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• If they are obsessed with a character on TV, look out for books and magazines about them.
• If your child loves music and rhythm, read them nursery rhyme books when they are young, and poems as they get older. Try the Jump up and Join in books by Carrie and David Grant. Rhyming picture books are fantastic, for example Cats Ahoy by Peter Bently, anything by Julia Donaldson, The Giant Jam Sandwich by John Vernon Lord and Janet Burroway. For older children, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot is great fun.
• If they love interacting with people, then books about families and friendship might click: My Big Shouting Day! by Rebecca Patterson, Dave and the Tooth Fairy by Verna Allette Wilkins, Hubert Horatio Bartle Bobton-Trent by Lauren Child, Dogger by Shirley Hughes, The Most Impossible Parents by Brian Patten, Grandpa Chatterji by Jamila Gavin or Coming to England by Floella Benjamin. For teens, try books such as The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden or The L-Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks.
• If your child loves words and enjoys playing with words and sounds, you could try Silly Verse for Kids by Spike Milligan, Noisy Poems by Jill Bennett, or Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes.
• If your child loves gaming, there are even books about that too – strategy books for older children, guide books and so on. Try the Minecraft books.
• If they are fascinated about how things work, plenty of factual books fit the bill. Try the Usborne See Inside series. Or Egmont’s In One End and Out the Other.
• If your child is logical and analytical, likes to experiment and solve puzzles, then at a young age they might like search and find books. When they get older consider puzzle books: try Logic Puzzles by Sarah Khan, and for teens perhaps mysteries such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, or Mummies: Mysteries of the Ancient World by Paul Harrison.
• If your child is fascinated by the natural world then factual nature books might click. For example Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? by Robert E. Wells, and for the older child My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. Also try books about animals, such as Hammy the Wonder Hamster by Poppy Harris and Varjak Paw by S. F. Said.
• If they love a film or TV series, seek out the book it’s based on, for example The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Tracy Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson.
• If your child is technology mad, see if reading digitally is inspiring for them. Got a teen who loves their phone and texting? Try Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 by David Crystal.
For more suggestions see here.
EXPERT VIEW
Finding the right hook to engage a child in a book is difficult to plan as it may depend on the child’s mood at the time. However, you can validate their interests and personalities by introducing books that reflect their interests and that are accessible for them in terms of vocabulary and sentence structure. This will pay dividends and help with holistic development, not just literacy. Books with characters that a child can relate to can enhance inter- and intra-personal intelligence and those with problems to solve can develop logical thinking skills. Visually descriptive books, with maps and routes, can engage spatial intelligence skills, and traditional goody and baddy books can promote the development of morality.
Dr Amanda Gummer
Help Your Child Love Reading is a book born out of my passionate belief that establishing a love of reading for pleasure is one of the greatest gifts you can give your child. I know my own experience as a mum and that of others I meet in the course of my work bear this out completely. If there is one thing that comes of writing this book, I’d like it to be for parents to realise their involvement really really matters. You absolutely can make a difference to your child’s enjoyment of reading and it will bring your family so much happiness. I wish you every success. Believe me, it’s worth it.
Alison David, May 2014
You may have tangible wealth untold,
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I, you can never be –
I had a Mother who read to me.
‘The Reading Mother’, Strickland Gillilan
Chapter 1: Screen time
EXPERT VIEW
Recreational screen time is children’s main waking activity. By the age of seven, the average child born today will have spent one full year of 24-hour days watching recreational screen media. It’s hardly a coincidence that at the same time reading continues to decline.
Dr Aric Sigman, biologist and psychologist
Lurking behind every parent’s anxiety about reading and school work is the dreaded screen. It seems to hold a magnetic attraction for children (and adults) and has infiltrated our lives at a furious pace and across all age groups.
Our children spend a lot of time in front of screens. There are various studies and statistics bandied around – for instance, an average of 1 in every 12 waking minutes, or 6.5 hours a day (that’s 20 years of your life by the time you reach 80!) are spent in front of a screen. Whatever it is, it’s certainly a lot and in some families it is taking over leisure time completely with the result that there is little time left for other things.
