Why Does My Child Hate Reading? (What to Do!)

Why Does My Child Hate Reading? (What to Do!)

Billie

Is Your Child a Reluctant or Resistant Reader?

“I hate to read!” is something that I have heard a lot, both in my teaching career and in my personal circle of friends and acquaintances. This aversion to reading seems like a growing problem to me. Most of the time adults are a little embarrassed when they tell me that they don’t like to read. Children who do not read are a different story. 

With no hesitation or hint of self-consciousness, a non-reading child will readily exclaim, “I HATE to read!” Common wisdom has many explanations for this. We blame the distractions of the television, video games, social media, or any one of the many other demands on a child’s time, but I see it differently. I think that the average young person who does not read has simply bypassed the opportunity to interact with books and stories in ways that fully reveal the exciting and important adventures locked inside the written word. 

The trick to helping young people acquire reading habits that will serve them for a lifetime — without killing their reading joy — is to get reading quickly and then give them choice about what they read.

How Can I Help my Child Develop an Interest in Reading?

In his excellent book Igniting a Passion for Reading (2009), Steven Layne explores the importance of relationships in teaching and learning. He emphasizes how challenging it is to entice anyone who lacks positive associations with books and reading to enjoy reading at all. Layne writes about connecting with reluctant readers in ways that show them that you are thinking of them and that you are interested in them — that you care about their hobbies and dreams and all of the things that make them tick. 

Layne describes the simple act of finding a book that matches the interest of a reader and then giving it to them and telling them, “I thought of you.” When I read Layne’s book, I decided to try this approach with my own students. And wow! It really works! When students know that a teacher thinks about them and finds books for them when they are not in class, it is a powerful incentive for students to reveal more interests that will strengthen their relationship with their teacher.

Why is Learning to Read so Difficult for my Child?

Contrary to some popularly held opinions, the process of learning to read is not at all easy and natural.  Yes, some young readers have a gift or intuition for reading, but many don’t. Writing and reading are entirely inventions of relatively recent humans. Think about it: only about 5,000 years ago our human ancestors developed a secret code that one must break in order to receive important information. 

It is complicated, and therefore frustrating for many early readers to learn the process of weaving together the multiple strands of reading skills (decoding, comprehension monitoring, pacing, inferring etc.) required to understand and use textual information. As beginning readers, we start by learning that squiggly lines are letters and lines represent sounds, and those sounds make words, and those words have meanings and strings of words have many different meanings. Equipped with that knowledge, beginning readers are supposed to break the code AND figure out what the writer really means even if they do not say it directly! That is a lot of very challenging work. Who wouldn’t rather watch a movie instead? 

Based on my experience, the trick to reading instruction is to get beginning readers to love the adventure before they burn out on the complex process of learning how to crack the secret code. No, children don’t necessarily love reading naturally. They fall in love with the adventure and want the keys to the code so that they can have more adventures.  

In her inspirational book, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018), Maryanne Wolf analyzes the development of the human brain and how it builds foundational knowledge. Among other things, she explores how humans invented a thing that our minds were never meant to do — WRITING and READING! (Isn’t it amazing that people push themselves to do that which is difficult?) In the case of reading, the rewards are great, but, for many, it is a long slog to that first reward. The best teachers in my life cast a kind of spell on me; they shared a passion for their subject in such a way that made me want to be just like them. And, like Stephen Layne, they let me know that they “thought of me” too.

Why do the Beginning Stages of Learning to Read Progress so Slowly?

Wolf explains that there is a 5-year period (age 5-10 in most children) in which a reader must move slowly through the first stages of learning to read. After those first stages, a reader can then learn to read fast enough (develop fluency) to be able to focus their attention on deep reading skills and their emotional response to what is being read. This fits with what I have learned about teaching these skills. I often share with my students that we must move slowly now, but we will speed up as we use new skills over and over. 

