Raising Kids Who Read

by Daniel T Willingham

  Figure 4.3. We’re lazier than we think. You may know that manufacturers pay grocery stores to put their products on more desirable shelves, and no shelf is more desirable than the one at eye level. This is an example of accessibility affecting choice. It’s hard to believe, but simply having to move our eyes up or down constitutes a cost to finding products. To maximize the chances your child will read, you want to have books so easy to access he will almost stumble over them.

  Source: © Art Allianz—Fotolia.com.

  A somewhat more subtle cost is time, that is, having to wait. The value of something nice declines if we know we’ll have to wait for it. For example, if you ask me at noon whether I want dessert after supper, it’s pretty easy for me to say, “No, I’m trying to lose a few pounds.” But if you offer me cake just after we’ve finished supper, it’s much harder to say no. Cake now has more reward value than cake I’m contemplating having a few hours from now. The implication for reading is that we want ready access to books. When a child is in the mood to read, she should not have to wait even a few hours to get to the book.

  The final question, in which I offered only the chocolate bar, is meant to highlight that reading is not a choice made in isolation. This offer—have it or not—seems realistic for chocolate bars, but the child does not compare reading a book to doing nothing. The child compares reading to something else he might do: read Bridge to Terabithia or, say, play the video game Portal. So it’s not enough that the child regards reading as an attractive choice. Reading must be the most attractive choice available at the moment the decision is made. This is an enormously important consideration. The average high schooler doesn’t hate reading, yet he virtually never chooses to read because there is always another activity available that is more appealing.

  I’ve suggested that four factors go into whether the child will choose to read a book: (1) the pleasure she thinks the book might offer, (2) her judgment as to the likelihood that she’ll actually experience that pleasure if she tries to read it, (3) what cost she anticipates that reading the book would incur, (4) and what she might choose to do instead of read. Throughout this book, we’ll focus on ways to maximize each factor: finding books that your child is likely to enjoy, boosting your child’s reading self-confidence, and making access to books easier.

  Making Reading the Most Attractive Choice

  Because this chapter is about prereaders looking at picture books, some of the concerns we have with older children are not relevant. For prereaders, you don’t have to worry too much about picking just the right book or that the child frets about his reading competence. Your focus should be on making reading the most attractive choice available.

  The simplest way to start is to make sure that she has access to books in places where she would otherwise be bored. Put a basket of books in the bathroom. Put another in the kitchen. Better than a basket is a bookcase that displays titles. That way your child can see what’s available, and especially at this age, book covers are more enticing than book spines (figure 4.4).

  Figure 4.4. Display bookcases. These bookcases allow kids to easily see what’s available. The design on the left is wall mounted and takes up little room, so it’s a good choice for kitchens or bathrooms.

  Source: © Steffy Wood Products, Inc. Used by permission.

  Always have a book or two with you when you are running errands for moments when you get stuck in a line. Put a basket of books in the car, ideally in a spot your child can reach from his car seat. One destination for these errands should be the library—weekly or biweekly if you can. Regular visits allow you to fill your bookcases at no cost, and they are a great place to find a cozy corner on a cold winter’s day or to linger in cool quiet during the heat of summer. And lingering in a place with a lot of books will likely lead to reading.

  Keeping Screen Time under Control

  Access to books is important, but it’s not enough. Most kids will choose screens—“screens” generically referring to video content, games, or computer applications—over a book, even a readily available one. For reasons I don’t understand, moving images on a screen entrance. We stare at them as we stare at flames or ocean waves. I’ve never met a parent who said, “Yeah, he watched television a couple of times, but he really wasn’t interested.”

  Very young children—those in their first two years of life—spend twice as much time watching television and videos as they do being read to (fifty-three versus twenty-three minutes per day). Slightly older children (aged five to eight years) watch more television than younger kids do (about two hours per day) although they read or are read to about the same amount of time (thirty-three minutes per day). At this age, children start to use other digital devices: 90 percent have used a computer at least once, and 22 percent use a computer daily. For console video games, the figures are only slightly lower. The use of these other devices, along with greater television viewing, means that the average five- to eight-year-old is exposed to about three hours forty-five minutes of various media each day. By the time kids are in their late teens, average media exposure approaches eleven hours per day.

  My guess is that very few parents are happy that their teens spend so much time with digital devices. I’m also guessing those parents didn’t see it coming when their kids were toddlers. But as any parent knows, it’s easier to limit something at an early age than to wait until it’s a problem and then try to change course. Obviously some video content is more enriching than others—Sesame Street is not equivalent to Tom and Jerry cartoons—but if you want your child to be a reader, controlling the content of screen time probably won’t be enough. You have to control the amount.

