Reading as Work
Writer Mireille Silcoff has done just as the NYT Opinion headline says — bribed her 12-year-old daughter with $100 to read The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han — and I mostly do not have a problem with that. (I know you — or she — didn’t ask, but oh well.) Silcoff admits right off the bat that the payoff is “excessive” (it is) and that she felt like a “parenting failure” when she acknowledged that her daughter didn’t read for pleasure (she’s not).
A lot of kids eschew reading around this age. I remember that I did. No shame in offering an incentive!
Where I diverge with Silcoff is that no way would I pay $100 “to instill one of life’s fundamental pleasures in my kid.” Would I offer up a “prize” of some sort — like a trinket from Claire’s or a pack of Match Attax cards — if my kid was in this phase of not reaching for a book? Absolutely. And I’m sure I did, although I don’t remember specifics. (Reading for a pleasure is a lifelong joy…let’s encourage it.)
Here are some ways that my kids earned $100 during their teen years: serving meals at an assisted living center, working at a daycare, babysitting/nannying, heavy-duty yard work, giving tours to prospective families at a school, providing “customer service” at a gym, primarily in the form of laundering towels. This is very typical, so I don’t bring it up to be like wow, my children are outliers. Instead, I bring it up because these money-earning endeavors are W-O-R-K and they were mostly not “one of life’s fundamental pleasures.”
So I struggle with the idea that learning to read for F-U-N is equivalent work that deserves $100. (Although I do understand that for some, it can be labor-intensive due to learning styles, etc.) Learning to read *well*, however, is cultivating discipline — mostly because it’s not always fun. Excellent literature doesn’t always pull us in straight away. Sometimes important books aren’t page-turners. But the rewards include: a sharpened sense of symbolism and messaging, mental endurance, the ability to decipher language.
I wouldn’t scoff at paying $100 for reading books that fine-tune and develop those qualities — because those are the kinds of skills our society needs.
originally published on instagram