I compare this process to the relationship of accuracy and speed when riding a bicycle. You start out with training wheels and move very slowly, trying to get all of the interacting parts working just right. If you did not have training wheels to prop you up, you would fall over because you are not moving fast enough for the bike to balance. When you can use all of your knowledge and your mastery of the physical skills to speed things up, you don’t need the training wheels. In fact, at that stage, training wheels will slow you down! As with so many new adventures you go slow at first and so that you can speed up later.  Proceed slowly until you get the hang of it and then, look out world!

Is it Necessary to Assess my Child in Reading so Frequently?

In Public Education today we are too driven by standards and benchmarks. Yes, standards and benchmarks are important and useful when applied appropriately. But, when it comes down to the interaction between student and teacher, especially in reading instruction, I think we grown-ups have muddled the message. We have become so obsessed by a desire to collect data and measure student progress that we have drained the average classroom of the time and incentive needed to interact with students in the way I have described above.  

How Can we Strike a Balance Between Student Needs and the Need for School Data?

When I was a classroom teacher, I often encountered the “speed it up” response to reading instruction. Each child was expected to meet certain benchmarks according to the division of the school year into nine-week reporting periods.  The schedule of reporting periods dictated the schedule of curriculum delivery which dictated the pacing of my instruction. The learning benchmarks all children were required to meet in order to be “on grade level” determined my students’ grades in everything, including reading. 

As required, every nine weeks I conducted lengthy assessments with my students to determine how far each student had progressed toward guided reading levels. This took enormous amounts of time, time that could have been used for individualized reading instruction. It all but eliminated opportunities to read great books with my students. Eventually, I had to suspend my read-aloud time to make time for assessments. Reading aloud to students is one of the most important things a teacher can do to foster fluency and comprehension. I had to suspend time devoted to the teaching of fluency and comprehension so that I could devote that time to measuring fluency and comprehension in my students! 

My students hated that they could not listen to me read aloud. But, because I could not cut math instructional time or time scheduled for lunch or recess, something had to go. I also suspended small group reading instruction to measure how much growth students had made because of small group reading instruction! The irony of all this was always lost on those responsible for enforcing the assessment policies. And this wasn’t just my classroom, it was every classroom. We have let the measurement of student growth become more important than the instructional needs of students. 

Yes, it is important to know how each child is progressing, but it is not necessary to stop teaching every few weeks to measure everyone. Reading grows slowly at first and then takes off. More frequent measuring does not make it happen any faster, and I believe it has slowed us all down. It has also disrupted the natural, slow then fast, progression of learning to read.

Another consequence of pausing too frequently to assess and assign grades is that it triggered worry, sometimes even panic, in the parents of my students when their children were not exactly at the expected benchmark. Every nine weeks, I had to reassure parents that there was good progress being made but the arbitrary grading schedule just couldn’t show it.

So, What Can We Do to Solve the Over-Assessment Problem?

As with all big problems that arise because smart people have good intentions, over-assessment is a good thing gone bad. The right kind of student progress assessment is absolutely essential. Assessment INFORMS instruction. Assessment helps the teacher blaze a day-to-day path for learning. However, the emphasis on frequent data collection has gone beyond reason and I believe it is a big part of why some of our children hate reading. 

Why would you gleefully do more of something that someone you don’t know says you’re bad at every nine weeks? My solution is to begin with assessment and trust the evidence that a reader is making progress based on the books they are reading becoming more and more complex. And, yes, assess progress but assess along the way when the student is showing signs that they have reached an important transitional point. The best evidence that a child is developing as a reader is that the child wants to READ.

What Can Parents and Important Adults in Children’s Lives Do to Help?

Find Time to Share Reading 

Many people think that once a child learns to read, reading to and with them becomes unnecessary. Actually, as children grow in reading, it becomes even more important to share reading together. We do this to model reading habits, share in the adventure and give the child opportunities to stretch to meet a challenge. If you have a reading routine with your young child, please keep it up until that child is no longer a child. If you think you don’t have time for this anymore, then find ways to listen to age-appropriate recorded books together and discuss them. If you set aside time each day to show how important reading is to YOU, then your child will adopt that practice. 

