How do you make a child, who has zero interest in reading anything other than SMSes, tweets, Facebook gooey and jackets of DVDs, start reading books for pleasure? How do you make water flow up river?
Easy. You convince the river that gravity isn’t anything much, give it a pep talk that water can always go upwards if it has the will to do so.
It’s the same easy way about the reading habit. It isn’t impossible, theoretically at least. In real terms, it’s possible only if you, dear parent, decide it’s the most important priority of your life for the next three months.
For starters, limit the use of TV at home. In my own case, my older two kids took to reading because I threw the idiot box out of the house. I got it packed in its original carton and ensured that it be opened only during the summer and puja holidays. That meant no one else at home could watch TV. A small sacrifice to get kids off to reading books. It worked beautifully. But that was in those good old days before 3G, when broadband wasn’t so available.
These days, teenage kids start off by insisting that parents must first walk the talk. Makes sense. You can’t ask the child to read for fun when you are surfing channels for time pass and sneakily watching FTV. You need to be seen reading a book, and discussing its merits afterwards. Of course, it still won’t work. Because kids are happy to let you walk the talk. They will even smile encouragingly, add a few chosen words of praise, and then glare at their cellphones for an hour as they give their Facebook a long facial.
My younger son Prem was every bit as street smart. He resisted every effort to start reading anything except his textbooks, the Sunday comics, and the sports page. If I tried to pull a walk the talk trick, he would assure me blandly that we both were doing what came naturally for us. He concluded that I was reading only because (in those prehistoric times) when I was a teenager there was nothing except for books. He was browsing because in these times, a kid of honour had to download at least a few gigs of apps, music, and other geeky stuff a day, just to keep up with changing tastes. Both were perfectly natural activities and could safely be conducted on a daily basis.
I tried many standard tactics and failed. One day something unexpected worked. I realised he had watched a lot of crime thrillers on TV; sleek shows about detectives and stuff. I roused his curiosity by reading him three quarters of a story from Sherlock Holmes, and asking him to guess the identity of the criminal. To his enduring delight, he was able to match Holmes in reasoning and identify the criminal. I then made him read aloud a story from the Omnibus every day. It was tough going at first, for getting a kid to start reading is like getting a creaky rusty engine to start moving. It oinks and grunts, makes plenty of noises, takes off in fits and starts, then suddenly shuts down.
But with a bit of perseverance and a few designer carrots artfully dangled, the situation can be turned around. Prem actually started reading Sherlock Holmes on his own every day. Then came the turn of the Godfather. Mario Puzo’s classic made superbly into a trilogy by Coppola. The films had been seen 20 odd times by my son. I decided it was high time he read the book. That also worked. To my delight, he read 70 pages in one sitting, and described at length how the book was so different from the film.
Well, that’s a relief. I hope he has turned around. If he hasn’t, I’ll just have to push start the creaky rusted engine inside him some more.