Want to Nurture you Child’s Love for Reading? Follow This Simple Pedagogical Practice

It happened as I was witnessing my brother’s partner breastfeed her child. The baby was playing with the nipple, perfectly contented. It dawned on me that what I was witnessing was not a feeding, but a learning. By committing to an exploration of breastfeeding as the practice of freedom, Alina was teaching her baby how to seek freedom. This, I thought, was the first, most important, lesson in my nephew’s life.

Nipples share this with books: how we use them is none of anyone’s business. Herein lies the secret of how to nurture your children’s motivation to seek pleasure as they grow into little readers who devour books: forget about the concept of the seriousness of books.

This was a tough lesson for me to learn. Children can go totally nuts with books. Before I had kids, I was an avid reader who was casual about the way I cared for them. I didn’t see myself as someone who viewed them as sacred objects. I never had any problem creasing pages, writing in the margins, highlighting entire sentences. And yet, when the little ones reached out for one of my books (or notebooks), my first impulse was to jump on them, like a leopard on an impala.

This seemed to work. The more I treated books seriously, the more my kids ran away from them.

That’s when I stopped to reconsider my reactions. As a mother of two, I know for a fact that children tend to associate “seriousness” with “boredom”. If I was serious about having kids who are excited about books, I was going to have to adopt another strategy. I started to look for ways to disrupt ideas of boredom that affect general perceptions of books.*

In a nutshell, what I realised was that, as parents and educators, we ought to be cultivating excitement around books by genuinely allowing children in as co-creators of excitement.

What this means is simple. Just let them.

Let them walk on books. Let them make houses with books. Let them closely inspect the sound of a tear, the taste of an illustration. If reading and playing means the occasional destruction of favourite pages and covers, then be it. Accept this side effect. Tape, glue, staples, rubbers (and meditation) are your friends. Teach your children how to mend their favourite narratives. Through this performative act, they will renew their love for the story inside the object. The patchwork will stand as testimony for the child’s care and love of books. If you are confident enough, you can go as far as letting them write (or pretend to) on your own books. This, as specified above, is a tough one, I know.

The important thing is: never be afraid to be vulnerable in front of your children. Why? Because, as all life-long readers know, delving into a book, an actual, real book, requires a certain level of vulnerability. What if you don’t like the story? What if it’s too long? What if you get bored? What if it doesn’t fit in your bag or is too heavy to carry around? Let them decide when to turn the pages, or when to close the book and move on. Let them. Each small transgression will bring the child closer to a view of books and stories as highways to freedom.

A doll’s house made of books, by my eldest daughter.

There are other strategies you can use to keep them interested. For example:

1. encourage them to look for parallels between everyday life and the stories you read together
2. create a constant (say, monthly) supply of book novelty by buying books or visiting the local library
3. regularly let your children see you with a book in your hands, and answer their questions about the story you’re reading in a mysterious, excited manner
4. encourage them to draw or paint their favourite character
5. watch the film only after you’ve read the book
6. start a bookshelf solely dedicated to the books you read together with your children
7. keep books in places that are accessible to children

The list could go on. However, if you really want to turn books into nipples for life, I’d say the most important step is to ditch the supposed seriousness of books. Cultivate the practice of freedom. Books are meant to be “lived in”, and enjoyed as objects, literally devoured, as well as read.

“A book picnic” (yes, they are pretending to eat the books here)

• Note: You may think that you are doing a great job shielding your child from these perceptions, and therefore need not continue reading. Let me warn you: these ideas are sneaky bastards. They find their way in every time you use your phone, tablet, computer or TV in front of your little ones, or behind their backs. Especially behind their backs.

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