How to raise a lifelong lover of literature

Your kid need not get a gold star for reading. All you need to do is make reading fun

Anovelist recently told me that, before having kids, she came up with a brilliant plan. Instead of punishing her child for misdeeds, she would instead order her to read a book. How better to turn a timeout into something productive and positive? She excitedly informed an experienced parent about her plan who told her point blank: “That is the worst idea ever.”

This novelist now laughs at her naivete. “Can you imagine if I had done that?” she said. “My child would have hated reading.” So that much is clear. Do not punish your child by making him read, not even if he shoves his baby cousin unceremoniously off the swing.

But there’s a more surprising corollary: Do not reward your child for reading either. That’s right. Just as reading shouldn’t be a punishment, it shouldn’t be rewarded. It shouldn’t be work and it shouldn’t be required to earn time for play. Reading isn’t something to plough through determinedly, accounting for each title.

This isn’t because reading isn’t important. It’s because it is. Reading is not only fundamental to academic achievement, it’s also crucial to developing other measurable skills like executive function and social behaviour. We are all agreed that reading makes you more knowledgeable and a better learner. What’s becoming more and more clear is that it also makes you a better-adjusted, better human being. All of this is why schools push reading so hard. That’s their job. But it’s not parents’ job. Schools may be the place where children learn to read; home can be the place where they get to read. For parents, the goal isn’t to push and or to grade and or to affix a gold star. It’s to help children realise that reading is the reward.

Intrinsic motivation is key

Most parents have absorbed the idea of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. Both get you to do things, but extrinsic motivation — external forces like financial rewards, academic honours and parental praise, or punishment and deprivation — are less powerful than intrinsic motivation, which is when you try hard because you want to. Intrinsic motivation is the real key to long-term personal fulfilment and success. By emphasising how terribly important reading is, well-intentioned parents risk turning it into something obligatory, depleting the activity of its inherent delight and joy. Reading is itself a privilege, an advantage and a pleasure. Let’s treat it that way.

Does your child want to stay up late? Let him know that if he wants to read in bed, he can go to sleep half an hour past bedtime. Otherwise, lights out at 8pm. Rather than set up the Wii as a reward for putting in time with a book, separate the two entirely. Let your child see your appreciation of literature. Share copies of your own treasured books from childhood. Allow her to see how special it is to write a book and how cherished those books are by other kids their age — or older. Children’s books authors are rock stars among avid readers; take your child to a reading and let her buy a copy and have it signed.

Above all, do not give up when your Harry Potter-mad book fan morphs into a fair-weather tween glued to YouTube and then an appallingly resistant adolescent. Remember: The vast majority of kids still manage to get from picture books to adult literature.

■ Pamela Paul is an American writer who currently serves as the editor of The New York Times Book Review.