This summer, I paid my 12-year-old daughter $100 to read a book. As far as mom maneuvers go, it was definitely last ditch and the size of the payout was certainly excessive. I can’t say I am proud — but I am extremely satisfied. Because the plan worked. It worked so well, I’d suggest other parents of reluctant readers open their wallets and bribe their kids to read, too.
My daughter is a whip-smart kid, definitely smarter than I was at 12. But until I resorted to bribery, she’d never read an entire chapter book for pleasure. She’d read books for school, but getting her to do that was like pulling teeth, and on her own she’d read a few graphic novels and listened to the audiobooks of the “Harry Potter” series. None of those activities became a gateway to any habit of what I might call classic deep reading — with two eyes in front of paper, and nothing else going on.
When I faced this truth a few months ago, it felt like a parenting failure. Even though we’d read many storybooks when she was younger and we live in a house stuffed with books, I’d not managed to instill one of life’s fundamental pleasures in my kid.
Just before the pandemic, a depressing federal survey revealed how much reading for pleasure had dropped among children. Almost 30 percent of 13-year-olds said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, a substantial increase from the 8 percent who said the same roughly 35 years earlier. Given that screen time among children also increased significantly during the pandemic, it’s fair to conclude that leisure reading is an increasingly endangered pursuit among children.
For those of us who are lifelong readers — who value our night stands stacked with teetering towers of books; who hold in our minds like friends the ideas and characters we’ve collected over the years from the printed page — conveying the importance of reading shouldn’t be hard. We all understand how reading enhances the fabric of our experience. Yet I found it weirdly difficult to communicate any of this to my reading-reluctant daughter. She claimed to dislike reading. Furthermore, she didn’t care to like it. And she didn’t see any of this as a problem. Lots of her friends, she explained to me, just “weren’t into” reading. I realized that if I wanted to communicate the joy of reading to my child, I had to clarify what the joy was for myself.
Certainly, my daughter’s having landed a smartphone last year — a secondhand iPhone with a zillion parental controls and time limits baked in — is part of the problem. Before the phone, I had a child who was like a gregarious Tigger, squealing with delight at something as simple as a new dessert cooling in the fridge. Post-phone, I had a monosyllabic blanket slug who wanted only to stay in her room with the blinds down, door closed, under a duvet, palming that little rectangle as if unhanding it would make her social life disappear. If it wasn’t her friends or it wasn’t her phone, it was only one thing: “boring.”
Have you ever tried cheerfully to tell a nearly-13-year-old enduring a couple of parentally imposed phone blackout hours to pull out the old watercolors set? Or maybe try origami? Unless you want your hair to instantly fall out from teenage eyeballs laser-hating you through tiny slits, I’d suggest don’t.
But I held a candle for reading. Because I could see that what my daughter was looking for, like so many her age, was escape. To me, that felt developmentally appropriate. The problem was that the easiest way for her to find escape was to plunge into the addictive chaos of her smartphone.
So I campaigned. I told her she needed to read because novels are the best way to learn about how people’s insides work. She said she could learn more from watching the people she followed on social media, who were all about spilling their insides.
I said books offered storytelling. She said, “Netflix.”
I said books taught history. She said, “The internet.”
I said reading would help her understand herself and she said, “Um, no thank you. I’ll just live.”
I promised, extravagantly, that I’d buy her all the books she wanted and construct bookshelves in her room, so that she could see the spines of all the books she loved from her bed. She said, “Mama, welcome to your dream.”
I could not win our debates, I realized, because few of my daughters’ arguments against reading seemed wrong to me. Yes, reading is a way to broaden your universe and discover new worlds — but so is the entire internet. So these discussions, which annoyed both of us, would inevitably whittle down to me wheedling about cognition and attention and how reading is “good for you.”
That’s not why I wanted my daughter to pick up a book. It wasn’t about optimizing her brain function but about being privy to a certain subtle magic. You know when an author sums up a feeling you didn’t even know you’ve had, and a hundred lightbulbs go off on the top of your head in a kind of epiphany? I wanted her to have a chance at feeling that. As Neil Postman wrote in 1982 in “The Disappearance of Childhood,” a screen-based medium like TV or video can’t create this kind of relationship because, by its nature, the medium must fill in all the blanks for you. Books leave space for blanks — and for the internal invention they can inspire.
So I decided to cut through all the reasoning with a cold, hard practicality: cash. I told my 12-year-old I would pay her $100 to read a novel. She said, “What? Really?”
Then, of course, she said yes.
I canvassed friends with teenagers about what book would work to ignite her reading desire. While some weirdos suggested things like “The Little Prince” and “Wuthering Heights,” the book suggested most often by people who know my daughter was Jenny Han’s “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” which had been turned into a popular Amazon Prime series that my daughter had watched and loved.
I brokered the deal: $100 if she finished the book within a month. We then embarked on a beach holiday, along with my boyfriend, to a romantic Greek island — an extended event involving bathing-suit-clad middle-aged bodies so mortifying to a 12-year-old that it was better not to look up. Perfect!
The holiday was eight days long, and before the seventh day was done, my daughter had finished the book. When we got back home, she asked for the sequel, then finished that one in about two weeks — at no extra charge.
Will this lead to her reading “Little Women”? To tearing through “Catcher in the Rye” and “White Teeth”? Will it result in a long reading life full of teetering night-stand stacks of books that she will come to see as friends, teachers, cheerleaders and balm for whatever her troubles of the day may be?
I don’t know. What I do know is that my daughter now has $100 worth of new Sephora items that I’d spent the past year refusing to purchase. I also know that together, we finally opened a new portal for her to the printed page: a quiet personal place that I imagine — I hope — will serve her for a lifetime. That feels like the best money I ever spent.
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