Why Children Don't Read and How to Change That

I will never forget the first time I picked up a ‘real’ book. I was five years old, stuck on a long car trip with my family and bored. I was grasping at straws trying to find something to do when I noticed a small, red book on the floorboard. I picked it up and flipped it to the front. The golden letters reading Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone jumped out at me and immediately I opened it.

That was the beginning of the end. It took me a year to work out all the words in that book, but once I did there was no turning back. I devoured every book, every ingredient list, and every magazine article I could get my tiny hands on. I turned into a miniature bibliophile. I was a lucky one. I got introduced to reading early on in life and my family facilitated my ‘addiction’.

But not every child enjoys reading like I did. A quick survey of a high school classroom will reveal that over half the class doesn’t enjoy reading and if you ask an entire school the results are liable to be the same. But why? What makes the difference between a person who will devour a set of words and a person who runs away from a book like it’s the plague.

The most common reason is a simple one that most people over look: a gross lack of confidence.

It’s not uncommon to see children (kindergarten age and up) to be ostracized from class because they can’t read as fast as other, or they can’t pronounce the words, or their teacher tells them that their opinion of the book is the ‘wrong’ opinion. It may not seem like it, but these practices greatly ruin a child’s self-esteem and can lead to them swearing off books forever.

Humans by nature look for praise and encouragement and when kids don’t get it from their teachers or their parents they soon come to the conclusion that what they’re doing isn’t worth their time if nothing is coming in return.

But it is. Reading is one of the single things besides speaking and writing that a person can carry with them throughout their life, ensuring success. It’s a talent that’s amazing to have, and people don’t realize that because they’re too busy thinking that they aren’t good enough to read a giant book, or pronounce words like ‘hypochondriac’ just because someone cut them down when they were young.

This is an easy thing to fix. All we have to do is give help to children in the reading department. It’s as simple as giving a child a colored sheet to read through so that the glare from the white page doesn’t hurt their eyes; letting them read at their own pace and not the ‘schools’ pace; not separating students into ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ groups; congratulating them when they finish reading something as simple as a stop sign.

All we have to do is give out one extra complement to change the future between a person and a set of books forever.