline, but I had kids over five years, a five-year span.

21:49And so finding books that were interesting to the oldest and the youngest at the same time. This is interesting, though, because I'm thinking about this. OK, a kid shouldn't read a book that is too easy for them. Why? Well, I think for two reasons, right? One, you won't get better at reading if you only read books with sight words that you know already. And two, because it will probably be too boring for you. That's the key. It's too baby, right? Reading is reading. So if they're reading, that's a win. but if they're bored of reading the five finger rule might be a thing to test so it kind of undercuts a little bit or at least um suggests it might be another way of looking at like readings reading yes but if your fifth graders still only will read captain underpants and nothing else they're missing out on books that would be more challenging and they're also more rewarding like the challenge and the reward is the same thing and that's why they shouldn't read books that are too easy for them only forever.

22:44If that gets them in the door, yeah. Once they learn to read, they learn to read. But beyond that, you do want something to be, it probably goes for us too, like a little challenging. Stretching. A little stretching in terms of, I don't know, language or metaphor, whatever. You can read sort of four romance novels a day on a Kindle, but if they're super trashy, I guess reading is reading, but then it's also, but there is this rule that you're supposed to get better at it. Here's, I think I actually, let me see if this makes sense to you. Reading is reading. So as long as a child is reading, seeking out reading, and enjoying reading, forget the five-finger rule.

23:19It doesn't matter to you. If you have a child who lacks interest or avoids reading, it might be worth looking at what they're reading and running these tests against what they're reading in case one of the reasons that they're showing that lack of interest is boredom or it's too hard for them and helping them set the book. I had a kid who was so into dinosaurs that they would be able to name, you know, Plataeusaurus Rex came from the Mesozoic period from this and that, knew everything. They were six years old at the time, but they could sit and memorize those books all day and look at those books all day.

24:00I think this becomes more of an issue with independent reading, basically. Reading is reading. If your kid is enjoying reading whatever they're reading, let them read it. But if you're trying to figure out why they're not enjoying reading, this might be something to look at. It could be too easy or too hard. And having a five finger rule is a way in that makes it up to the kid, right? The kid decides, I mean, I get the like, this is too easy for me. I need more of a challenge. And they've decided of that for themselves through this cool trick. I can see that being very useful for certain. Yeah, absolutely.

24:35Like everybody likes a little bit of a challenge, but don't let it be like, this book has easy words. Therefore, you're not allowed to read it. That's not the point of the test. So my experience where I read every night to my little kids, they started school and continued a lot of reading. I'm picturing those books with like the digger on the front. It's like photos with a lot of explanations of how all the different Mighty Machines worked. Can you imagine something would be less interesting to you, right? Like, I'm going to learn all about Mighty Machines. Not interested. But to certain kids, yeah.