by Robin Abcarian
I remember the magnificent moment I realized my niece could read.
She was 6, and had come for the weekend.
It was bedtime and we were reading “Make Way for Ducklings,” the children’s classic about the mallard couple who waddle around Boston trying to find a safe place to raise their brood. After many adventures, they end up on an island in the Boston Public Garden lagoon.
“Now you try,” I urged.
“I can’t read,” she said.
“Just try.”
She sounded out a few words.
“You’re reading!” I exclaimed.
“But I can’t read,” she insisted.
Two years later she moved in with me. Our bedtimes were filled with stories: “Guess How Much I Love You.” “The Day the Crayons Quit.” “Ramona Quimby, Age 8.” “Madeline.”
Now she is 11 and more interested in TikTok than in 12 little girls in two straight lines who lived in a house that was covered in vines.
And while she certainly can read, she really doesn’t like to.
As someone who comes from a family of educators and writers, this is painful for me. To my regret, reading has become one of our most reliable points of friction. (The other two: sugar consumption and screen time.)
“Just read for 20 minutes a day,” I plead.
“I don’t want to,” she replies.
“You have to,” I say.
“Or what?” she asks.
What I want to say: “Or you will never make it in school! You will never go to college! You will work a minimum-wage job your whole life!”
What I actually say: “Or I will take your iPad away.”
“Well, then,” she replies, “how about if I read on my iPad?”
Touché.
***
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” said educational consultant Lori Ann Waldinger when I called to discuss my distress. As digital natives, our children simply have a different relationship with the written word than those of us who came of age in the typewriter era, suggested Waldinger, who advocates for special-needs kids.
“Kids do lots of incidental reading,” she told me. “They may not love books like ‘The Secret Garden’ or ‘Nancy Drew,’ but our kids aren’t wired that way.”
Playing video games is reading, she said. Watching a movie like “Hamilton” with closed captions is reading. Using a recipe to make cookies is reading.
Ann Steinberg, a veteran educator who retired last year after teaching fifth grade English at Westminster Elementary School in Venice, urged me to stop fighting over reading.
“The fighting is never going to be any good,” Steinberg said. “You have to suck it up. I know I did.”
As a passionate reader, she was frustrated when her three children needed a lot of encouragement to read.
“I had to let go of my own interest, desires, whatever,” she told me. “My youngest kid wanted to read nothing but ‘Captain Underpants’ when she was in fifth grade. What the heck? Then I thought, ‘For God’s sake, if this is what she wants to read, fine.’ I thought the stuff was so stupid, but she enjoyed it.”
You just can’t expect kids to sit down and open a volume of the encyclopedia like we did back in the day. Many have probably never even seen one.
“Media and information comes so quickly on the internet, and they are texting all the time,” Steinberg said. “They are used to getting things in compact, quick ways.”
Tech-addled adults are not immune to the curse of the shortened attention span. Unless I am deeply engaged in a subject, I no longer have the patience for those overly long New Yorker stories. That teetering pile of unread books on my nightstand could kill me in an earthquake. How did it get so tall? Because I used to read novels until I got sleepy. Now I snuggle with my iPhone.
