RECENT NEWS: MODEL READING FOR CHILDREN, AND FOR YOURSELF

Common sense tells you that it’s going to be easier to sell reading to children if they have parents who are avid readers. Research does, too.

Rick Riordan, whose novels have motivated large numbers of kids to pick up books, recently wrote a short essay on the Wall Street Journal blog Speakeasy, where he opined that “all children can become lifelong readers.” He listed four essential ways to make that happen. Number one? “Model reading at home.”

That means not only reading books to your children, but reading books to yourself. “If the parents are too busy to read,” wrote Riordan, “it’s a safe bet the children will feel the same way.”

Sounds so true, but what Riordan is asking parents to do is something that can be difficult for adults today. And it’s not only because we are busy.

Think of the places where people used to read a magazine, or pull a paperback out of a purse or a backpack. In doctor’s offices and on public transportation, in laundromats and coffee shops, more and more of the people who are reading are doing so on handheld devices and laptops.

Looking at a screen is an activity we don’t need to model. Onscreen entertainment is intrinsically exciting. We don’t have to persuade children to like candy, either.

Of course, kids could be reading online, just as adults do. But that’s hard to monitor, and there is a good argument being made, in books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, that the kind of reading we do on computers is a radically new kind of reading, and it is changing our very malleable gray matter. Think of the effect on younger brains, so much more plastic.

Maryanne Wolf, an expert on dyslexia and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, co-wrote an article in Educational Leadership a year ago, in which she and Mirit Barzallai express their concern over the possibility that digital learning is having a negative effect on children’s literacy.

They are afraid that students are not acquiring the tools necessary for "slower, more time-consuming cognitive processes" so critical to "deep reading.” Those tools “propel comprehension” and “include inferential and deductive reasoning, analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection, and insight.”

“The expert reader needs milliseconds to execute these processes," note Wolf and Barzallai. “The young brain needs years to develop them.”

Wolf and Barzallai argue that the very skills that we need online, such as evaluating the credibility of sources, are ones that are hard to learn online. It’s a medium that is inherently distractible.

Books, however, require the kind of focus that nurtures deep reading. The page is simply the page, demanding complete attention. With nothing for readers “outside the text,” they are forced to “grapple with the text and apply their earlier knowledge as they question, analyze, and probe.”

If there is a great value in insisting that kids devote time to reading old-fashioned text, there are also benefits for their elders. David Ulin, former book editor of The Los Angeles Times, has just written The Lost Art of Reading, about his own battles to counteract the distractions of screen time. In an identically titled earlier piece in The Times, Ulin admitted his own susceptibility “to the tumult of the culture, the sound and fury signifying nothing.”

“These days,” Ulin wrote, “after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page.”

I think he’s touched on something to which most of us can relate. And I think most of us also identify with the accompanying sense of uncomfortable jitteriness Ulin feels: “the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it's mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.”

By making the effort to read books, Ulin believes, we can find respite from that anxiety. Such reading, “by drawing us back from the present…restores time to us in a fundamental way.” It’s “an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage.”

So, returning to Rick Riordan’s number one way to insure that our children become lifelong readers, let’s look at deep reading, the sort of reading we do with books, as something that is not only good for kids, but good for us, for our community, and for the larger society.

To help children read, help yourself. Think about what you want to read, go to the library or a bookstore, get books, and put them where they are as accessible as your digital devices. And then, although it won’t always be easy, follow Ulin’s advice and “try to make a place for silence.”

Show your kids the rewards you can find in the quiet act of contemplative reading found with a good book.