If you yourself “hate reading” or want to avoid it, then that is the model to which your child is paying the closest attention. Audiobooks have opened opportunities for people who are ALITERATE (they know how to read, just choose not to) to enjoy the adventure and share it with others. If you think book clubs are dorky and not worth your time, try not to share that out loud — what is school but one big book club?

De-emphasize Reading Levels as Much as Possible

Your child is a person — not a “Level H.” The importance of reading levels will diminish with time, but the impression of being labeled may last much longer. Try not to impress on your child that you believe that ever higher benchmark measures are the most important indicators of success in school — particularly in beginning reading. There is a lot of debate about the accuracy of reading levels (I won’t engage in that debate here — that’s the time taken away from reading!) You will still receive a report card and should meet with your child’s teacher at intervals during the school year but keep that to yourself for a while until your child gets a little more control over the reading process. 

Think of it as keeping the training wheels on just a little while longer while you give your child time to work things out. I am not suggesting that you should not talk about the reading progress with your child, I only suggest that we would better serve students if we didn’t make learning to read a frustrating race to some arbitrary finish line. 

Make reading time with family THE reward

This is easier said than done, but it is an important point to consider. Encourage your child to complete assignments and then stretch with a harder book that you read aloud or share in reading. When your child is reading aloud to you for pleasure and comes to an unknown word, give the word, and wait until a good stopping point to go back and figure the word out together. If your child wants to keep a log of words to revisit and remember, encourage it, but don’t assign more homework! Make reading together the reward for getting homework done! Set aside time each night to read a book or a chapter or an article that your child has chosen to share with the family. You will be surprised at how important to you this memory will become. 

A few years ago, my adult son and I traveled by car across the country. One of the things he wanted to do was read aloud from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to me as I drove. I was so touched by this. He wanted to do this because one of his fondest memories from his childhood was reading this book with me. It didn’t matter that my British accent was not good! We loved that time together and it still brings happy tears to my eyes as I write this. One of the things I am most looking forward to if I am fortunate enough to be a grandmother is the time I will spend sharing my love of reading with my grandchild.

Older Kids Like it Too!

Early in my adult life, I was a “nanny” to a couple of teenage boys whose parents were on a trip out of the country for a few weeks. One of the routines I was expected to maintain involved reading the newspaper (way before the internet came along) and clipping articles from the sports, world news, or local news sections. I was to leave an article on the table at each boy’s place, next to their breakfast plates. As they ate breakfast, they would read the article and talk about it with each other and with me. I was very skeptical that this was something teenagers would enjoy, and it took a little while for me to figure out which topics sparked the best conversations. But this experience left a lasting impression on me. This was a family routine that kept those boys connected to each other and their parents even though they were far apart. The boys went to school with something to talk about and they could make conversation with just about anybody. 

I recommend this for older students, it’s a good way to build advanced vocabulary, background knowledge, and give teenagers exposure to the world beyond Tik-Tok! You might have to print the articles from the internet and have a “no phones at the breakfast table” policy, but it can be done. Those two boys are in their late forties by now, maybe with kids of their own. I hope they carried on with this tradition, it is not too late to start your own tradition. 

Trust That Reading Will Happen

If you are the frustrated parent of a child who is struggling to learn to read, please take a wider view. These days will pass and when your child is grown, it won’t matter so much what their grades were, or whether they were reading at the same level as their peers. What will matter is how reading made them feel at a pivotal point in their development. The more you can do to build positive relationships around the act of reading, the better off your child (and the world) will be! I love reading because my own mother loved reading and most of my early teachers and friends loved reading. You and your child can learn to love it too. Just… Be a Reader! 

References

Layne, Steven L. 2009. Igniting a passion for reading: Successful strategies for building lifetime readers.  Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

Wolf, Maryanne. 2008. Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. NY: HarperCollins Publishers. 

Wolf, Maryanne. 2018. Reader, come home: The reading brain in a digital world. NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

Read my article, TIME to Find Joy in Reading, to learn more about what it takes for your child to find JOY in reading, and how I can help with that process!