How to Cultivate the Joy of Reading

One thing that has drawn many of us to the Charlotte Mason Method is our love of books. And naturally, we want our children to love books as much as we do. But Charlotte held that our children are their own persons. We cannot and should not force our own preferences onto them, for that would be disrespectful of their personhood. We can, however, use three instruments of education to encourage them in good and helpful paths. Those three instruments are the atmosphere of our homes, the discipline of good habits, and the living ideas that we choose to convey. There is that three-legged stool that summarizes the Charlotte Mason philosophy—atmosphere, discipline, and life, or living ideas. So here is the question for today: How can we help our children cultivate a joy of reading in our homes, in our habits, and in our lives? 

Atmosphere, discipline, life. Let’s look at each one.

Atmosphere

Let’s start by talking about the atmosphere of your home as it relates to reading. Remember that the atmosphere is very much dependent on the attitudes and ideas that influence you every day. How you look at life, at homeschooling, at your child, at your home—all of those attitudes will create an atmosphere that your child will grow up “inhaling,” as it were. So what kind of atmosphere will help to cultivate a joy of reading?

First, read aloud to your child often, every day, even after he can read on his own. Reading books together is a simple and lovely way to form family bonds around good ideas. And the more enjoyable those read-aloud experiences are, the more they will cultivate that sense of enjoyment in reading. You want to connect those positive emotions with the act of reading. So do your best to make it a cozy, loving time together. One mom I know serves snacks during the daily read-aloud time. And don’t overlook the importance of those moments of physical touch when you’re all relaxed and sprawled all over the couch near each other. Recent research has shown that the physical touch that often accompanies a read-aloud—snuggling on the couch, for example—produces neurochemical benefits in the child. Stress and anxiety are reduced, because that physical closeness releases hormones that relax the child and promote trust. It’s not just the contents of the book that is helping your child to grow when you read together; so much more is happening. I highly recommend the book The Enchanted Hour by Meghan Cox Gurdon if you want to learn about it. 

Second, make sure your child has easy and regular access to good books. Your own family library is a fabulous way to provide this access. That’s why we at Simply Charlotte Mason provide book lists and include books by so many different authors in our lesson plans, so you can build your family library with great books. Regular trips to your local library can also provide this easy access to good books. Be watchful, of course. Sadly, many public libraries are pulling the good books off their shelves and replacing them with twaddle and agenda-driven stories. But if you do your research and plan ahead, you can find the gems that are still available. And don’t overlook the living books libraries that are cropping up around the country. If you live near one, be sure to check it out! It’s like a library custom designed for a Charlotte Mason homeschooler. And, by the way, if you run a living books library that’s not listed on Charlotte Mason in Community yet, go ahead and add your listing and let everybody know about your library. It’s completely secure, and it’s free!

The third suggestion related to the atmosphere of your home is to model your own joy of reading. Let your child see you spending enjoyable time with books. Discuss some of the good ideas from those books with your spouse or with an older child, not as a pointed lesson, but as a natural overflow of the ideas that are taking root in your own heart and mind. 

By the way, let me just give you one word of caution here: be careful not to allow your own enthusiasm for reading to put undue pressure on a child who is learning how to read. There is a difference between modeling your joy of reading and pushing your child. Pushing or pressuring a child who is learning to read will not cultivate a joy of reading in him. The more you push, the more easily you can inadvertently feed two negative attitudes in your child: (1) I’m not good at this, and (2) I don’t like to do this. You don’t want either of those ideas taking root in your child’s mind and heart, so yes, model your own enthusiasm, but don’t allow it to become so overwhelming that it turns into pressure or pushing. Neither of those experiences are conducive to encouraging joy.

Discipline

All right, let’s look at the discipline side of things. What good habits can you work on that will help to cultivate a joy of reading?

First, set aside a regular time each day for reading and protect that time. It’s easy to get so busy with activities outside the home that we’re always on the run and don’t have time for reading. But the truth is that everyone has the same amount of time; it’s just a matter of how you choose to use it. So if cultivating a joy of reading is a high priority with you, make sure your schedule reflects that. Make it a habit to have a regular set time for reading.

Then, there are two habits that I think are very important to helping our children learn to read and love to read. Those habits are patience and mental effort. Charlotte mentioned both in her writings, and both are integral aspects of reading. Even if the act of reading comes easily to a person, reading a book requires mental effort. And working your way through the lines of text on each page requires patience, especially if that text is well written. You can’t just scan the page, look for a few key words, and move on.

Which is exactly what our brains are trained to do on web pages. When I spend a lot of time researching on the internet, I find my brain and my eyes trying to use that same default scanning technique on a book page when I finally do open a book, but it doesn’t work. Then I find myself struggling to focus on each word and each sentence, because my brain isn’t used to that kind of mental effort. The new habit of scanning is starting to replace the old habit of careful reading.