  But many parents see screens as a lifesaver when their kids are very young. Imagine the frequency of the following scenario. Mom and Dad have both worked a long day. Their four-year-old has had a long day himself. He’s hungry, frazzled, whiny. If he watches a video, he’s satisfied, and twenty minutes are now available to get some supper on the table. People often describe digital technologies as offering instant gratification for kids. They are instant gratification for parents too.

  Sure, any parent feels sheepish about using the television as a babysitter, but most of us have done so. And let’s not catastrophize the situation: it’s a twenty-minute video. The concern is how parents get from there to a child consuming hours of digital content per day. You need a two-pronged strategy to keep screen time under control: setting limits and promoting independence. Here are a few ideas on setting limits on screen time:

  A minutes-per-day time limit is an obvious policy. Let your child choose when to watch if that works for you, but don’t be afraid to regulate when he gets his screen time if the times he chooses don’t work for you too.

  Think about making the times that your child watches videos or plays computer games regular. If you say “three hours per week,” keeping track of how much she’s watched becomes a bookkeeping headache, and you end up in too many debates about how much time she has left.

  Don’t put a television or computer in your child’s room.

  Don’t put a DVD player in your car. (Audio books are a great substitute.) If you already have a DVD player, use it only on long trips.

  If your child has a playdate, mention to the other parents that you’re trying to limit screen time, and you hope they won’t be watching videos or playing computer games. You won’t sound like a fanatic. In my experience, most parents agree it’s kind of silly to have a friend over and then just sit and watch television. But at the same time, if you say nothing, the kids may choose to watch a DVD, and if the house rules are “anything goes,” the parents won’t redirect the kids.

  Stick to your guns. The hardest part of limiting screen time is the whining.

  When your children get too old for an afternoon nap, institute “quiet time.” That means your child plays quietly for an hour in his room. There are no restrictions on what he can or can’t do, but it must be quiet. An hour of peace in the middle of a hecti
c, noisy day is a godsend for a parent, and it’s also good practice for your child to learn to entertain himself.

  That last idea may strike you as unrealistic. If your child drops his afternoon nap at, say, age four, will he really be able to play quietly on his own for an hour? He probably can, but he’ll need your help.

  Teaching Independence

  Being resourceful about entertaining oneself is a skill like any other. Children must learn it, and you can actively promote this learning. That’s the second prong in your strategy to limit screen time. Kids need to know that they can depend on themselves—not a screen, not a parent—for entertainment.

  For crawlers and toddlers, make sure that the house is meticulously babyproofed so you don’t feel that you have to watch them like a hawk. Then again, do watch your child like a hawk, but do so to learn what interests him. If you’re trying to build independence, you need to know what he finds absorbing. I once saw a mom encouraging her twelve-month-old to play with Play-Doh, but he was having none of it. He kept fooling with the Play-Doh canisters. She finally realized that he was intrigued by how the top fit. She ditched the Play-Doh, got out half a dozen Tupperware containers, and he was happy for about thirty minutes as he removed and replaced the tops.

  When setting your child up for independent play, focus on one activity at a time. If she’s got an idea of what she wants to do, great. If not, try to involve her in what you’re doing. A toddler can hold a dustpan while you sweep, or a bowl while you mix, and it takes no more than this sort of job for her to feel she’s helping. A three-year-old can tear lettuce for a salad or stack books on a shelf. A four-year-old can set a table or water houseplants. It won’t be long before your child doesn’t want to help around the house, but at this age, kids are eager to do so. Of course it’s faster and easier to do it yourself (and you won’t make a mess), but it’s worth putting in the effort to teach them (figure 4.5).

  Figure 4.5. Independence. Sometimes it’s impossible for your child to help you in what you’re doing, for example, when you’re writing or using a mattock in your garden. In that case, suggest that he do something similar. If you’re writing, he’s coloring. If you’re gardening, he’s watering plants.

  Source: © Chris Parfitt via Flickr.

  Not only will it take effort, it will take time. Think of building your child’s independence in stages. Initially expect that you’ll be sitting nearby engaged in your own activity and your child will frequently check in with you. She’ll ask a question or request help. My basic strategy is to respond as briefly as possible. If she wants me to engage in the task with her, I say, “I’m doing this now. And you know what? It looks like you’re doing great with that. How about you continue, and we’ll check in with each other in a few minutes?” (To be clear, I’m not saying I never interact with my kids. I’m talking about times when I’m self-consciously trying to build independence.)

  Because building independence is a process, you should have higher expectations for your child’s resourcefulness as she gets older. When my six-year-old says, “I’m bored,” I’ll suggest four or five things she might do. If she doesn’t bite, I say, “Well, that’s what I’ve got for you.” Usually she finds something to occupy herself. If she drapes herself across the sofa and moans, “There’s nothing to doooooooo,” I tell her that she’s free to moan in her room but not near me.

