She paid her kid $100 to read a book. Experts say results may vary
Positive encouragement — but not pressure — is key to forming healthy reading habits, experts say
Mireille Silcoff loves books. Her home is filled floor to ceiling with them and, as an author and journalist, she's always reading or writing one. But her eldest daughter doesn't read for fun.
Since the 12-year-old got a cellphone, Silcoff says she's been glued to it. And despite her efforts to make getting a library card sound exciting, or offering to buy her daughter any book she wants, the Montreal mother says she simply can't win over social media apps — which are addictive by design and harm young people in particular.
So, out of desperation, Silcoff says, she resorted to cold, hard cash — offering her daughter $100 in exchange for reading Jenny Han's bestselling young adult novel The Summer I Turned Pretty in a month.
"I needed my daughter to know that … there are other ways that you can be alone with your ideas," Silcoff, who first wrote about the experiment in the New York Times, told The Current's Matt Galloway. "That you can feel somebody else's ideas other than resorting to the phone."
Her daughter finished the first book in a mere two weeks, then asked for the second in the trilogy. She later read the third as an audiobook. Though her daughter has returned to her phone as a primary pastime since completing the series, Silcoff says she got her money's worth from the deal.
"As far as I'm concerned, the plan worked. Who knows where she'll end up [as a reader] when she's 15 or 16 or 30 or 50 years old," Silcoff said. "For now, I have someone that knows what a novel can do because it's happened to her."
Rewards don't work
Silcoff says she'd suggest the tactic to any other parent trying to pass on the joy of reading to their kid. But while experts understand the battle with technology, they aren't so sure her blueprint is the best way to engage kids in books.
"I definitely understand parents' frustration," said Vivian Howard, a former professor at Dalhousie University whose research focused on reading for pleasure.
Howard says rewards for reading, like summer library programs that offer prizes for finishing a certain number of books, are nothing new. But she says reading for pleasure should be intrinsically motivated — motivated by the child's own desire, not an external factor. She fears that the offer of a large reward for reading transforms the pastime into "something very transactional," which shouldn't be the case.
Dan Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and author of Raising Kids Who Read, says rewards can be effective in getting kids to perform a targeted behaviour — but agrees that they're unlikely to help spark enough genuine enjoyment in reading that it becomes a habit.
"What you're gambling is that … you get them to read solely for the hundred bucks, but then [they] discover, 'My God, I love reading. This is fantastic," Willingham said. "That could happen. It's just it doesn't very often."
Willingham points to the research on incentivizing kids to read, which indicates it doesn't move the needle much. Some older research suggests that rewards can have a damaging effect on intrinsic motivation for reading — though newer analysis suggests the evidence is mixed.
Lots of teens aren't avid readers
Howard says it's important to note that lots of kids stop reading around the time they hit middle school and pick the habit up again in adulthood.
A national survey from 2017 conducted by Scholastic found that half of kids between ages six and eight said they read five to seven days a week, whereas only a quarter of kids ages 15 to 17 read that many days per week. While the data is seven years old, it provides one of the most up-to-date snapshots of kids reading behaviour in the country.
When it comes to adults, the Canadian Leisure and Reading Study 2023, published by non-profit organization BookNet Canada, found that 49 per cent of Canadians said they read or listen to books weekly, while 31 per cent do so daily.
And the drop in reading might not be a bad thing, according to Howard.
"If the teen decides they're just not going to read for a few years, I don't think that's the end of the world," she said.
There's only so much positive encouragement parents can give before it starts to do more harm than good, she adds. Sharing that you're worried about your teenager's reading habits only sets up a "losing battle" for parents, Howard says, as kids that age want to assert their own independence.
If you've tried other strategies to get your kid to read and they haven't worked, Howard says, "it doesn't mean it's gone forever, and it may simply mean that for this period of time, it's not fulfilling a need."
How can parents encourage reading?
Willingham says modelling a good relationship with books as a parent is important — but it goes beyond simply reading in front of them.
Instilling a love for learning, by taking a new route home or buying something from the grocery store that you've never tried, for example, might be more powerful according to Willingham.
"After a lot of exposure, they internalize that reading is an important part of [learning]," Willingham said. "Because if you're interested in learning new things, reading is about the best way there is to learn."
Teacher-librarian Wendy Burch Jones says letting kids read what they want is also key, which is why the shelves in her library are plastered with all kinds of subject material.
If the end goal is getting kids to read, parents shouldn't be strict about the kinds of books their kids pick up, she said.
"Reading is reading is reading," said Burch Jones. "Whether it's magazines or manga or, you know, a graphic novel." She also says technology shouldn't be seen as the enemy of books. Audiobooks and ebooks still count as reading, she adds, and might make the pastime more accessible to people who struggle to get through a paper book.
And if the situation is more about reducing screen time than it is about building a reading habit in particular, parents can always limit access to their kid's electronics, Willingham says. This allows kids to have agency over their free time by allowing them to do anything that's not scrolling.
"If you want them not to be on their phone … sometimes, like, it is that simple," Willingham said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Interview with Mireille Silcoff produced by Susan McKenzie
