Why don't my kids pick up books on their own?

I originally published this post on July 27, 2021. I’ve edited it a little but have mostly left it as is, so the ages of my children are not accurate, but all of the intention, ideas, and behavior inspired by the original post remain true.

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📫 Questions from you

I received this question from my long-time internet friend Rebecca, who was the very first supporter of this newsletter, way before it was a concrete idea, much less an actual newsletter, but rather just a nebulous desire floating around in my head.

I shared an image of my youngest child on Instagram — back when I posted to my Can we read? Instagram account before deciding it was too draining and detrimental to my energy for writing here — and she immediately DM’d me.

My 4yo, looking at Hazel’s Amazing Mother by Rosemary Wells

While they constantly ask to be read to, my kids don’t pick up books and look at the pictures on their own like this; how do you drive this behavior?

💌 Dear Rebecca,

My answer is pretty simple: I offer my children lots of new books.

Now, I don’t mean “new” as in brand new, not used, from a new bookstore — I merely mean new-to-them.

There are a couple ways to do this, which I’m going to break down into sections of questions to help you think about not only the books you’re offering your kiddos but how and when — two components of driving this kind of behavior that I believe are even more important than the titles you choose.

Where do you keep your books, and how do your kids access them?

Walk around your house in your mind and think about every place — every single place — where you keep books:

• How are they organized?

• How accessible are they to your children?

• Importantly, can they see the covers of the books?

I’ve shared many times about my front-facing bookshelf — one of the Help-Yourself bookstands from Lakeshore Learning (this is the one I have; I got it off Craigslist for half that price) — which I wish I had bought the moment I knew I was pregnant with my first child. It has been that useful and impactful in our home.

The front-facing bookshelf as it looks right now

But before I had this magical bookshelf, I had other ways of creating what the stand is intended to do, which is present titles in front-facing way:

Often I just propped picture books up along a blank space of wall or against a large bookcase, especially when my children were still crawling or spent more of their time on the floor. Now I do this on occasion against the back cushions of one of our couches (I’ve found this to be especially easy when I get home from a solo library trip with some new kids titles and don’t have the bandwidth to rearrange the front-facing shelf — I just prop 5-6 new books up on the couch and leave them for my children to find on their own. 9 times out of 10, the next time I walk by that room I spy a child standing next to the couch or sitting on the windowsill (see the photo that prompted your question), paging through what I’ve left.

I’ve also used gutters from the hardware store — you can see them in the background of the rather blurry shot below (what amazes me about this picture is how few books there are compared to now 😂 ). These cost $20 and my husband’s labor in cutting them down to size for me. There are a million directions online. Do they look like rain gutters? Actually, no. You have to get right up on top of them to really realize that’s what they are. Do they work? Yes. They are sturdy — they can hold surprisingly heavy books — and hold up to a lot of abuse.

I have also offered books using small wooden tabletop easels (the kind that are intended to hold up a book/hold open a cookbook, or, you know, as an actual easel) in unexpected places — or cheap plastic bookstands, either on bookcases we already have, or on random surfaces.

Other places I have left books for them to find: on their pillows, on their placemats to be discovered in the morning (especially helpful if I am hoping not to be awake at that time), on their carseats/in the car, on their desks.

I just keep giving them books, constantly, in whatever ways I can think of.

(This is where I want to repeat, again, that these are not new books in the sense that I have gone out and bought them for this purpose — sometimes they are books that I have recently bought, because I am constantly buying books and there are always new-to-them titles somewhere in our house, but more often they are books from my storage shelves that they perhaps haven’t seen in awhile, or books from the library. It is entirely possible to create a constant flow of books in your home without spending a dime. I do spend dimes — many, many dimes — but that’s because I want to, not because it’s necessary.)

How often do you refresh your books?

Beyond where you keep your books is the issue of how fresh they are to your children. Another way of saying this is, how often do you rotate out the books on offer (do you rotate out the books on offer)?

I’ve found that my own appetite for doing this depends entirely on my children’s — i.e., when they no longer seem interested in the titles on the front-facing shelves, if they are not bringing them to me to read, if I don’t catch them sitting and looking through them on their own, then I know it’s time for a refresh.

Some areas need this more often (the Lakeshore shelf is by far the most demanding, as it is their most-utilized reading nook, so I try to add 2-3 new titles there at least bi-weekly and change out the whole thing every 4ish weeks), some far less so (the gutter shelves require far less attention; I add a few new titles whenever I come home from a book sale but change out both shelves entirely only every 3 months or so). The distinction here is that these spots dedicated to motivating my kids to pick up books and look at them are not storage areas — they are meant to be changed and changed frequently.

Thinking of these areas kind of like store window displays, the purpose of which is to entice customers to stop and look and hopefully come inside and buy something, has helped me utilize them — sometimes I actually put “refresh such-and-such shelf” on my to-do list, a little because I am neurotic, yes, but more because I see it as my job to foster a love of reading in my home, and this is one way I do that.

What kind of books are you offering?

I know you are an involved and diligent parent, so you know what your kiddos are interested in at every age and stage: use that information! Look up all the books about frogs, fairies, riding bikes, the weather cycle, whittling, Vikings, baking cookies, insert-whatever-here in your library system, put a pile on hold, and leave them in a place your reader/s can’t miss. Do this again and again and again.

I often provide my children books to assist in/be part of their pretend play — if I notice that they’ve been playing superheroes for a week straight, superhero books magically appear in our house. We have a nature table stocked with field guides that they regularly use to play adventurers — the books go into their little backpacks alongside binoculars and magnifying glasses and they head outside to do whatever adventurers do, and when I take a peek to see what they are up to, sometimes I find they are facedown in one of those books for whatever reason their play requires. I offer these books without a word and without any expectation of use — if they do get used, great, if not, NBD.

Of course, changing seasons as well as upcoming holidays and events are also opportunities for providing enticing reading material. Not that birthdays need more hype when one is little but I’ve ratcheted up the anticipation, for better and worse, a few days ahead of birthdays by leaving a pile of birthday books around — something that is all the more special and worth-sitting-down-for because those titles only come out for a week, twice a year.

“Looking books” — which I wrote about for the second time earlier this year — may also be relevant here.

What really matters

My 4-year-old is much more inclined toward picking up a book and looking at it on her own than my 7-year-old. Maybe there is something there about learning preferences, reading preferences, how each processes information, how curious they are — I don’t know.

This is to say, the most important part of your question wasn’t the question at all but rather the part where you mentioned that your children are “constantly asking to be read to.” Don’t overlook that. That matters a whole heck of a lot.

Take a look at how you’ve got things set up in your home, try a few new ways of offering books to your children, but remember that you are doing a great job raising readers whether your kids end up picking up books and looking at them on their own or not.

Keep reading to them, and then read some more.

Sarah