Encourage Your Kids to Read



Simon Says blog from last Friday touches on the subject of the lack of parents encouraging a group of primary school boys to pick up a book and read.  As he says, it is deemed by both the parents and the boys that reading is boring.  How can these 'responsible adults' declare an important life skill and what may turn out to be a hobby so uninteresting?  It is vital for your childs education and later on in their working lives.

Ever since my junior school years, I have most of the time enjoyed reading.  I've nearly always got a book on the go.  Admittedly it may take me a few months to read, depending on how much the book grips me and what other commitments take my time up.  I've always had the encouragement from home, even though there is a mixed feeling towards books within it.

My mum is an avid reader but my dad has never picked up a book and read it.  For years he has resisted various peoples attempts to get his interest in the written word, apart from newspapers.  Even when he was laid on a sunbed by the pool in Rhodes with mum and some friends next to him, all with books in their hands, he wasn't interested.  To his credit however, he has never stood in the way of mine and my brothers desire of literature and books.  He has asked me about some of the autobiographies that I've read, to see if a particular subject was mentioned, but he's never gone that one step further and borrowed my book to find out for himself.  However, he has never been short of encouragement when it came to following one of mums pastimes.  Again, he understood how important it was for our education.

Like Simon mentioned, I did embrace television and computers (the industry which I am currently employed in), but I have fitted in books at some stage.  I like to think that I've managed to get the right balance between these forms of entertainment.

My earliest memories of reading were making my way through the Roald Dahls books and the Diaries of Adrian Mole.  I currently read autobiographies and 'historical overivews', most of which centre round football (another huge pastime of mine).  I'm not a real big reader of fiction unfortunately.  I have read the odd story but it has to be a real good one.  Now Mrs S. reads fiction all the time.  Before you ask, she's not a Mills and Boon woman, very much a gangland murder type story a la Martina Cole.  I don't share her interest in this genre.  I've always struggled to 'get into' it.

I don't think it is a new opinion that reading is boring.  Take my office at work which is made up of people predominantly older than 30 (my age).  Out of ten of us I only know of one other colleague besides me who reads.  Admittedly a couple of others maybe read when they are on holiday.  They claim that they don't have time to do so.  Maybe this is another reason for not encouraging your kids to read?  They also claim they don't have an interest in books (back to the boring argument again).

For those of us who do enjoy reading, I'd thought I'd share this piece of advice I was given.  It from an ex-girlfriend, someone else who loved her books.  We were in WHSmiths and I wasn't sure about a book I was deliberating on buying.  She told me to pick the book up off the shelf and thumb your way through to a random page in the book.  Now read that page and see if the story grips you.  If does, you buy the book, if it doesn't, put it back as it will be a waste of money.  This method seems to have worked more often than not, probably the only decent peice of advice she gave me.  I don't know however how you would be able to do that in this day in age though with a high proportion of book sales made on the Internet.

I'll round this blog entry off with a note to myself for the future, and to all those parents with young children in the early tages of school education.  The theory that reading is boring is completely wrong.  Make sure you encourage our son or daughter to read as much as they can.  Not only is it important for their education , you may just get them interested in what is probably one of the best past times ever invented that doesn't involve staring at a television or a computer screen.