Opinion | I Paid My Child $100 to Read a Book

This summer, I paid my 12-year-old daughter $100 to read a book. As far as mom maneuvers go, it was definitely last ditch and the size of the payout was certainly excessive. 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. She’d read books for school, but getting her to do that was like pulling teeth, and on her own she’d read a few graphic novels and listened to the audiobooks of the “Harry Potter” series. None of those activities became a gateway to any habit of what I might call classic deep reading — with two eyes in front of paper, and nothing else going on.

When I faced this truth a few months ago, it felt like a parenting failure. 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.

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 — conveying the importance of reading shouldn’t be hard. We all understand how reading enhances the fabric of our experience. Yet I found it weirdly difficult to communicate any of this to my reading-reluctant daughter. She claimed to dislike reading. Furthermore, she didn’t care to like it. And she didn’t see any of this as a problem. Lots of her friends, she explained to me, just “weren’t into” reading. I realized that if I wanted to communicate the joy of reading to my child, I had to clarify what the joy was for myself.

Certainly, my daughter’s having landed a smartphone last year — a secondhand iPhone with a zillion parental controls and time limits baked in — is part of the problem. Before the phone, I had a child who was like a gregarious Tigger, squealing with delight at something as simple as a new dessert cooling in the fridge. Post-phone, I had a monosyllabic blanket slug who wanted only to stay in her room with the blinds down, door closed, under a duvet, palming that little rectangle as if unhanding it would make her social life disappear. If it wasn’t her friends or it wasn’t her phone, it was only one thing: “boring.”