What Will Make Children Read Today?

What Will Make Children Read Today?

In the mobile-based childhood, seeing a book in the hand of a child is a rare scene. Book reading is fast becoming obsolete. However, the need to read has become even more important. The complexity of the world is increasing. What impacts our life has become far more complex to understand. In this complex world, reading is one of the tools that helps us understand this complexity and navigate it.

Barring a few exceptions, children are not willing to replace mobile phones with books in their hands. The interesting phenomenon is that even parents and teachers, who themselves do not take an interest in reading, are keenly interested in developing reading habits in their children. It shows that reading still holds an intrinsic value. The problem is how?

For long, it has been believed that creating a print-rich environment is important for children to pick up reading habits. Middle-class parents took this suggestion seriously and created a print-rich environment for their children. Still, children are not picking up books. I think the understanding of the print-rich environment and its impact on reading was valid in the pre-mobile phone period. Now, the availability of mobile phones has almost neutralized the impact of a print-rich environment.

While struggling with this on a personal front, I came across a talk by Yogendra Yadav, where he says: don’t expect children to read, read to them. Well, for middle-class working parents, this is far more difficult advice to put into practice. Creating a print-rich environment is still easier, but reading every day to your children requires a high degree of discipline and the availability of time.

I have modified this advice a bit and have started listening to audiobooks with my daughter. Well, this is not easy. She often refuses. Then I ask for five minutes of her time, set a timer for five minutes, and we start listening. For the last 40 days, we listened to a book titled Matilda. I found the book amazing; still, my daughter never agreed to listen to it for 10 minutes. On my requests, she sometimes agreed to listen for six minutes. We somehow managed to complete it in 40 days. I thought she would get hooked, but that didn’t work. She resisted starting a new book. When I insisted, she asked for a break. After a one-day break, we have resumed listening to another book by Roald Dahl, The BFG.

Selecting a book for a 10-year-old was a big challenge for me. If mobile phones are the problem, solutions too have to come from there. AI has been really helpful in this. Matilda was recommended by Google Gemini, and I found it to be a perfect choice. The storyline and characters are amazing, and so is the narrator.

I don’t have a breakthrough in understanding what can create a reading habit in children. I have brought here some of the efforts that I am making. The digital world has unsettled our previous understanding of how children learn. A series of new research is required in almost every field. Just as a print-rich culture is no longer a sufficient condition for children to pick up reading habits, as I discussed in this piece, I believe the solution will also have to come from the digital world. The digital world has changed the paradigm, and in this new paradigm, the solutions to problems will have to be found in new ways.