When your child says reading is boring

“Reading is boring” is almost never a review. It is the only short sentence a child has for a set of quite different problems, and the four of them need completely different answers.

Working out which one you are looking at takes about an evening, and it is worth doing before you buy any more books.

One: it is too hard, so nothing is left over

This is the most common by a distance and the easiest to miss, because a child who can technically read the words looks like a child who can read.

Decoding takes effort. If most of the effort is going on working out the words, there is nothing left for the story, and a story you are not following genuinely is boring. The child is not making it up.

What it looks like: they read accurately but flatly, they cannot tell you what just happened, they lose their place, they get tired unusually fast.

What to do: drop the level. Not by a little. Give them something two years easier than the one they are supposed to be on and watch what happens. If a child who “hates reading” laughs at an easy book, you have your answer.

Nobody has ever been harmed by reading below their level for a bit. Plenty of children have been put off for years by being kept above it.

Two: it is somebody else’s book

A child who is handed a reading scheme book, a book chosen for its educational value, and a book their school says is right for them has not chosen a single thing they are reading.

Adults would not put up with this. We choose our own books, we abandon the ones we do not like, and we read things that are objectively rubbish because we feel like it.

What to do: let them pick, and let the pick be bad. Comics count. Football annuals count. The one about slime counts. A book they finish is worth more than five they were supposed to enjoy.

Three: it is the wrong shape for their day

Some children will not read at bedtime because bedtime is when they have least left. Some will not read in a room with a television on in the next one. Some cannot sit still for it and are perfectly happy to listen while doing something else with their hands.

What to do: move it. Try it in the morning, at breakfast, in the car, in the bath. Try listening rather than reading. The format is not the point; the story is.

Four: it is not theirs

This is the interesting one, and it is the one with the most durable fix.

Children who are ambivalent about reading are often not ambivalent about stories at all. They will happily spend forty minutes telling you an extremely detailed plot involving a shark, a submarine and their friend from school. What they have no interest in is somebody else’s story, arriving in a book, with an ending already decided.

What to do: let them make one. Not “write a story”, which for most children is a school task with handwriting attached, but decide one. They say what happens. Somebody else does the writing.

A story you argued about the plot of is a story you want to read, and a child who has spent a week deciding what happens in chapter four has been reading for a week without noticing.

The one thing that helps all four

Reading aloud to them. Past the age you think you should have stopped, and past the age they can read themselves.

A child can follow a story a couple of years beyond what they can comfortably decode, which is where the genuinely good books are. Reading those to them keeps the interesting part of reading available while the mechanical part catches up. That is the whole trick, and it is why “they can read to themselves now” is a bad reason to stop.

Taleium exists for the fourth one. You and your child decide what happens next, chapter by chapter, and it writes it in the words for the age you choose, which means you can pitch the story exactly where their reading actually is rather than where a scheme says it should be. Then it reads it back to you, which covers the rest of them.