  One final thought on goals. Other parents have usually reacted to the screen restrictions in my home with a shrug, but I occasionally hear a slightly sharp edge in a friend’s voice as he says something like, “You can’t protect them forever,” or “They’ll see it at other kids’ houses, you know.” My goal is not that my child never sees a screen. My goal is to make space for reading, so that by the time she’s ten, reading is so firmly socketed in her life that it cannot be threatened by an obsession with gossip websites, the latest video game, or anything else.

  •••••••••••••

  In most schools, kindergarten marks the beginning of earnest reading instruction. In the next chapter, we begin our discussion of this age.

  Keeping It Simple Summary

  Be a model of love of reading and love of knowledge.

  Communicate in words and actions that reading and learning about the world are family values.

  Change the environment to make reading the most attractive activity available.

  Notes

  “based on the bottle label, not on the content”: Woolfolk, Castellan, and Brooks (1983).

  “Old Spice becomes associated with positive emotions”: Stuart, Shimp, and Engle (1984).

  “positive childhood experiences with books are associated with later reading”: Baker, Scher, and Mackler (1997); Rowe (1991); Walberg and Tsai (1985).

  “and so become another source of the child’s self-image”: DeBaryshe (1995); Evans, Shaw, and Bell (2000).

  “they recognize they may not actually get the outcome they anticipate”: In the research literature, these are called expectancy value theories (e.g., Wigfield & Eccles, 2000).

  “average media exposure approaches eleven hours per day”: Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts (2010).

  PART II

  KINDERGARTEN THROUGH SECOND GRADE

  Chapter 5

  Learning to Decode

  The period from kindergarten to second grade is an age of rapid change for your reading child. In this chapter, we look at how decoding is likely taught at your school and what you can do to support your child’s learning at home.

  What’s Happening at School

  You may have heard of what is referred to as the “reading wars,” a vociferous and nasty set of arguments about the best way to teach children to read. Some background on the two instructional methods that shaped the reading wars battleground will help you understand what’s happening in your child’s classroom today, and you’ll see that neither side fully prevailed in the war. Most children today are taught reading using a compromise method.

  Two Traditional Methods of Teaching Reading

  I’ve emphasized that the alphabet is a code that puts sounds into visual form. An essential part of reading is the process of decoding, of turning the visual forms back into sound. To understand what you read, you use the same mental machinery you draw on to comprehend spoken language; reading, in a sense, is a process of talking to oneself.

  That makes it sound as though the teaching of reading ought to be uncontroversial: you teach kids the code. You plan instruction to introduce the letter-sound relationships and do so in a particular order, teaching the most common letter-sound pairs first. The umbrella term for this strategy is phonics instruction.

  There are variants within this broad approach. Some people favor teaching the letter-sound pairs in isolation. Show the child the letter “o” and say, “This makes the sound AW, as in the word MOP.” An alternative is to teach letter-sound correspondences in the context of real words. Thus, instead of telling the child that the letter combination “ou” is usually said as OW, the teacher might introduce the words “cloud,” “mouse,” and “found” to help the child deduce the relationship.

  The competitor idea on teaching reading holds that phonics instruction is largely unnecessary. This notion is at least two hundred years old, appearing in a French monograph from 1787, The True Way to Learning Any Language Dead or Alive by Nicolas Adam. Adam points out that when you teach a child the name of an object—a shirt, say—you don’t list the parts, telling the child, “These are the buttons, here are the cuffs,” and so on. No, you tell the child, “It’s a shirt.” Likewise, Adam says, “Hide from them all the ABCs. Entertain them with whole words which they can understand and which they will retain with far more ease and pleasure than all the printed letters.” Some fifty years later, American education pioneer Horace Mann agreed that “the advantages of teaching children by beginning with whole words are many.” He referred to isolated letters as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” and remarked it was little
wonder children felt deathlike when confronted by them (figure 5.1).

  Figure 5.1. Intimidating script. Mann’s description of letters as skeleton-shaped may seem a bit over the top, but when we examine a script that is alien to us—for most English speakers, muhaqqaq, a form of calligraphic Arabic, is an example—the script looks, if not macabre, at least intimidating.

  Source: Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Egyptian-_Text_Page_from_Chapter_2_-_Walters_W5614A_-_Full_Page.jpg.

  Both Adam and Mann suggested that learning to read is natural. Indeed, they thought that it’s as natural as learning to speak, a suggestion still put forward today by some theorists, although they are very much in the minority. The argument suggests that what makes it unnatural and difficult is the process of drilling children in letters. Instead, we should immerse children in reading and writing tasks that are pleasurable and authentic. Give the child experience with reading that makes sense to him, that has a clear point to it, and he’ll be motivated to engage with it and will learn to read more or less effortlessly. An analogy is that children don’t need instruction to learn to speak. They are surrounded by spoken language that carries meaning and obviously has value, and so they learn to speak. In this scheme, children will learn to read from the shapes of words, not from the identity of individual letters. For that reason, it’s called whole-word reading.