A year ago, when the world shut down, I did what any reasonable Type-A person would do: immediately crafted a schedule to structure my days with a four-year-old and twin six-year-olds. Included were daily bike rides, schoolwork, free play, regular meal times, iPad time, and 15 minutes of silent reading time.
It was the last one my daughter protested.
“I don’t waaa-nnaaa read,” she would whine, draped like a spaghetti noodle over the couch. “I don’t even like reading.”
“That’s funny,” I would reply, “Because we read an entire Princess in Black book together last night before bed.”
To which she would try to suppress a smile before sighing and then continue on with her grumbling.
We’d get through the 15 minutes. Some days were better than others. It often felt like I worked for almost every one of those 15 minutes.
Let me be clear: it wasn’t that she couldn’t read. She adored being read to and was a strong Kindergarten+ level reader herself. She just…didn’t want to. Maybe she found it overwhelming. Maybe she wasn’t confident in her own abilities. Maybe it was that the world felt upside down.
I did what I could to make silent reading appealing. I combined snacks with reading time. I encouraged her to just look at the pictures; she didn’t have to read all the words. I had small crates of books I’d curated specifically for each child’s interests and reading level. (Bless my early pandemic heart.)
I’m a prolific reader myself. I see memes which say things like “I was the kid who sat up reading under the covers with a flashlight” and feel seen. Books are an enormous part of my life, and all this whining about reading unnerved me.
What if she falls behind? What if enforcing a mere 15 minutes of silent reading time a day turns her off reading forever? What if she never, ever likes reading?
I didn’t always think like this. But in my weaker moments, like during the it’s-day-four-of-this-whining-nonsense moments, my mind definitely went down that path.
It was several months into this schedule, late summer, when I realized she hadn’t whined about reading in…days? Weeks? I realized we’d fallen into a pattern with our silent reading where each kid grabbed a book and I did, too, with 15-20 (mostly) silent reading minutes each morning. I didn’t even know when the whining had stopped. I just knew that silent reading had been a battle I’d dreaded every day until one day, without even noticing…it wasn’t.
Read the rest over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.