Dear parents, let your children fall in love with reading

SLOUGH, ENGLAND:

Like all phone addicts, I’m familiar with just about every annoying trend that colonizes social media. If you’re looking for the most annoying thing to see on the internet today, I’ve got a winner: random tips. Whether it’s Facebook or Reddit or Instagram, somewhere in the internet wilderness there will be a proud user who will write “Let’s start a random tips thread. No specific theme, just good advice.”

Excuse me, Mr/Ms Advice Purveyor: normal people don’t turn to the internet looking for random advice. Normal people go online for a long time specific tips for a lot specific problem. No one in the history of the world has ever googled “hit me with some random advice”. They’re googling things like “fire remote won’t work even though I put in new batteries.” Or “how to drain water from a washing machine when the door is stuck”. A quick fix to a real problem: this should be the advice forum.

What advice do teams have to tell you?

When women-only desi groups started tipping, I naively imagined that I might get something useful out of such a thread – maybe something about how to cook a foolproof biryani in five minutes, or a list of appropriate returns to the wedding aunt who has she is rehearsing a monologue about why you are such a terrible mother for not teaching your children proper Urdu. The desi groups, however, were tainted with grave warnings like, “If you were invited at the last minute, you were never part of the plan” and profound lessons (“treat others as you would like to be treated”). It was either that or a lesson in Red Flags and scientific ways to identify them.

You know what I did not find? What to do with kids after you’ve had a baby Red Flag. (Or Green Flag – some women claim to have them too.) If we’re going to get back to his point specific tip, I had to scroll down about a billion comments before I found the only useful parenting tip that applies to every culture on every planet in every solar system: Read to your kids.

Why doesn’t anyone read anymore?

I am surprised that desi parents have so little interest in reading because they are otherwise so passionately devoted to their children’s grades and relative heights. Not for a desirable parent the disgrace of a 7 at GCSE! For those lucky enough that this isn’t currently a problem, the powers that be in 2018 took it upon themselves to rename GCSE grades from letters to numbers. 9 is an A**, 8 is an A*, 7 is an A, 6 is a B, and so on. A desi mother I spoke to told the sad story of her son who scored only a 7 in GCSE maths.

“Then I knew I had to get him a tutor,” he observed with grim determination. “Can you imagine what will happen if he gets a 7 on his real exam?”

To avert such a horror, this particular mother procured a tutor, though the tutor was of little consolation, for it turned out to be a designer in his seventies devoted to academia and even more obsessed with 9s than his colleague. “That boy should study at least five hours every day,” he informed the mother, who swallowed his words as if they were life-saving medicine before placing a large order of Edexcel textbooks. The house was soon piled high with books on circle theorems.

“What do you like to read?” I asked the budding mathematician.

“Right now I’m going through this thing with proofs,” he explained.

I made it clear that I was referring to something less to do with evidence (whatever that is) and more to do with fiction.

“Ah that,” he said. “I don’t read fiction. It’s kind of a waste.”

“I tell him to read, but he doesn’t,” his mother said sadly. “I don’t know why that is.”

Seriously, get a book

I may not be as familiar with proofs and circle theorems as I should be, but I know why kids don’t read: it’s because out of ten parents I asked, six said they let the schools take care of reading. Three said they had to force their children to read on pain of removing screen time. Someone said it was more important to focus on the long division.

“If you don’t get your kids to master long division now,” he warned, “then they’re going to struggle. For life.”

As a bookworm and junior mathematician, I prefer to focus on his teachings Psychology Today, who takes pains to tell us that reading for pleasure promotes a high vocabulary, teaches empathy, and increases concentration limits. However, parents today are reading Psychology Today As diligently as I study theorems and circle proofs, who knows what slippery slope we’re headed down.

Of course, if we’re going to play devil’s advocate here, then my three kids have been read to since birth and are now avid readers, and I’m not sure how impressed I am. Psychology Today it would be with their vocabulary or empathy. For reference, I have a room that contains four bookcases filled with the works of Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Harlan Coben, Cressida Cowell and JK Rowling. These are not books that sit nicely (and neatly) on a shelf. they have been gobbled up, repeatedly, for years. However, I found out this week that one of my kids thinks “attic” has an ak on the end. Another has a casual relationship with commas. Two of them engage in mortal combat for a usurped inch of couch space. All three crafts mean (but woefully misplaced) insults to use on each other at the table. What they learn from books, spelling, punctuation, empathy or the gift of mockery are not on the list. (And, obviously, long division.)

But I have hope. A teenage girl who saw my chick-lit rack gasped and said, “Wow! Did you read all of this? You must be so smart!” I didn’t have the heart to correct her, but if you’re still looking for a reason to bring books into your child’s life, remember this: one day they, too, will fool someone by saying they’re “so smart.” Have faith. Your work will not go to waste.

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