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.
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.
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. It felt like a parenting failure.
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