If you google for it, I'm sure you'll find dozens of ways to Encourage Your Child to Read.

[conuly]

This seems to me to be a mistake. I spend half my life trying to KEEP Ana from reading!

Let's run through my day. We'll take a L O N G day where I not only bring them to school (that's every day lately) but Jenn is running super late so I put them to bed. This will give you an idea of the full extent of the problem:

I go upstairs and wake up the nieces. They're dead tired, probably because they stayed up all night with a flashlight and a pile of books. I shake them, and sing to them, and finally cajole them into going to the bathroom.

I make breakfast. Why isn't Ana out of the bathroom yet? Oh. She's reading. No book until she's dressed.

I put breakfast on the table. Why isn't Ana here yet? Why isn't she DRESSED yet? She's reading! Book gets properly CONFISCATED this time. Sheesh.

We eat. No, Ana, we can't read at the table. No, we can NOT read at the table. No - look, it's rude, and anyway, you'll spill food on your book, and you need to EAT. No, I don't care if you're reading to Eva... oh, just give me that, I will read it.

Time to put our shoes on! No, Ana, give me the book, I just READ IT to you, there's no need to read it again.

We head out the door. We put books DOWN when walking down stairs, don't want to trip!

Down the block - oh, Ana left her bookbag. Well, hurry up and fetch it and meet us at the corner. She doesn't meet us. When I catch back up to her I find out... she's looking at birds. (Well, at least there's no book in her hands. I shudder to think of her crossing the street!)

She's in school alllll daaaaaay.

After school, I pick her up. She's... reading, and continues reading the whole walk home. At one point she sits down on the sidewalk to read some more. I take the book away.

When we get home, she tells me she got in trouble today. Why? She didn't listen to her teacher. "But I didn't HEAR her!" Now, I have an idea where this is going, and I bet you do too: "What were you doing?" "Reading." (Sometimes the story is that she didn't go out to recess because she didn't realize there WAS recess until lunch was over, she was too busy with her book.

We start her homework. She has to read for 20 minutes! I wonder, honestly, about the sense of this but I let her have at it. 40 minutes later she's still going "just one more page!" at me, and I have to drag her bodily away to start her worksheets or her journal. (We're trying something new where she does all her worksheets for the week on Monday, and then just has her journal to worry about the rest of the week.)

She stops to re-read her journal. Every entry. Page by page. It's not that scintillating, Ana!

We suffer through homework, and she goes to play. Unless she stops to read a book first.

She reads while she brushes her teeth, reads while she poos, and reads while I read to her sister. When I read a chapter book, she tells us what happens in that chapter. "Ana! Shut up! And stop reading ahead!" For the love of god, she can't read a different chapter book? It's not like we have a shortage!

Into our PJs... no, we have to put the book DOWN to get dressed, put it DOWN... well, okay, so we don't have to, but it's faster if we do.

Into bed. Sing. Quiet.

And then we all spend the next three hours sneaking in and snatching books right out of her hands.

I'm happy that she likes to read. I'm thrilled. But can't she like to read a little less? I feel like saying "Go out to play in the sun for half an hour, and then you can come back and read." (Admittedly, the main reason she's not going out to play right now is she's fighting with the boys down the block and doesn't want to deal with them.)

So, here's my thought. Encouraging children to read, as we all know, just convinces them that reading is HARD and BORING and GOOD FOR YOU.

Clearly, once your child has the basics down and you've identified one or two dozen books they might be interested in, the thing to do is to engineer the situation so you're constantly taking books AWAY. Make him sneak off to do it! Convince him, as my parents convinced me, that if he leaves his book FOR A SECOND you'll run off and read it yourself before giving it back. (They didn't do this to teach me anything. They were just SUPER ANNOYING and they liked the same books we did. But I did learn to read very fast.)

As for me... can anybody tell me how to get her to stop reading all the time? Most of the time would be fine by me.

Comments

[trialia]

*laughs* Oh, boy. A kid after my own heart. I was just like that when I was little, too.

[conuly]

So were my sister and I.

[trialia]

*nods* I distinctly recall getting a comment on my school report from my head of year when I was about 14 that I needed to stop reading two or three English books at the same time as trying to learn German. *G* I did get an A in the language, though, so it can't have hampered me too much. xD

[sayga.livejournal.com]

I was the same way as a child. I got "in trouble" for reading too much. "In trouble" being the same way Ana does, just needed constant correction and guidance towards not reading so much and actually doing what I was supposed to be doing. Right now I'm trying to teach Kira that if we work first and then play, we know how much time we have to play and it's usually much more fun because we know we've finished our work and don't feel guilty. This is in relation to getting ready for school in the morning. She gets a sticker if she's dressed and downstairs with teeth brushed and hair combed by 7:40 am. The stickers go on her ear piercing chart, and when she gets to 100, she gets her ears pierced. It works...sometimes. :)

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

Can't help you here... this is a little too close to home. We keep thinking, somehow work around the reading, make it part of whatever was going on.

[erisiansaint]

Sorry, that was me, too. Except I loved playing with my sister's dolls, she had a bunch of little ones that I didn't get to touch without permission. (My sister is 9 years older than me, though.)

[humantales.livejournal.com]

I was the same way, and so is Max. (We've had multiple teachers say, "He reads in class when he's not supposed to, but we hate to stop a kid who's reading. To which we say, "Please do. It's not like he's going to stop.")

Fortunately, he seldom complains about his school reading, so there's a plus. :-)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I was the same way, and so was my daughter. LOL, what stopped me from reading all the time was playing music; what stopped my daughter was doing art. There's this to be said about reading: it's quiet and it doesn't make a mess.

[lizziey.livejournal.com]

I doubt anything you try to do to stop her is going to work. After all...NONE OF IT WORKED FOR YOU.

The only thing I think I ever saw you NOT read was the ounces of condensed milk to put in the fudge. ;)

[conuly]

Evaporated.

[lizziey.livejournal.com]

Yeah that.