209: How I'm Raising A Book Lover (As A Toddler Mom)

 

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How I'm Raising A Book Lover (As A Toddler Mom)

Hi friends, welcome back to Your Big Creative Life podcast. It's, okay, I see all of these, the topic for this week's episode was inspired by all of these like news headlines I see about like literacy rates are declining, which is its own separate scary issue, but then also like people aren't reading, kids aren't reading, these stats, the number of readers are plummeting, kids who say they enjoy reading, it's plummeting, there's a crisis. And I believe that there is, I don't, think, I mean, I think there is cause for concern. And let's be honest and just admit that book bans are not helping this situation either, the book bans that are happening in so many states in school libraries. But this isn't going to be really diving into the stats. I want to just focus on what I'm doing to raise a reader, to raise a book lover. And then also what my parents did when I was growing up to raise a reader and a book lover.

Obviously, I have one kid who is 2. I am not a parenting expert. I am not a literacy expert. I am not even; she's not even learning to read yet. I am so at the beginning of this journey, which is why I put as a toddler mom in the title of this episode, because I don't know a lot, but I do know some. And this has been something that I've been intentionally thinking about from the very beginning, like since she was born. How do I encourage a love of books in my daughter. Not because it's me, it's an interest that I have and I want her to follow in my footsteps and become a reader and a writer for that purpose. That's not it. And look, she's her own person. She might, I could do all of these things that I'm talking about in this episode and really encourage her to love reading, but she could grow up to not be a reader. And that is fine. I'm not going to force this down her throat when she gets older and say like, you have to read these books or read this certain amount. I have no interest in doing that. So if she gets to be a little bit older and has no interest in books, that's okay. I will probably continue to try and to continue to bring it up and see if there's a different form of books or a different type of story that might interest her because I think it's so valuable for kids and then adults, really. I mean, the research just shows it makes you have empathy. It sharpens your comprehension skills.

There's so many benefits to reading for kids. that I think we can all agree having a kid read is a good thing. So if you have seven kids who are all grown and you have raised seven book lovers, you're probably going to listen to me talk about this in the episode and be like, you don't know what you're talking about, which might be true. But again, it's something that's been on my mind. And I just, every time I see these headlines about like scary stats about kids reading, I just think like, oh, I think maybe I could do an episode talking about my story with this and what I'm doing because I'm going to say, well, I told you we weren't going to get super into stats or anything, but I do just want to mention a couple of things that I found. One, I learned about this article on social media, and then one I found when I was just sort of Googling like stats about this to try to wrap my head around how big this issue really is. So it does look like, okay, I'll link to this in the episode. I'll link to both of these sources in the show notes so you can go check them out for yourself. I looked at a scholastic kids and family reading report. that polls families on kids on like, how often are you reading? What are you reading? Parents, how important have you heard it is to read to your kids? So digital activities for kids have risen since 2018. No shocker there. And then reading frequency, enjoyment, and importance over time have gone down from 2010 to 2022, which is the last year they have on this little source thing.

Significant drop in reading enjoyment as kids, 70% among 60 8-year-olds versus 46% among 12- to 17-year-olds. So, there is this interesting drop off that happens as kids get older where more kids say that they just like don't enjoy reading. And that could be the rise of screens, it could be the rise of iPads and phones, it could be societal pressure if the peer group that they're in, if reading is considered something that's like dorky or you know other kids aren't doing it, then they might be less likely to do it. But one of the things that the report highlights is reading role models, particularly parents, are a strong predictor of a child's reading frequency. Parents play a big role in this. The biggest predictors of reading frequency are having a parent or guardian who believes reading is important and provides books for their child and having people in the child's life that enjoy reading. The other article, the one that I found on social media, then I went to search out and read myself is from The Guardian. It was published earlier this year. And the title of the article is called, It's So Boring. Gen Z parents don't like reading to their kids and educators are worried.

So, the article talks about, okay, let me see. Former elementary school teacher Spencer Russell posed a question to parents who follow his Instagram account, Toddlers Can Read. Why aren't you reading aloud to your kids? The responses, which Russell shared with the Guardian, range from embarrassed to annoyed to angry. “It's so boring,” said one parent. I don't have time, said another. One mother wrote in, “I don’t enjoy reading myself. Others reported difficulty getting their children to sit still long enough for a full dose of Goodnight Moon or Mother Goose. He's always interrupting. My son just wants to skip all the pages. I love reading with my kids, but they request the same book over and over and over.” Parents who struggle to read to their children tend to be younger themselves. Okay, so that gives you the idea of the article, right? Again, you can go check it out. I'm going to link it in the show notes. But look, I will be honest and just say my experience as a parent, yeah, sometimes it is boring. to read the same board books over and over and over again.