There’s no doubt that the digital world offers our children exciting entertainment, education and stimulation. Children can learn logic, quick thinking, problem solving and strategy from gaming, and much socialising is now done through texting and social media. But I think screen time should be part of a rich and varied childhood and not dominate our children’s lives – certainly if you want your child to do other things, and especially if you want them to read.
Lots of parents tell me they would like their child to spend less time on digital entertainment and more time reading, as well as enjoying other things such as playing outside, getting involved with sport, taking part in imaginary and creative play, enjoying their toys, interacting with other children and so on. In other words, not spending the vast majority of their time in front of a screen.
The truth is that time spent on screen-based entertainment is eroding or even replacing time for other things. Parents I talk to have conflicting emotions about all this. Despite feeling anxious about it they see their children are happy, having fun, socialising with their friends, becoming more and more tech savvy. And that has got to be a good thing in this day and age, hasn’t it? So this is really not an easy problem to tackle.
Spending so much time in front of a screen also means children have become accustomed to immediate entertainment. They are growing up with the instant gratification that comes from digital attractions. This is one of the reasons that reading holds less appeal for children today. The ultimate reward from completing a good book is enormous, but it is not instant – it takes a while and some effort to get there. Watching television or YouTube, on the other hand, is a passive activity. Entertainment is presented fully formed and all children have to do is watch it. Gaming and texting are interactive but are also instant – and responses to actions, such as levelling up, winning a game and responses to texts all tend to come thick and fast.
EXPERT VIEW
Gaming produces a burst of the brain’s reward chemical dopamine, a substance implicated in all addictions. Interestingly, although ‘computer game addiction’ is being increasingly recognised by the medical profession, they do not recognise ‘book addiction’. And while health departments now recommend limits on children’s screen time, curiously they’re not recommending a limit on reading time or number of books kept in the child’s bookcase. There are a growing number of in-patient clinics for computer addiction, yet there are no Roald Dahl rehab clinics. This is because reading is a very different and more timely neurological and intellectual process, requiring far more inference and cognitive work on the part of the developing child.
Dr Aric Sigman
And gaming and texting only really need short bursts of concentration. Reading requires effort and attention to make sense of the text and follow the story. In other words, it requires sustained concentration.
So not only is it less effort to passively absorb TV programmes, watch videos and to play computer games, but also the rewards come quicker. And the more children do these things, the more their brains become accustomed to them, the more they want and expect that kind of entertainment, and the harder it is for them to concentrate for a longer period of time on something like reading without being distracted.
EXPERT VIEW
The moving image of screen entertainment is the perfect medium to produce strong rewards for paying attention to something. Compared to the pace with which real life unfolds and is experienced by young children, screen entertainment portrays life with the fast-forward button fully pressed. Rapidly changing images, scenery and events – zooms, pans and edits – and high-fidelity sounds are highly stimulating and, of course, extremely interesting. Once you are used to food with E numbers and flavour enhancers, real food doesn’t taste as interesting. Modern screen entertainment is the flavour enhancer of the audio-visual world, providing unnatural levels of sensory stimulation. Nothing in real life is comparable to this. Screen entertainment overpays the young child to pay attention to it, and in so doing it may corrupt the reward system that enables that child to pay attention to other things in life, such as books.
Dr Aric Sigman
There is no doubt in my mind that the desire for screen time can be compulsive. It can also become obsessive, and I think it’s not too strong to say that then it is like a drug. In the worst cases, studies have shown that the changes addiction makes to the brain of an internet addict are similar to those of a drug or alcohol addict: X-rays reveal that pathways to the parts of the brain associated with emotions, decision-making and self-control are interrupted. So these addicts might present as being unable to connect emotionally outside a video game, for instance. At the time of writing it’s estimated that 5–10 per cent of internet users are unable to control their usage and are considered addicts. These numbers are small and the point I make is extreme, but the power of screen-based entertainment to hook us is abundantly clear in our daily lives. And other studies have found a significant link between excessive social networking usage and depression.
As a parent, I know you’ll have seen the big negative impact – physically, mentally and emotionally – that excessive screen time can have on your child. All the families I have talked to, without exception, have observed changes in their children’s behaviour after too much screen time, whether it be TV, gaming or texting. These changes range from being mildly obsessive, over-excited or lacking in concentration on other things, through to being moody, bad-tempered, hyperactive or even outright aggressive when told it’s time to switch off the machine.
