My child is not reading!
A parent wrote that she felt her child wasn’t reading books and asked what she could do to get her to read more.
Her child is 6 years old.
The answer to the second question is simple. If the child sees an environment of reading books in the house, i.e.
The child will end up reading sooner or later.
The idea is not to force the child to read and associate reading with a feeling of being forced. But the central idea is to create an environment where reading naturally happens.
So, this is easily solved.
What is difficult is to understand why the parent feels this way in the first place. What happened which led the parent to feel, "ohh my child is not reading?"
So, I asked her that.
She said that her mother had seen another child of the same age reading a big book. For the last 3–4 days, the child’s grandmother had been saying to my friend, “Arey, our beti doesn’t read. That boy who is in her class is reading a big book.”
This was the start of the thought. Comparison. Brought about in this case by a well-meaning grandmother.
And this FOMO passed on to my friend, the mother.
“The other child can do this. Why is my child not able to do this?”
This led to the mother sitting with the child in the next few days, trying to read a book. Before a difficult word, she would stop and say, “Arey, I am not able to read this. What is this word?” And the daughter would step in and say, “Mumma, this is what the word is. You don’t even know this.”
So, the mother started to feel, Ohh, my daughter knows a little bit.
As her mind calmed down, she could explain to herself that she had chosen a school for her daughter that does not put pressure on reading and starts formal reading only after the age of 6, which is a fabulous time for the child to start absorbing text. As she reflected, she started to calm down. Her FOMO became less.
But the actions of the past week with the grandmother had already left an impression on the child. The child said to the mother the next day, “Mumma, my English is becoming bad, isn’t it? Maybe because I am speaking Hindi nowadays.”
The mother wisely said to her daughter, “No, beta. Not at all. I also thought so, but then I was sitting and reading with you, and I felt, my daughter knows so much. So, you learn English and read at your own pace. And Hindi is a beautiful language. Just like you are learning to cycle nowadays and balancing on both sides, similarly, you can learn both languages. Don’t worry about it.”
Comparison with others is at the root of a lot of the fear we feel for our children. This, combined with the fact that as a generation we are physically and mentally less present for our children, is a toxic combination.
But it is not too difficult to remind ourselves that our child is okay the way he/she is.
And if anything has to be changed in the environment, it should be because we want to do something that aligns with the values of the family, rather than trying to change our child to match the agenda of the world.
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