But that's just part of it. You kind of have to get through that slog piece of it in order. It's like short-term pain for long-term benefit, which is honestly so much of what parenting is. So, okay, what I want to do in this episode is I don't want to just lecture y'all again, because I'm certainly not an expert at this, but I want to talk about what I'm doing with my daughter. First of all, I'll talk about a couple of things and then I'll and then I'll shift and talk about what my parents did to encourage me to become a reader, which there's a lot of overlap, but obviously my daughter's 2, so I'm not at the stage yet of some of these things. So what I'm doing with my daughter, number one, frequent reading. Since birth, even when it's boring, even when she's pulling a book and wants to jump ahead, like she can do whatever she wants while we are reading. And I've had this mentality from the beginning. When she was fresh out of the womb, days old, I started reading to her because having her propped up and looking at me while I was reading, I've read that that's so beneficial for newborns to look at their caregivers, to look at their parents' faces, to see how they're reading, to hear the sound of their voice. It helps with that connection.

So just the sound of your voice when you're reading something to your kid, that's so beneficial. When she got a little bit older, like baby years before she became a toddler. It was a lot of pulling at pages, wanting to put things in her mouth. It doesn't matter. I still kept reading to her. And I say, I'm talking about myself in this episode, but my husband reads to her a lot as well. Both of us are working on this jointly. We switch off like nighttime routines, for example. So, I will do bedtime routine with my daughter one night and then he'll do it the next night. And both of us read a lot of books to her as part of that. And then just during the day when we're playing, you know, she'll want to take a break and read some books and both of us will read to her. But I'm just talking about my experience. in this episode, so I'll keep it just saying I. Now that she's a toddler, she will sometimes flip pages forward. She'll want to skip pages. She will want me to stop halfway through the book, throw it down, and get a different book. She will want to read the same books over and over and over. She's very into Peppa Pig right now.

We don't really do screen time for her except like maybe an hour on the weekends. Just because we haven't, I don't know, I haven't really found it necessary yet. I know eventually she'll be on screens more. It's just inevitable with kids in school and stuff. But she doesn't have any screens and we don't let her watch anything on the phone. It's just on the TV, like on Sunday afternoons or Saturday afternoons, we'll watch some Peppa Pig. She really likes that. And we have all of these Peppa Pig books that are literally falling apart. They're these really thin paperbacks. Two of them have the covers ripped off. One has the 1st 2 pages missing because she's, we flipped through them so many times. She will get home from school sometimes and say, Peppa books, Peppa books. And she just wants to read her Peppa books. I have read those books so many times. It's not that interesting to me. I mean, it's not interesting in the 1st place. It's a kid's book, right? But I don't care. Like, it's just part of playing with her. I'm not playing with her because I love playing and making things up and using my imagination as an adult.

Playing with a child isn't that... exciting when you're an adult. And it's the same thing with reading, but it's just something you got to do. I do enjoy it more if it's like a new kid's book that we get from the library and I'm like, oh, this story looks kind of interesting. But a lot of it is so basic. It's just not that interesting for adults. But that's okay. That's not the point. The point is not for me to be entertained, for me to like read a compelling story. It's her, she's directing all of this, right? I follow her lead. So frequent reading. Oh, and then #2, I already mentioned, I'm not following my list here, rereading her favorites all the time. Yeah. Number 3 is frequent trips to the library now that she's a toddler. Obviously, we didn't do this when she was a newborn, but we go a lot of Saturdays to the local library because libraries, I mean, they have, our library has like a little play area. There's toys. They have story time every once in a while that coincides with when we're going, like a family story time, which is great. The kids will sing songs and the librarian will read some books. But we just get books that she's interested in. And she's two, so she likes the colors or an animal on the front cover, and she'll just grab it, we'll get a stack, we'll take them home.

