Chances are, if you spend long enough in a conversation with another parent, you’ll eventually stumble upon a “hot button” topic about which you (politely) disagree. We all have different parenting philosophies, come from different backgrounds and cultures, and prioritize different things. We have strong and sometimes opposing opinions about everything from discipline to sleep training to birthday party etiquette.

However, there seems to be unanimous agreement on at least one point: we all want our children to be readers. I have yet to hear a fellow parent say, “Reading? Yuck! No thanks. I don’t want my kid to like reading.” (Or at least, I haven’t met a parent yet who is willing to say that out loud to the school librarian!)

Reading at an All-Time Low for Adults

We all want our children to read, both for proficiency and for fun. The numbers, however, tell a different story about what we ourselves are modeling for our children in terms of reading behaviors. Reading for pleasure among American adults has been in steady decline for decades, and is now at an all-time low. In 2004, roughly 28% of Americans age 15 and older reported reading for pleasure on any given day. By 2017, that figure had fallen to 19%. In fact, as of 2018, a quarter of American adults say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in any format (print, electronic, or audio) in the past year.

If we hope for our children to be on a journey toward becoming readers for life, it’s incredibly important for them to see us, their parents and teachers, as readers too. The biggest obstacle to this is, of course, time. By far the most frequently cited reason I hear from adults for not reading regularly is simply not having the time to do it.

Working Reading into Your Daily Routine

I don’t have a magic wand to wave that will give you an extra half hour each day to curl up with a book and a cup of tea. What I can do, though, is provide some tips and ideas for how you can work reading into your daily routine so that it becomes a habit.

1. Always Have a Book with You

Much to my husband’s chagrin, the passenger seat of my car is often buried under a pile of library books. I try to always have a book with me, just in case I find myself with an unexpected opportunity to read. Whenever you are waiting in the school dismissal line, arrive early to meet a friend for lunch, or are waiting for your child to get out of soccer practice, that’s a great time to knock out a few chapters.

2. Take Advantage of “Edge Time”

Many days, the reality is that you just won’t find a huge chunk of time to sit down and read. Instead, it might be ten minutes stitched together here and there. We all have those small awkward windows of time in between meetings or after-school activities, and if we are being honest, much of that downtime is gobbled up by the thing that’s probably in your hand right now: your phone. It’s easy for five minutes of scrolling Facebook or Instagram to turn into twenty minutes. No judgment whatsoever—it’s not you, it’s the algorithm. However, I issue you a challenge: check your “screen time” statistics in your phone settings, and see if you can cut your social media or “play” time in half next week. Set time limits on your “go-to apps” so that you get a reminder when you’ve spent your allotted time that day, and then move on to a book—maybe eventually the book will be the thing you reach for in the first place! What a powerful message that will send to our kids when they see us standing at the kitchen counter squeezing in a few pages before it’s time to load into the car, instead of reaching for our devices.

3. Find your Reading Tribe

Joining some kind of reading community will help motivate you and keep you accountable, whether that’s a book club or a virtual community like Goodreads, which allows you to “shelve” books you have read or plan to read, rate books and write your own reviews, and connect with others to discuss books. (Here is an open invitation—I would love to be your friend on Goodreads! Find me here.) I get so many ideas for books I want to add to my own to-read list from my Goodreads friends’ reviews. Goodreads also has a Reading Challenge feature that allows you to set an annual reading goal and track your progress throughout the year—extra motivation for the competitive spirits out there!

4. Get to Know Yourself as a Reader

Perhaps you already know what genres you enjoy or even have a handful of favorite authors—wonderful! Read the books you enjoy. When you get bored or find yourself in a rut, try something new. Maybe you have no idea what genres or authors you like, and have always relied on someone else to recommend books to you—that’s okay too! Reflect on what you liked and didn’t like about each book you read. Each time you read a book and assess how you felt about it, you get to know yourself better as a reader—and your intuition for choosing books you’ll enjoy gets more and more honed. Finally, don’t be afraid to give up on a book. If you’ve given it a fair chance (I have arbitrarily determined this to be 80 pages) and you’re not looking forward to picking it up again each time you set it down, it’s time to move on. I have forced myself to finish books I didn’t like just for the sake of finishing, and the only thing I regretted was all the other books I could have read instead in that amount of time.

5. Think Beyond the Book

We often associate “pleasure reading” with “hardcover literary fiction reading” exclusively, which is unnecessarily limiting. Nonfiction books, biographies, and memoirs count. Self-help books count. Children’s books and teen books count. (Pro tip: if you really like to fly through books quickly, give young adult books a try! They’re for grown-ups too.) Electronic books count. Graphic novels count. Magazines count. Newspapers count. Audiobooks during your evening commute count.

Like most habits, creating a habit of reading for yourself and your family takes time and commitment. Carving out time in the day for reading, even among competing and more pressing demands, is a very real struggle. There may be weeks, months, or even years that the habit slips away from you a bit. Be gentle with yourself—books make for very patient friends, and they’ll be ready when you are.

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About the Author

Carly Squadroni

Media Center Director 

csquadroni@stanleyclark.org