Only about one in four adults reads even a single book a month. So why do so many of us still want our kids to grow up loving books?
Surveys on reading habits keep turning up the same answers. Adults who read say they do it for knowledge, for curiosity, for the pleasure of sharing a world with an author. Kids, it turns out, want much the same things — curiosity satisfied, a story to enjoy, a world to step into.
Ask people why they don’t read, and the top answer is almost always “I don’t have time,” followed by “I get along fine without it” and “I don’t know what to pick up.” Ask teenagers who love reading why they got into it, and the answers are strikingly consistent:
- They happened to read a book that was genuinely fun
- A friend recommended something
- They were read to as a young child
Kids who were read to when they were small tend to read more as adults, and score higher on reading comprehension tests. Read more, and you know more. Know more, and you get curious about more. Get curious, and you want to read more still — it’s a loop, and read-alouds are how it gets started.
Reading sits at the center of almost everything else a child learns. Every subject in school starts with reading a page of text.
So how do you actually pass that love of reading on? Telling a child “books are fun” doesn’t do much — it’s like describing a merry-go-round to a kid who’s never ridden one. They need to experience it themselves, with you, before “fun” becomes real to them.
That’s really what a read-aloud is: not a lecture about why reading matters, but a shared experience of it being enjoyable, repeated often enough that the child comes to believe it for themselves.
A collection of my own reflections on raising bilingual kids abroad — without the pressure to get it perfect.