Your child doesn’t read enough. It’s a tough problem that nearly every parent faces. “My child won’t read. What can I do?” They say. “I have told them they have to do it. I’ve punished them for not. I reward them when they do. I even filled their room with books!” the exasperated parent says. “But they just won’t do it!” So, what can you do if your child doesn’t read? The answer is simple: Teach your child to develop a “growth mindset”. Read on to get some ideas on how to do that!
1. Praise where appropriate, criticize when necessary.
The modern world has convinced us that we have to be our child’s best friend. This is only a half-truth. The fact is that no, you don’t have to be your child’s best friend. Instead, you have to be reliable. You have to be trustworthy. You have to have their best interests at heart. Your child has to know and understand this. But most importantly, you have to be the one who is strong enough to guide your child through the process of growing up. This means you give the appropriate amount of praise AND criticism, and clear explanations for each.
When your child does something right, too much praise can cause them to think they don’t need to continue developing themselves. Too little praise will leave them feeling directionless, like they don’t know what they’ve done right. The same goes for criticism. Too much criticism will destroy their confidence, while too little criticism will leave them not knowing what areas they should improve.
In other words, balance is key, and the key to achieving balance is giving explanations that your child can understand as to why they were praised or criticized. You should explain why you think they did well or poorly and how they can do better in the future.
The goal here is creating a growth mindset. Praise and criticism are instructions on how to do learn, improve, and grow.
2. See things from your child’s perspective.
Your child is no different from you. You have motivations, hang-ups, hopes, desires, weaknesses, and so on. So does your child. But, unlike you, your child lacks the life experience to put these things into perspective. They have difficulty understanding how their actions today affect their future outcomes.
You may understand that learning to read well is critical to success because you have the life experience that proves it. You have the benefit of hindsight. Your child doesn’t. Most children don’t even understand why going to school is important, let alone how strong reading skills and developing a growth mindset impacts their lives thirty years from now.
“You have to learn to read so you can go to a good college” means nothing to a young child. Instead of framing the importance of learning to read with abstract concepts like far-future possibilities, frame it in terms of tangible, near-term realities such as; keeping up with classmates, learning new and interesting things by themselves, a fun way to pass the time, learning to make friends more easily (and yes, strong reading skills is linked to better social skills).
Framing your praise and criticism in ways that they can understand will help with this. You know your child better than anyone, so only you can figure out exactly what counts as concrete, near-term reasons to learn how to read.
Help your child understand them.
3. Avoid giving gifts as rewards for reading.
Want to know the fastest way to de-motivate people from developing a positive habit? Offer them money and gifts in exchange for doing it.
Lots of people think that offering money and gifts in exchange for good behavior will motivate them to keep doing it.
It’s not.
Think about it. If your boss stopped paying you, would you keep doing your job for free? For most people, the answer is a resounding NO. Likewise, giving children gifts for reading is like getting paid for work. It’s a transaction. As soon as the exchange of value stops, so does the transaction. Then what incentive does your child have to continue reading? That will do the opposite of teaching them to develop a growth mindset. It will teach them that their academic performance is negotiable, and not something they should actively enjoy and pursue.
What’s going to happen the first time you take that reward away? They will get the sense that the reward is unreliable and perhaps not worth investing in. It could damage their trust in your promise. They will more than likely go find things that offer them instant gratification, like playing with toys or daydreaming.
The remedy to this is structuring an environment for your child that is conducive to wanting to read. Get rid of distractions that offer more immediate-gratification type feelings (toys, TV, video games, etc) and replace them with books and places that are fun and interesting to read in. Even if they can’t read all of the words, you can encourage them to enjoy the process of learning to read and understand them.
Now that you have a few concrete ways to help your child develop a growth mindset, go try them out, then come back and leave a comment to tell me how you did!
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