But I want to get her used to going to the library to get new books, because it's fun to get new books. It's kind of like kids getting new toys, right? The novelty is fun. So frequent trips to the library. No, she's a toddler. So that's all I'm doing right now. That's it. There was a period where she was like a year old around that age where she didn't really want to, well, actually, I guess it was more than a year. Maybe it was like 18 months, like a year and a half, where it was very difficult to get her to sit still. So we would try reading. We would read for like 2 minutes and then she would want to be off playing. That's fine. But I still kept trying. I would still sit her down. I'd put her on my lap. I'd open up a book. And if it kept her attention for literally 2 minutes, awesome, that's a win. and then she can go off and do something else. I'm not gonna like restrain her and force her to sit and read a book with me if she's truly not into it. But we would just do that over and over and over. And now she's to the point where she will sit, I don't even, we haven't even tested how long she would sit like to read, but it would be a while. Okay, so things that I think my parents did well in terms of encouraging me to become a reader. Reading the same books over and over, which I mentioned already with my daughter, frequent trips to the library, that was the same. We went to the library a lot when I was a kid. I would obviously go to the school library just in school, but then My mom would take us to the library a lot, and it was like just something that we did. It was a part of our routine. It was a part of our life.

It was very normal that I have two younger brothers, so all three of us would get our own stack of books to take home and to take care of and keep track of and then return them. And it was just something that we did. It was very normal. Another thing that they did that really was so beneficial is they let me pick what I wanted to read without judgment. I think this is where, and I even saw this a tiny bit as a librarian, not so much because I, not as much as like a children's librarian, I imagine, or a public librarian. I worked at a college. But I think so many kids get judgment passed on about certain books being better than others from teachers, from parents, from society. I mean, even just look at messaging about like romance novels, be like trashy romance novels or back when chick lit was a thing, just like demeaning literature written by women, right? It's everywhere. I certainly has this as an English lit major in college where it was like, no, certain books are just inherently quote unquote better. and deserving of analysis and discussion, and some are just trashy, fluffy reads. And it's like, I hate that now, thinking about it, but it's just the truth. And I think that starts in elementary school, where kids are, certain books are just fed as like, these are the books to read. And this is what you should be reading. And I think it's like anything with kids. one thing my parents did well is encouraged all three of us, me and my brothers, to follow our interests.

So, they didn't force all of us to do the same activities or sports or music lessons or whatever. They wanted us to do some things. They wanted us to join extracurriculars and do something, but they weren't judgmental about it or said like, oh, you have to do this thing. And it was the same with books. I read, I was a very early reader. Like I was reading, I went to kindergarten reading like Little House on the Prairie books just because I started reading at an early age and I started like devouring books and I wanted to get into bigger stories when I was younger. And that was a problem in early elementary school where I wanted to be reading more advanced books because I had the capability. But maybe my parents felt like I wasn't ready for certain more advanced kind of subject matter, but they never tried to control that really. Partly because they just didn't know. I mean, maybe every once in a while I would read something that was like kind of inappropriate, but it was pretty rare because I was sticking to the children's section of the public library and then I was sticking to what the school library had. So it wasn't like I was really reading anything super bad.

But my parents just let me read whatever. I mean, I went through a massive Nancy Drew phase and I would also read like these Nancy Drew Hardy Boys crossover books. Oh, I was just like so obsessed with them. And there was never any judgment from my parents about like those not being good or I don't know. I even like Sweet Valley High. I read those when I was too young. I was not in high school. Or Sweet Valley Kids. I forget what the younger series was. And there was never judgment from my parents about that. It was just like, it was just a neutral. Every book that I chose to read was a neutral. I think sometimes my mom would ask questions about what I was reading and kind of want, like if I wanted to talk about it, I could talk about it with her. But that's something I want to encourage my daughter to do. When she's reading something, it's like, I want to hear about I want to hear what your experience is with this. Do you like it? Do you not like it? Why?

To really help her read, like to help her reading comprehension, but then also to just help her form opinions about what she's reading and why she thinks that way. And there's something about, if a kid is really into something, I think one of the best things to do is just let them, like, just listen. to them. I don't know, just the experience of talking to a kid who's really into something. It's fun to see them go on and on about it. Yeah, I can get a little repetitive sometimes, just thinking about kids in my life who do that with me, but older kids, obviously, my daughter's not there yet. But I think that's an important thing that my parents did, is it was just like, I could talk about books and go on and on and on, and they acted interested in it, even if they weren't really. My dad's not a big reader. I don't remember him ever reading a novel in my life. He did read some nonfiction, but, and we had some books at home, like some of his books. He had some like philosophy books and stuff too. And then my mom does read fiction. She reads a lot of fiction now. Growing up, she didn't read as much just because honestly, she didn't have time. She had three kids.

