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How to help kids hate reading

Please read this newspaper for 20 minutes every night until you have finished the entire issue.

Use a timer. Record the date and number of articles you read each day, and the reporter. Please also indicate the topic of the article and its genre: opinion, news, feature story, etc. If keeping that kind of log sounds like a way to turn one of life’s remaining pleasures into a chore, why are we making our kids do it? When I asked parents on Facebook for their feelings about schools requiring reading logs, it was like asking the Mitch McConnell Fan Club about Nancy Pelosi.

A typical response: “Hate hate hate reading logs!”

Another parent: “My son hates them. They only pressure him to read books he can read quickly, instead of books that challenge him.”

This kind of torment might make sense if it had the effect educators hope for: instilling the habit and love of reading. But does it? This is a question studied by Sarah A. Pak, a student and research assistant at Princeton. She assigned half of a group of suburban students to a mandatory reading log group and the other half to a “voluntary log” group. Then she surveyed their motivation to read before the experiment and two months in. The result?

“Students with mandatory logs expressed declines in both interest and attitudes toward recreational reading in comparison to peers with voluntary logs.”

As Pak noted, the issue is intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. When you’re intrinsically motivated to do something, you are going to work hard at it and enjoy it more. When someone else is making you do something it becomes a drag. To free their children from this, some parents have gone so far as to resort to subterfuge. “I would use multiple pens and pencils,” Erin Lee, a mom confessed, “to create the appearance of not having completed the entire thing in one sitting.”

Perhaps even the author of this article has done the same. Perhaps, then, it’s time for a national “Fall Off the Log” campaign. After all: Reading is fundamental. But reading logs are not.

Lenore Skenazy is a nationally syndicated author.

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