A year ago, when the world shut down, I did what any reasonable Type-A person would do: immediately crafted a schedule to structure my days with a four-year-old and twin six-year-olds. Included were daily bike rides, schoolwork, free play, regular meal times, iPad time, and 15 minutes of silent reading time.
It was the last one my daughter protested.
“I don’t waaa-nnaaa read,” she would whine, draped like a spaghetti noodle over the couch. “I don’t even like reading.”
“That’s funny,” I would reply, “Because we read an entire Princess in Black book together last night before bed.”
To which she would try to suppress a smile before sighing and then continue on with her grumbling.
We’d get through the 15 minutes. Some days were better than others. It often felt like I worked for almost every one of those 15 minutes.
Let me be clear: it wasn’t that she couldn’t read. She adored being read to and was a strong Kindergarten+ level reader herself. She just…didn’t want to. Maybe she found it overwhelming. Maybe she wasn’t confident in her own abilities. Maybe it was that the world felt upside down.
I did what I could to make silent reading appealing. I combined snacks with reading time. I encouraged her to just look at the pictures; she didn’t have to read all the words. I had small crates of books I’d curated specifically for each child’s interests and reading level. (Bless my early pandemic heart.)
I’m a prolific reader myself. I see memes which say things like “I was the kid who sat up reading under the covers with a flashlight” and feel seen. Books are an enormous part of my life, and all this whining about reading unnerved me.
What if she falls behind? What if enforcing a mere 15 minutes of silent reading time a day turns her off reading forever? What if she never, ever likes reading?
I didn’t always think like this. But in my weaker moments, like during the it’s-day-four-of-this-whining-nonsense moments, my mind definitely went down that path.
It was several months into this schedule, late summer, when I realized she hadn’t whined about reading in…days? Weeks? I realized we’d fallen into a pattern with our silent reading where each kid grabbed a book and I did, too, with 15-20 (mostly) silent reading minutes each morning. I didn’t even know when the whining had stopped. I just knew that silent reading had been a battle I’d dreaded every day until one day, without even noticing…it wasn’t.
How often do we do this as mothers? Catastrophize things in the moment and turn them into life-long detriments. My 2-year-old hasn’t eaten a vegetable in two weeks so clearly he’ll never eat another vegetable ever again…My daughter is so shy she’ll never make any friends…My toddler hit another kid at the park so he’s going to grow up to be a criminal.
It sounds eye roll-y on paper. Yet we do this in our heads all the time.
My own kids have gone through phases where they won’t eat anything green, consistently woken up at ungodly hours of the day, refuse to sit still to write or draw anything on paper, and fought with each other constantly.
And every time I’ve turned it into their palates are ruined, we’ll never sleep past 5:00 ever again, their school career is doomed, they’re going to grow up to hate each other and will never, ever be friends.
Every time, they’ve emerged out the other side to eat a bite of broccoli, slept until the sun peeks above the horizon, drawn pages of pictures at a time, and giggle in each other’s bedrooms for hours with make-believe games that involve some combination of Barbies, LOL dolls, LEGOs and stuffed animals.
It’s hard to see in the moment, when what we’re living feels so immediate and important. To some extent we’ve been indoctrinated to believe if we don’t get this one thing right our children will never be functional adults. That’s what I did with the reading—how often have we heard how capital-I Important these early reading years are? These things, these fights, feel so heavy in the moment. It can be hard to remember that like so many things in our children’s lives, these things are just a phase. This too shall pass.
Here we are, a year later, and this summer I find her reading at all hours of the day. Her preferred reading attire is a fuzzy blanket with a hood that she wraps herself in while she curls up with a book. She lies in bed with a stack of books until I don’t even know what hour of the night. She wandered into my room at 9:00 last night, well after her 7:30 bedtime to tell me, “I read the entire Ramona Quimby book!” and people, I can’t even be mad about it.
Note: I wrote this with average, neurotypical children in mind. Not all kids will grow out of things or be just “fine.” If your child is struggling with reading, math, social skills, or anything else, I encourage you to listen to that mother’s intuition and seek help. We are a family who believes firmly in the power of occupational therapy, mental health therapy, and tutoring. Each metro area school district has several resources available to support children and families which are only a web search or phone call away.
