I Don't Like to Read

Yes, I know how that sounds coming from me. I teach people how to read. I've built curriculums around it. But I think it's an important distinction to make with parents, because a lot of the time, their idea of reading success is skewed toward wanting their kid to enjoy the act itself vs being able to do it.

It would be great if every student loved reading. That's just not the reality for most kids. Or for me. Reading is something I know how to do very well. I view it as a tool I deploy at my leisure. When I need it, I use it. That's when I read. It's not something I do for fun. Ever since I was a kid, I remember opening a book and immediately checking how many pages were left in the chapter. How many more pages until I've read enough of this thing. I never enjoyed it. I just got really good at it. Knowing how to read well and enjoying reading are two different things. Two different acts entirely.

When parents try to shoehorn their kid's interests into loving books, it usually backfires, because reading isn't the medium that kid naturally wants to take information in through. So how do you get a kid who genuinely doesn't want to read, to read? You start comically small. Thirty seconds. Not a chapter, not a page, thirty seconds, and then they're done for the day. Build it around something they actually care about. Kid's obsessed with butterflys? Have them read about butterflys for thirty seconds. Repeat that for two weeks. Then bump it to one minute. Two weeks. Then two minutes. Then three. Small habit, repeated until it's easy, then stretched just slightly. That's it. That's the whole mechanism.

The point of this one is simple. Most parents are trying to get their kid to enjoy reading. What you actually want is for them to be able to do it really well, so they can deploy it whenever they need to.

Enjoyment is a bonus. Competence is the goal.

-SL