Accidentally Raising Readers
Unintentionally creating habits of book-love
by Melissa Woodruff
As a parent, I have always desired to instill good and healthy habits in my children. I want them to have better habits than me. I want them to make better choices than me. I have invested so much time and energy in so many different areas to get them on board with these good habits and choices. I buy them bright-colored water bottles, hoping they will drink more water if they love them. I buy and make food with better quality ingredients hoping to give them healthier options and higher standards when they’re older and can make more of their own food choices. We take our kids to church and study the Bible with them as part of their homeschool day. We talk through all of the emotions and how to regulate and process them. I work so hard to do all of these things with the simple hope that some of it just might stick in the long run.
So when my mother-in-law was visiting recently and asked me some questions, I was a little stunned. “How have you convinced your kids to love reading so much? All of them, given a pile of books and some free time, will sit for hours reading. Even the little ones who can’t read—they will stare at the pages and re-tell the stories that you have obviously read to them over and over again. Or they will bring books and ask to be read to. None of my kids were like that when they were this young, even older. I never thought to teach them to love books. How did you do it?”
The thing is, I haven’t worked at this at all. I haven’t set out to do any intentional hard work or made any plans for habit forming when it comes to reading and enjoying books. I haven’t intentionally guided them into how to choose books or even to pick books over other things at all. I have only ever put books in their hands. The only forethought at all was sharing with them all the things that books have given me my entire life. The excitement of a new story. The escape to new worlds. The joy of meeting new characters between every page. I have loved books and reading my whole life, so naturally, I put those same stories in front of my kids.
As parents, we do want our kids to make good choices and have good habits, but we also have a desire to share with them all the things we love—especially the things we loved as children. For my husband this has meant sharing chess and Star Wars. For me, it’s been books. But I didn’t do it on purpose.
I shared books with my kids because it was fun for me. It was completely selfish. By sharing stories with my kids, I am able to re-live the discovery of new worlds and characters all over again through the eyes of these tiny humans that have been entrusted to me. I get to open their eyes to adventure, fantasy, mystery, love, friendship, diversity, adversity, and so much more.
But none of it has been intentional. It was completely and utterly, by accident. We go to the library often, because this mama needs a break and to get out of the house sometimes, and because I love the library. We happen to have an amazing library system in our area with fun events all the time. So we go. They get entertained and I can rest in the presence of the very stories I have loved all my life that they are now getting to experience for the first time.
I have friends who are authors and who also love Jesus. I know what their stories provide, and I know what my children’s hearts and minds are going to be filled with and pointed to when I put my friends’ books in front of my kids. So I buy the books, and then we read the books, and my kids get more and more entranced by words and worlds. I get to support my friends in their endeavors, while also accidentally feeding a habit I had no idea I was feeding.
Bedtime, every night, includes storytime. I’m home with my kids all day while my husband goes and hangs out with grown-ups. So after we have done dinner and bath time, my kids come trudging in loaded down with books from our packed shelves just outside their bedroom. They all pile up in one of my boys’ beds and listen while their daddy uses the most ridiculous voices for all the characters, making them come to life right in from of them. All the boys in my house, including the epic voice actor that is my husband, look forward to this time every day.
Again, mommy gets a break, and daddy gets story time snuggles. It’s [almost] entirely selfish.
My almost 13-year-old asks me often if she can come sit beside me in my bed and read. She doesn’t usually want to talk, but she wants to be with me, her reading her book and me reading mine. Sometimes she feels just on the brink of being too cool to hang out with mom. But then, just when parenting a tween feels like the hardest thing I’ve ever done, books slide in and give us space to have the time together so many parents long for. I wasn’t intentional about any of this, but man am I thankful for it.
As a parent, I think all of us who love and find solace in books want to share that love and solace with our children. I have seen so many blog posts or podcast episodes or homeschool conference workshops about how to do just that. But almost 13 years into this parenting journey, I have to wonder if we’re just overcomplicating something so simple. Maybe it really is just loving something so much, with and in front of our kids, that they can’t help but love it too. Maybe it’s not actually that hard to raise readers after all. We just have to walk with our kids off the beaten path to find all the stories that are good, true, and beautiful, and then sit and watch them fall in love.
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“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
Albert Einstein
My earliest childhood memories include pulling large volumes of The Harvard Classics off a shelf with my brother to build cities for our matchbox cars. That in turn led to him reading to me from them. Reading is the best way to inoculate the next generation against falsehoods as well as give them wings to explore the world.
Yeah, this is pretty much how it was in our house. I didn’t set out to “raise readers.” I just loved sharing stories with my kids!