Do I Have to Read with my Kid?

I've covered How to Get your Child to Read More, and all the info there still stands. I wrote that post, I believe in the message, I want everyone who wants to get their child to read more to read it..and yet I still had this nagging feeling there was a missing piece in my message, something I still hadn't addressed. I even knew what it was..how do you get a kid to make the leap from reading with an active reading partner to reading alone with no supervision? Man did it bother me. But, I finally found the solution, and like all the best solutions, it's simple. I love a simple solution. I've come to believe in them, and wait patiently for them, because good things come to those who wait.

Here it is: No, you don't always have to read with your kid. When you feel that Reading Together thing stalling, when you feel you're more invested than the young reader is or that it's taking just too dang long to get through a book or you don't have all that energy after work (reading time between parents and children usually stalls out because the kid's "I can't" energy smacks up against the parent's "I shouldn't have to" energy...basically nobody has the stamina for it.), here's what you can do: block off 15-30 minutes with your child, sit down with them, and tell them to read to themselves. You the parent are still there, and you're completely focused on them (no scrolling phones or doing anything else) but you're merely an observer. The reading is no longer a team sport like tennis, it's a supervised solo activity like riding a bike. Let them wobble around with no help or interference, you're just there in case they fall off.

I just tried this with a student and it had instant effect. The reading was no longer performative, it was personal. We tried 2 books: one I knew would be hard for her, and one I thought should be easier. Reading the hard book (but one she should be able to read at this age) without help seemed to instantly help her come to grips with her own inadequacy. I asked her if she would like to read this book to her younger sister, and the panic and the nonononono was a starting point for a conversation in which she could see that she had a lot of work to do. She doesn't like phonics, and she'd been fighting it for a while, but here was proof positive that it is the exact way to learn how to decode the words she couldn't decode. It made her more open to the learning she'd been resisting.

The next lesson, I gave her the easier book, one I knew she'd read with an adult before. Not only did she read it better than I'd expected, she covered more of the book faster than what we would have done together. She had built up genuine reading momentum as the story unfolded for her in a personal reading experience. Honestly, she'd even had that moment with the hard book, where she saw that something serious was about to happen to Paddington, and she got invested in it but she just maddeningly couldn't understand everything and definitely couldn't read it to another person.

I reported this finding to her parents, who tried the technique and reported the same kind of result I'd had. With less work on our part, the reading activity got a complete reframing and a better result. So no, you don't always have to read with your resistant or emerging reader. But you do still have to be the one to make sure the daily time is set and followed through, and you do need to still give it your full attention. Personally I've gotten really good at sitting quietly while students work, to empty my mind of nothing but the present. It's a meditation, and it's good for you. Give it a try.