So I don't know what she was reading or how much she was really reading, but it's something that she loved, even when she wasn't doing a lot of it because she was so busy. And then the last thing my parents did that I think has helped raise readers is give us books as gifts. It was like we each had our own little collection of books. Vast, the vast, vast majority of the books that we read were from the public library or school library. But we would occasionally get some money to, if there was a book fair at school, we could buy some books or, birthday or Christmas, we would get books that either they knew that we would like. And I was a rereader and they knew that. So if I enjoyed a book series, they'd buy it for me. Or just books that they thought I might like. So I was able to start building a little collection of books when I was young. And that was fun for me as a kid, to just have my own little personal library that I could organize and put on the shelf. Oh my god, can you tell I'm such a book person? It's like thinking about doing that as a kid.

So Yeah, that's really all the tips I have. I mean, they're not even tips. I guess there's things that even if you're not a parent, you probably know intuitively. But I think the part that's really important for me as a mom right now is, yeah, sometimes my daughter doesn't want to read the way that I want to read. Like, we tried to read Velveteen Rabbit recently, which I just love. I'm like at this point where I'm itching her, I'm itching to introduce her to books that I loved, but we're not quite there yet because Velveteen Rabbit is a long book and she will get impatient. So she'll start off, okay, the first couple of pages are fine. And then she wants to flip through to see the pictures and see the rest of it. So we can't get through the whole story, which is fine. We'll get there eventually. But I'm not like letting that stop me from trying again. I'm rereading the same books over and over and over. It's fine. It is what it is. It's been chaotic with her trying to get her to read or be interested in books. It's all over the place when you're a parent to a young kid, a toddler, or a baby. But that's just part of it. It's like you're doing the work now to increase the odds that you will have a reader later. And one other hopeful note I want to end on, I guess, is when I do see those stats that are scary about, oh, kids don't enjoy reading, blah, blah, blah.

 I think about how it was when I was a kid. It was, it like pains me to say this, y'all. It was embarrassing to be a reader. This was not something that I shared with friends. Like I didn't have that many friends in grade school, but like they weren't readers. really. We never talked about books. This was not something that was cool. There was no outlet for me to talk books with other people. And I remember a shift happening when the Harry Potter series came out. So I was, let me look at when the first Harry Potter book came out. I actually didn't read Harry Potter. I didn't read the series until much later. Okay, so the book was published in 1997. I guess that makes sense. I was born in 86, so I would have been like 11. Okay, there was a bit of a shift that happened when Harry Potter came out. I despised J.K. Rowling. I don't want to give her any more credit. But I think it's also important to acknowledge the shift that happened when Harry Potter was published. And if you were younger than me and you don't remember that or you weren't alive when Harry Potter was published, you might not realize this, but it was such a cultural movement with kids. where it all of a sudden became, if not cool, adjacent to be reading the Harry Potter series and to be looking forward to the releases and to be, and then the movies came out and it's like it kind of moved the needle where reading was no longer considered this niche kind of nerdy thing that kids did.

And it brought it a little bit more, it became a little bit more acceptable for kids to read. At least that was my experience where I lived. I'm not going to say that was the case for everyone, but I definitely noticed that as a kid even, that there was a shift that happened after that point. And now I think of how it is with Bookstagram and BookTok and all of these social media outlets for book lovers. And a lot of them are young. I mean, if you look at TikTok, just the user base of TikTok skews younger, there are so many teenagers who are discovering books and reading through social media. I think that's a ******* great thing. I'm so excited for that, actually. That's one of the positives about social media. And it can be easy to focus on the negatives, like those scary headlines about statistics about readers and the negatives of social media generally. And of course, there are tons of them, but that's one bright spot. I think that if BookTalk or Bookstagram or whatever, if they can spread the gospel of reading and encourage kids and teenagers to read, that's an amazing thing.

So I'll end on that note because I truly think that's an incredible thing. And if I had been growing up in an age of social media, maybe that would have encouraged more of my peers to read. I don't know. But I do think it is a step in a positive direction, at least for young women. There's all the stats about how young men are not reading as much, but that feels like a whole separate conversation because there's just a crisis with young boys and, you know, teenage boys and men, honestly, in the world right now. So that does feel like a separate topic. But yeah, that's a good thing. Y'all, we got to take our wins where we can. And I think that's a win for us in this community. So, all right. I hope that was helpful. If you are just interested in this topic, even if you're not necessarily a parent, hopefully that was interesting to hear as, you know, thinking about how we're going to do this collectively and also individually, like on an individual level. And maybe you're just a fun aunt or uncle and you have friends with kids or you have nieces and nephews. Like this is something to think about for them as well. You don't have to be a parent to help instill a love of reading in a kid. I guess I should have said that at the beginning. That probably would have been a good intro to the episode. But anyways. All right, thank you for listening, and I will see you next week.

Katie Wolf