Earlier this week an interviewer asked me for some tips on encouraging kids to read.  I gave her my off-the-cuff response, but the persistent little topic has stayed with me all week.

This is a tough issue for some parents, because reading is so critical to education.  Too often, we push our kids to learn to read–to understand how the letters on the page form words–rather than teaching our kids to love to read, which I would argue is an entirely different goal.

When kids love a story, they eventually want to connect the dots.  They want to understand how to make those words for themselves.  For some kids, this comes early and easy.  Others struggle more, in the beginning, but eventually they get it.  We just have to keep reading with them and be patient.

If you’re looking for ideas, you can find a few ideas in the following posts from my archives.   Here are the summaries, and you can click through if you want more info.

1)  We can’t read to our kids often enough.

2)  We can’t read to our kids (and they can’t read to themselves) when they’re watching TV or plugged into PlayStation or blah, blah, blah.  You get it.

3) Pick great books.

3) Keep reading fun.

A final note: I’m a huge fan of Daddy’s Super Summer Reading List, because our kids enjoy reading and look forward to a fun list of new ideas from dad every summer.  However, I’m not a fan of assigning kids who don’t like to read a certain number of books they have to read in a certain amount of time.  It’s like torture for the poor kid.  Instead, I’d choose a great book–a classic, maybe–and read it aloud to that child, whether he’s 7 or 11.  The drawback, obviously, is that reading aloud takes forever.  I read The Cricket in Times Square to the boys a few summers ago, and it took ages to finish.  Everyone was hooked though–all ages!  I’ve found that when kids are engaged in a good story they’re more likely to read a page or two on their own to see what’s going to happen next.  And if I have to choose for them to want to read a page or two, rather than trudging, begrudgingly, through a book I’ve “assigned”?  I’ll choose the wanting every time.