Children can get fixated when trying to get past the next level in a game, checking social media updates, replying to texts or watching the next instalment of something on YouTube. Like addicts they can lose interest in other things as a result. Think about your own need to keep checking emails or your phone for texts. How hard do you find it to switch off and be still, to concentrate on reading? I know how hard it is for me. It’s the same, if not worse, for children.
EXPERT VIEW
Children are understandably influenced by sensation-seeking and instant gratification without their impulse control being fully developed, and so their ability to self-regulate their own screen time is extremely limited.
Dr Aric Sigman
How screens are used for entertainment in the home is therefore a vital element in your child’s reading development. If you want your child to read for pleasure, you’ll need to give the whole issue a lot of thought, not only considering the negative aspects of digital entertainment, the internet and computers, but also the positive ones.
He plays on his Xbox before breakfast, after breakfast and after school. We’d like him to focus his energies into other things but it’s like fighting a losing battle.
Parents to Jordan, age 12
Reading for pleasure and recreational screen time can coexist. I have met families where reading thrives despite all the distractions on offer, and you’ll be pleased to know it’s not that difficult to achieve, although it does require some determination. If you want your child to read for pleasure you have to limit screen time, both to make space and time for reading and to help your child to focus and concentrate on enjoying a good story.
If there are no rules in place to control the amount of screen time, reading for pleasure will definitely suffer because children won’t have the interest, time, patience or attention span to read a book.
I sometimes think the principles of helping your child read for pleasure are like raising a healthy eater – we realise if we want a healthy-eating child we have to supply the good stuff, encourage them to try new things, offer a range of foods and restrict the bad stuff. We don’t let them eat chocolate until they are sick, or drink Coke until they are ill, but we do let them have sweets from time to time. Raising a reader and managing screen time is the same.
The really important point is that it’s not about denying children screen time but it is about being clear on what is allowed. It’s about finding a balance. Your child needs to know screen time is a treat or a privilege, but not their right to use as they wish. Children don’t know what is best for them, and left without rules they won’t turn off the TV, Xbox or Wii because, as I said before, they do not self-regulate. Screen time will take over if children are free to choose.
I think my nephew thinks all mobile phones are his by rights! As soon as I go through the front door he says ‘Can I have your phone?’ before he even says hello to me. Apparently he says this to all the adults he meets. I know his mum has regular dramas of having to physically wrestle with him to get her phone back. He’s only 3!
Angela, aunt to Lukas
It’s certainly made harder to find balance by the sheer number of devices a child typically has access to. I talked to a dad who likened restricting screen time for his children to holding back a tsunami. He told me that at home they have Sky TV, a PC, a laptop, mobiles, a Nintendo DS, a Wii and an Xbox, and the children are constantly badgering for time on screen, be it playing games or using social media to talk to friends. And technology is developing so fast. If you have a young baby now as well as an older child, you will be aware of the huge difference in the digital entertainment available to your baby. One mum I talked to told me she could see a massive increase between her 15 month old’s gadgets and pre-school apps and what her 8 year old had access to at that age.
So, how do you strike that balance? The most obvious and best place to start is by establishing some basic rules. Marking out boundaries is a positive thing for children – they know what is expected of them and it makes them feel secure. They also know that when they have kept to the rules they have done well. But so many families I meet feel they can’t, or don’t want to, say no to their children about screen time. I think they confuse having rules about it with punishment. When you restrict screen time you are not punishing your child, you are creating space and time to do other things. Rules about screen time teach self-control and discipline.
Our children all read a lot. My wife has a real gift for finding interesting books and we are very strict with computers and mobile phones. If they had no restrictions they would probably stop reading immediately!
Dad to Claire, age 15, Eva, age 13 and Luke, age 7
You need also to establish consequences if the rules are broken: if you have set a limit of one hour for gaming and your child won’t stop at the end of it, you can cut the amount of time when he next uses the machine or even take away the privilege. You are in charge. That is the only time when taking away screen time is a punishment; the rules themselves aren’t.
I can’t tell you exactly what rules to establish because they have to be workable for you and your family. But I can share effective ideas that I have come across in my conversations with numerous families.
