Do We Want Children To Fall In Love With Reading? If So, We're Failing

In 1974, I was a 12-year-old living with my family in the suburbs of Athens, Greece. My father was working on a project for the Greek government, which was at the time on the brink of falling apart. There was a war in Cyprus against the Turks, student protests, and even tanks going down our streets. I'm ashamed to admit that I wasn't really up to speed on what was going on, but I was aware of a rising anti-American sentiment. It must have been pretty bad because all "unnecessary" US military personnel and their families were evacuated. My parents decided to stick it out for a little longer, but we did give up the longterm lease on our house in order to give us flexibility in case we had to flee. So, for a time, we lived in a series of fully furnished homes of friends who had already returned to the states.

There was a sense of tension in the air, but to be honest, it was mostly an adventure for my siblings and me, moving every month, getting new bedrooms and new stuff with which to play. In one of those houses, my bedroom was a basement room accessible through a secret stairway built into a closet and the room was lined with more English language paperbacks than I'd ever seen in one place that wasn't a library or book store. I never was what you would call a bookish child, but I definitely enjoyed reading.

I owned and had read, for instance, nearly every one of the Hardy Boys mystery series, and I was always on the lookout for the few titles we didn't own, either in the American or British versions. Mom had put no limits on what or how much we could order from the Scholastic Book Club so once a quarter, I'd receive a tall stack of books, which I would consume like candy. That's how I was introduced to Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles) and The Who (I'd read this cheap fan biography before I'd ever heard their music). I was particularly attracted to books about real-life mysteries, like UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle. For a time, I was a convinced that Swiss author Erich von Daniken was onto something with his books Chariots of the Gods? and Return of the Gods, in which he laid out a pseudo-scientific argument "proving" that space aliens had visited our planet, building all the pyramids around the world and perhaps even giving Homo sapiens the artificial boost we needed to evolve from apes to modern humans, thus explaining the so-called "missing link." I was also an avid consumer of superhero comic books.

The thing I remember most about that cool secret entrance bedroom was that it contained George Orwell's Animal Farm and all 14 of L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz books. We were only in that house for a little more than a month, and in that time I managed to read all of them. It was summer, so no school, but still that's a lot of reading!

My point is that I don't think I was a particularly voracious reader for the time, but I did read, mostly for pleasure. I suppose I read for school as well, but I have scant memories of any of the assigned books I was compelled to read during my elementary and middle school years. It was the books I chose to read that stuck with me.

Today's complaint is that kids don't read books for pleasure any more. I'm not sure if that's entirely true. I mean young adult novels still sell quite well, but over all, children just aren't falling in love with reading the way past generations did. A pre-pandemic survey commissioned by the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that the percentage of 9- and 13-year-olds who said the read daily for fun has dropped by double digits since 1984. As Katherine March writes in her recent The Atlantic essay entitled Why Kids Aren't Falling in Love With Reading:

What I remember most about about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume's Margaret and Beverly Cleary's Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early '80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

Today, children are being introduced to books and stories one paragraph at a time. They might be reading something as wonderful as Peggy Parish's Amelia Bedelia, but when you have to stop and answer questions, in detail, often word-for-word, about random paragraphs, there's no way you can learn to care about the characters or the stories. Marsh writes about a class in which the kids were reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, but they were told by the teacher that they would be doing it over the course of months, and probably wouldn't have time to finish it. What the hell? How can you read any book, and that book in particular, without reading it to the end? And months? It's a novel, not a sitcom.

No wonder children aren't growing up to love reading. 

Yesterday, I was feeling ill, so I spent the day reading a Doris Lessing novel, falling in love with Martha Quest and her emotional story of growing into adulthood in colonial Africa during the 1920s and '30s. I fell asleep last night with one chapter to go and am relishing the thought of sinking back into her story today. Will she leave her husband and kids to pursue an independent life of writing and fighting for social justice? I can't wait to find out. Have I understood every single thing in the book? No. Lessing uses regional words with which I'm unfamiliar. She discusses politics about which I know little. She writes of plants and animals I've never seen before. I probably missed some of her metaphors and symbolism. But none of that changes my love for the story I'm reading or the characters I'm reading about.

I'm not going to wade into the reading wars or the so-called "science of reading" here because, as a preschool teacher, I don't have anything to do with "teaching" children to read. My only job, as I see it, is to allow children to continue to fall in love with stories and characters. To read to them. To listen to their own stories. To create an environment in which the children "play" their stories together, taking on roles and saying to one another "Let's pretend . . ." 

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," writes George RR Martin, "and the one who doesn't read, lives just one."

I haven't seen any convincing evidence that our current methods of teaching literacy have done anything to improve overall literacy rates. They seem to have stayed pretty steady since I was learning to read. But we do seem to have made it more difficult for children to fall in love with books. Love of reading must precede analysis. From where I sit, if we want our children to fall in love with reading the best thing we could do is just get them all library cards and let them get lost in the stacks, choosing where to stick their noses, and leaving them to fall in love with the giddy freedom that comes from living a thousand lives.

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"This inspiring book is essential reading for every family choosing a preschool, every teacher working with young children, and every citizen who wonders how we can raise children who will make the world a better place." ~Dr. Laura Markham, author of Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids

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