7 Ways To Ensure Your Child Will Hate Reading
Or, at the very least, have a tough time with it.
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Reading is problem-solving, right?
It takes interaction with the text. But also making sense of symbols, sounds, words, and phrases. And that’s not even all there is to it.
You want your child to enjoy reading. Yet if you want it too much, you could turn it into a problem of its own.
Here’s how grownups can mess up with little ones’ love for reading before love even begins.
Overwhelming the child with stories
At first, children read by syllables.
It’s slow, jerky, tiring reading. The voice they hear isn’t enticing. Their eyes aren’t gliding but instead dragging from one word to another.
This is why parents must let children read the same story again, and again, and again. Practice the grasping of more words at a time. And gaining the confidence of smooth reading.
Once confidence over one text is acquired, the child can better understand the story and somewhat enjoy the process.
Force reading a different story every time, and confidence with all the imaginable joy of reading will never come.
Only introduce a new story when the child can confidently read the current story.
Mistaking ability with pleasure
So, your kiddo can read. Congrats! Now what?
Just because he can read doesn’t mean he enjoys it yet. And it certainly doesn’t mean you should push him into reading more and more.
It makes sense that after the basic reading acquisitions (typically acquired in the first and second grades), children may need a bit more time to develop a joy for reading.
This happens because it’s one thing to gain the skill of reading. And an entirely different thing to enjoy practicing that skill.
Drawing intellectual satisfaction from reading will certainly not happen in the first few months of learning it.
