Daniel T Willingham - Raising kids who read: what parents and teachers can do

Daniel T. Willingham

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Baby reading Jose Manuel Gelpi diaz | Thinkstock

Kids reading Jacek Chabraszewski | Thinkstock

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Copyright 2015 by Daniel T. Willingham. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and is on file with the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-118-76972-0 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-91150-1 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-91158-7 (ebk.)

For Trisha

Daniel Willingham is professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1992. Until about 2000, his research focused solely on the brain basis of learning and memory. Today, all of his research concerns the application of cognitive psychology to K16 education. He writes the Ask the Cognitive Scientist column for American Educator magazine and is the author of Why Dont Students Like School? (Jossey-Bass, 2009) and When Can You Trust the Experts? (Jossey-Bass, 2012). His writing on education has appeared in thirteen languages. He earned his BA from Duke University and his PhD in cognitive psychology from Harvard University. His website is www.danielwillingham.com.

I received useful feedback from Helen Alston, Karin Chenoweth, Tracy Gallagher, Fred Greenewalt, Lisa Guernsey, Michael Kamil, Margie McAneny, Mike McKenna, and Steve Straight. Special thanks to Lauren Goldberg, Kristen Turner, and Shannon Wendling and to seven anonymous reviewers, each of whom provided detailed comments on the entire manuscript. Gail Lovette generously offered consultation throughout this project. David Dobolyi did yeomans work on the survey reported in the Introduction, and Anne Carlyle Lindsay created many of the figures. My thanks, as ever, to Esmond Harmsworth for his unfailing support and sound advice, and to Margie McAneny, who took special care with this project. Most of all, I thank Trisha Thompson-Willingham, my parenting lodestar; her wisdom informs much of the approach outlined in this book.

Were going to start this book with a quick thought experiment. Suppose you have a teenaged child. (If you actually do, so much the better.) Surveys show that the typical teen has about five hours of leisure time each weekday. How would you like your teenager to spend those five hours? To provide a little structure, Ill give you six categories of activities among which the time could be allocated. (Note that with six categories, equal time to each activity is fifty minutes.)

Have your answers? You can compare them to the results of a survey I conducted of three hundred American adults. Ive also depicted the actual number of minutes that teens spend on each activity, according to the national American Time Use Survey (). For reading, the hoped-for amount among my respondents was 75 minutes. The actual time American teenagers spend reading is 6 minutes.

. Wishes versus reality in teenagers leisure time. Darker bars show how our survey respondents hoped teenagers would spend their leisure time. Lighter bars show actual leisure time spent, according to the American Time Use Survey.

Source: Daniel Willingham.

The purpose of this book is simple. Parents want kids to read. Most kids dont. What can parents do about that?

Of course, some kids do grow up as readers. The numbers in are a little deceptive because they are averages; its not that each teenager goes home from school, reads for six minutes, and then puts the book down. Most kids dont read at all, and a few read quite a lot. Can the parents of those readers provide us with any guidance?

In my experience, most of those parents have little idea of how their kids ended up as readers. A conversation I had with an editor at the New York Times is typical. I mentioned I was working on this book, and he told me that his eighth grader was the kind of kid who had to be reminded to step outside every now and then to get a little fresh air, so devoted was she to whatever book she was reading. When I asked what he and his wife had done to foster this passion, he laughed heartily and said, Not a damn thing.