Six Things Adults Say That Quietly Make Children Hate Reading
The Viking's Apprentice There is a generation of children growing up who can read perfectly well. They can decode. They can comprehend. They can pass the assessments. And given any choice in the matter, they would rather do almost anything else. We tend to blame screens for this. Or attention spans. Or modern life. The truth is much closer to home, and much more uncomfortable. A lot of what makes children hate reading isn't a system or a screen. It's the things the adults who love them say, often with the best of intentions, in the moments when those children are sat with a book. These are the six I hear most often, and the small shifts that change everything. 1. "You should be on a higher level by now." Reading levels were never designed to be a label. They were a teacher tool, a way of tracking which children needed which support, and what kind of practice would help. They were always meant to be private, professional, and temporary. Somewhere along the wa...