Reading will most definitely suffer if there are screens in the bedroom. Research among 4,000 pupils in England found children with TVs in their bedrooms and children who own their own mobile phones suffered significant falls in reading achievement. So, do not have screens in the bedroom: no TV, no computer, no DVD player and no consoles. As your children get older and get mobile phones, make sure they are removed from their rooms at bedtime. If your child needs a computer for homework and works in their own room, consider getting a laptop, so that it can be put somewhere else at bedtime.
EXPERT VIEW
Increasing screen time is about access and consumption. Think about it, if you put a fridge in your child’s bedroom they’re likely to eat more. And if you told them one compartment had broccoli and sprouts, and the other had Ben & Jerry’s, your child is likely to eat more and it won’t be those healthy vegetables on offer.
Dr Aric Sigman
Limit school-day screen time. I met a family who have a rule that says no recreational screen time at all from Monday to Thursday – although of course if the children need to do homework on the computer that is allowed. Their children accept this. I have also met a family who allow their 12 year old 45 minutes in the evening, but only after their homework is done.
At weekends you might want to give a longer time for screens – maybe even up to 2–3 hours at a stretch as a maximum for teenagers. At younger ages you should probably reduce this amount of time but, again, adapt this to your child. Watch how they behave and feel after an extended period of play and change the time if necessary.
Turn off screens (including TV) at least 30 minutes before bedtime to give your child a chance to wind down and to give them a decent amount of time to read.
When you are dealing with very young children who don’t understand the concept of time, using an alarm or timer of some sort can be very useful. You could say they are allowed 30 minutes and when the alarm goes off, time is up. I used this strategy very successfully with my son when he was younger and he would simply turn off the laptop when the bell rang, no questions asked.
For older children who better understand time, it’s very useful to give a 5– or 10–minute warning that time is nearly up.
Make sure that your child asks if they can use the computer or games console before they turn it on. This reinforces that it is a privilege and not a right. You can answer ‘yes’, or ‘no’, ‘later’, ‘yes, for 30 minutes’, or ‘yes, if you’ve done your homework’ – whatever matches the rules you’ve laid down or agreed.
Even if you have no problems restricting screen time with your child at the moment and an informal, ad hoc arrangement seems to work just fine, or if they are young and perhaps not especially keen on digital entertainment as yet, I urge you to think ahead. Imagine your child is young, say four, and from time to time she wants to play on your iPhone. You let her do that and when you say that’s enough she complies. There is no problem. Before long she won’t comply, however, as she finds her voice and more firmly forms her likes and dislikes. Children grow up. So just make sure when you say ‘Yes, you can play on the iPhone’, you give a time limit too. For instance: ‘You can play on the iPhone for ten minutes, then we’ll get the crayons out, or we’ll read a book.’
If you establish house rules about screen time now, you will be well set as and when demands for more screen time come your way, which inevitably they will. Do this and your child will grow up accepting there is no unfettered access to screens.
If your child is older – say age eight upwards – and you are intending to introduce screen time rules, be prepared for the fact that your child may not take it well. How cross they get will in part depend on their age and how long they have been accustomed to doing what you want to restrict. I can only say stick to your guns! Older children may be more difficult to manage but that’s normal because they are learning about life, that things don’t always go their way, and they do have to learn that when you say no, you mean it.
If your child complains that everyone else in their class can play all evening or that their best friend can spend as much time as they like, your reply must be something along the lines of ‘Every family has rules and these are our rules.’ I remember being with a family who had no set rules about screen time and it backfired on them. Their daughter was happily playing on her DS and her mum said, apparently out of the blue, ‘Turn it off, you’ve had enough now.’ Of course, the girl made a huge fuss and there was a family row because she saw it as her mum ruining her fun. Because there was no warning before the time was up, the girl didn’t feel in control. An easier way for all involved would have been to tell her up front that she had a certain amount of time and give her a five–minute warning before the time was up.
Remember that children ultimately like boundaries; they like to know they have been good, and you make it easy for them to be good and be praised by having rules to stick to. To be honest, you will find it a whole lot easier if you set up screen time rules from a young age when children are less rebellious and more accepting. You can then adapt them as your child grows and you will be in a much better position to keep them enforced when they reach their teens and seem to want to immerse themselves in digital entertainment and not much else. If your children are more mature and you think you can reason with them effectively, why not sit down and agree the time limits with them?