What if my child just won’t read?

Moreton Senior Culture & Events Moreton Sixth

I’m going to let you into a little secret: giving girls celebrity autobiographies is not going to magically turn them into readers. The go-to solution for parents and teachers everywhere often comes up short when pitted against watching actual celebrities in the jungle on the TV and don’t get me started on Snapchat, Netflix and the other plethora of distractions available to the modern teenager which all push reading books down the priority list for most!

So what can we do when they just stubbornly refuse to read books? Well, firstly, make sure that they do have access to lots of different books; including some about celebrities if that’s their thing! The days of teachers and parents believing that the only books worth reading are those written by Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters are hopefully long behind us. Visit libraries and book shops and let your child choose whatever books they want: the bigger the range and selection the better so that when they get home they have as many options as possible. That way if they don’t like something then they can easily move on to something else. After all, if you started watching a TV series and you didn’t enjoy episode 1 you wouldn’t force yourself to watch the whole thing. So let them read whatever interests them: manga books are often a brilliant way into reading for pupils who feel overwhelmed by a lot of text, non-fiction books can be fascinating and there’s worse things they could be doing with their time than reading Guinness World Records! Just celebrate the fact that they are reading even if it isn’t something you might have chosen yourself.

But reading doesn’t have to mean books. Sometimes news articles or magazines can seem a little more manageable and it’s still reading and just as beneficial. Shropshire library has online content available with over 100 current magazine titles available to download for free at home plus daily newspapers. There’s academic material such as New Scientist, The Economist and National Geographic but there are also a range of popular titles covering the worlds of sport, cinema, cookery and much more. Additionally, there are some fantastic daily news digests that deliver the news in manageable chunks which drop daily into your inbox and can then be read on a phone. I particularly like ‘The Knowledge’ which has serious stories alongside more humorous ones and ranges from showbiz to politics and even property.

If they won’t give articles a go either then we might need to become somewhat more stealthy to get our teens reading! One of the most innovative literacy campaigns that I have come across is the Turn On The Subtitles campaign. Backed by Stephen Fry, Sandi Toksvig and a host of other big names, this is the result of research into eye tracking. Research suggests that your eyes cannot help but follow along when there are subtitles on the TV and this has a powerful effect on children’s literacy as it improves their automatic word recognition. This research is considered so important in its potential to transform literacy that Netflix are currently considering turning on the subtitles automatically on all their shows aimed at kids and teens and the Indian government has already implemented legislation to turn on the subtitles automatically on mainstream TV programming in India. This is an easy win with your teens: I’m sure they’ll be delighted when you start encouraging them to watch TV (with the subtitles on, of course)!

I love books. I love delving into other worlds and forming connections with complex characters but I know that many of our teens don’t feel that way and it’s a cruel paradox that you often have to be good at reading in order to enjoy reading books and so the best readers read the most and so become even better readers. Therefore, if we really want to improve our teens’ literacy we need to move away from thinking that lengthy novels are the gold standard in reading or the only thing worth reading. Celebrate that your child is reading anything at all: start small, try some of these ways to sneak reading into their lives and just maybe they will find their way towards books independently anyway.

Tori Little (Charlesworth Housemistress)