Plus, if I’ve been spending my evenings watching videos, I find that my brain tends to slip into a passive mode. It begins to develop a habit of expecting to be entertained without any mental effort of its own, and that kind of habit does not bode well for reading good books. Reading takes mental effort. It can be enjoyable effort—in fact, it is very enjoyable if the book is well written—but it does require more effort than cursory scanning or passive entertainment. So I encourage you to carefully limit electronic entertainment and even internet scanning if you really want to set up a habit of a joy of reading. Effort is not a bad thing. We grow when we put forth an effort, and we enjoy a sense of accomplishment and achievement when we finish something that took effort. So be careful not to sabotage your child’s mental efforts in reading by inadvertently setting up contrary mental habits of little or no effort.

And the same goes for the habit of patience. Reading a book requires patience. The more we deal with web pages and electronic games or videos, the more impatient we get with real life. The constant movement on the screens rewires our brains to expect something to change every couple of seconds, and if it doesn’t, we begin to lose interest. Book pages don’t change. The words on the lines of text don’t move or flash. We have to have patience as we read, and that patience is rewarded in a good book. But a habit of patience is difficult when it’s being sabotaged by a constant onslaught of movement and change on a screen. I’m not saying no screen time at all; I’m saying be careful and use technology wisely.

And there’s another way we can inadvertently sabotage the habit of patience in our children. Impatience is all about “I want what I want right now”; patience is about “I can wait for what I want.” We can help our children cultivate a habit of patience by stopping at the end of the reading or the lesson for the day no matter how much they want to keep going. Yes, we want our children to enjoy the book or the lesson, but that doesn’t mean we have to keep giving it to them constantly, with no break or time to digest. Think of it this way: every time you “give in” to your child’s desire to “don’t stop, keep reading,” you are reinforcing a habit of impatience, of “I want what I want right now.” If that child is enjoying the book, that’s great! He won’t stop enjoying it if he has to wait until tomorrow for the next chapter. In fact, he will probably enjoy it more, plus he will have a delicious expectation of something to look forward to in the meantime. Just because your child wants something right now doesn’t mean that’s what is best for him. 

So be careful of binge reading and of feeding the “I want it now” and the “I want it easy” neuron paths in your child’s brain. In the long run, those will undermine a joy of reading. There are a lot of benefits in helping your child develop the good habits of mental effort and patience.

Life

We’ve talked about how you can encourage a joy of reading in the atmosphere of your home and in the discipline of good habits. Now let’s turn our attention to the content of the books themselves, to the life—or living ideas—they bring to your child. 

And that’s the first criteria: choose good books. Make sure they convey living ideas, not just dry facts. Good living books are usually written by one author who has a passion for her subject and conveys it in a story well told using well-put sentences. The ideas of the narrative shape your child’s thinking about life and influence who he is becoming. The ideas also nestle in your child’s heart and grow, continually looking for other related ideas. So it is an ongoing relation, not a once-and-done event.

The second criteria is to give your child a variety of good authors in the books he is reading. Variety is important. Just as with food, there are so many different options available, you can taste a lot of different foods in order to find some favorites. Too many children say, “I don’t like books,” when what they mean is “I don’t like the books I’ve read so far.” Not every child will have the same preferences when it comes to styles and authors. But if you offer a variety of books, and—here’s the key—make sure they are all written by good authors, your child will have a much greater opportunity to find an author or a style that resonates with him. Variety is a key.

Let me just insert a word of caution here. I read and review hundreds of books, and I have noticed a trend in recent years that I want to bring to your attention. It seems like more and more of the books these days are being written by an author who has an agenda, rather than an author who has a good story. Be careful in choosing what books and ideas you feed your child’s mind and heart.

Then one more suggestion: As your child grows older, begin to give him a choice in what he reads during his leisure time. You will still be choosing school books, but as he discovers what style of writing he connects with and which authors are his favorites, he will enjoy his leisure reading time much more if he can choose. Not all children are ready for that freedom of choice at the same age. It takes some discretion on your part. We recently did a post on this topic of supporting your older student as he walks through this process.

You know, it dawned on me the other day that a joy of reading does not necessarily equal the speed or even the quantity of reading. Sometimes it’s easy to assume a child does not enjoy reading if that child spends most of his time outdoors. Somehow we think that if he really enjoyed reading, he would do it all the time. Some kids are like that, but enjoyment is an inner attitude. You can enjoy something even if it’s not your top passion. Does that make sense? Persons are multifaceted; we can enjoy many things. So the goal is not to raise a child who sits with his nose in a book all day every day. No, in a Charlotte Mason education you are seeking to help your child develop relations with a wide variety of people and things around him. Some of those relations are formed through good, living books, but other relations are formed through time in nature and working with your hands and calculating and designing and singing and playing and creating. The key is in the attitude toward books, not the quantity or speed with which they are consumed. Yes, your child might enjoy time outdoors more than reading books, but that doesn’t have to mean that he finds no enjoyment in books. It doesn’t have to be either/or; it can be both/and. 

So do all you can to encourage an enjoyment of books through the atmosphere of your home, the discipline of good habits, and the selection of books that give living ideas. For once that is set up, it will be a source of joy for life.

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