Cultivating a Love for Reading

Cultivating a love for anything seems like a tall order. You certainly can’t force someone to like something. And if you can’t force a smile from your seven-year-old with asparagus, can you really expect to entice her with a book? And is it worth all the effort if some kids “just don’t like to read”?

It is (and asparagus is worth the effort, too). Let me address the why first and then deal with the how.

Why?

Cultivating a love of reading in kids isn’t just about books. It isn’t even about increasing their brain activity, as reading aloud apparently does.¹ It goes much deeper. In fact, it goes right to the heart of God. God is all about words. But it’s not just that he uses them to communicate. That’s true—we’d know nothing of God if he didn’t reveal himself to us. But God uses words to do more than impart information; he uses words to change us. He himself is the Word (John 1:1), spoken by the Father and carried to us in the Spirit. In the depths of God’s being, a word isn’t something; it’s someone. That Word became a script on the pages of history and wrote us into himself. Our eternal salvation depends not simply on knowing words about God but about having the Word of God inside us, as real and life-giving as our thudding heart.

Human words matter because the divine Word matters. That divine Word isn’t just something we read; it’s someone we commune with. It’s someone who changes us, who directs us, who never leaves us (Matt. 28:20). When it comes down to it, a single Word of God tells us who we are, why we’re here, and where we’re going.² A single Word of God changes us. Forever.

Now, wed that truth to the practice of reading. How did you and I learn about this life-giving Word that reorders our lives, this living Christ? Paul set out the logic in Romans 10:14. “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” This verse doesn’t just highlight the importance of preaching; it also reminds us of the necessity of communication. And what is reading if not communication? We learned of Christ because we heard. And reading is hearing with our eyes and understanding with our hearts. We have trouble grasping this because we think words are “just words.” But as the Great Word carries us to eternity with him, human words are meant to carry us beyond themselves, beyond the symbol and into the truth, where life originates (Jesus, as the Word, is both the truth and the life; John 14:6). C.S. Lewis put it this way in his An Experiment in Criticism, “Every piece of literature is a sequence of words; and sounds (or their graphic equivalent) are words precisely because they carry the mind beyond themselves. That is what being a word means.”³ We’ll come back to that last part later. For now, just remember that words built the bridge that carries us to Christ, the eternal Word. Apart from hearing, apart from reading, we’d know nothing of Christ.

And if God can use words to bring us to eternal salvation, can’t he use them to do a host of other things inside us? Can’t he use them to develop our minds and character into the pen strokes of Christ’s person? In fact, isn’t it through words that God is most likely to work, given the primacy of the Word who is God?

So, why should we cultivate a love of reading in our kids? Because one Word from God has changed everything inside us and because God is going to keep shaping us through words. In fact, each of us can be thought of as a little word saved by the Great Word. Put to poetry,
One Word given, many words saved.

God’s speech heard, many unslaved. One Word read, all souls escape. Words taken in, every soul shaped.

How?

We can know why cultivating a love of reading is important theologically and developmentally, but we hesitate when it comes to how. What follows is a short list of practices that will position your child to love reading.

1. Show your kids your passion for stories. Kids are mimetic. They observe and follow (at least until they’re teenagers). When they see that you have a passion for reading, they become curious. And when you share that passion with them, relating your favorite details and characters from the books you read, it spurs them on to check out books for themselves. Passion for stories can be (and should be) contagious.

2. Develop a practice of reading out loud. Reading aloud isn’t just for toddlers. Kids of all ages can enjoy it. This may mean you need to work on your narrator skills, but that can be a lot of fun. Your kids won’t judge you for trying to read passionately; they’ll thank you for it. If they’re able, you might even have your kids read aloud with you so they can add their own personal touch.

3. Plan an event around a book reading. When our kids finish a long book or a series, we have a party following the main themes. They help us plan food, decorations, and activities all based around the book. It gives the kids something to get excited about, and it pulls them deeper into the story, even after they’ve finished it.

4. Use audiobooks. Our kids love getting into a good story, even if we’re not the ones telling it. And let’s be honest: some people are naturally gifted narrators. Let them bless you. Hearing stories supplements reading them. It can also give you a break from reading as a parent. You may even find you love a good audio book as much as they do.

5. Connect reading to life events. Children may need help connecting literature with life. Be intentional about making regular connections for them. For a while, whenever one of our kids was having an attitude problem, we’d say, “Don’t be a Eustace” (from C.S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader). If we saw someone who seemed to be hoarding, we’d call the person a dragon (Tolkien’s The Hobbit). Our garden pests were called thwaps (Peterson’s The Wingfeather Saga). And when someone did something selfless for another person, you might hear us say, “Hey, that’s just like Janner, remember?” (also from The Wingfeather Saga). Show your kids how the truth of stories intersects with the truth of their own lives. Soon enough, they’ll start doing it for themselves.

Loving the Storyteller

With persistence and enthusiasm, you can cultivate a love of reading in your kids. And that’s going to serve them in more ways than you can count. And it taps into something powerful in them, something that will grow with time and undergird their faith: they are storied creatures. They came from the Word, they’ll return to the Word (Rom. 11:36), and everything that happens to them in the middle will be understood through stories.

Let me end by returning to an earlier quote. C.S. Lewis said that being a word means carrying the mind beyond itself. But we are all words of the eternal Word, and so our love of reading can carry others beyond ourselves and to the Word himself. A love of reading can and should lead to a love for Christ, the source of all stories and the one who put us into his story. In a way, cultivating a love of reading is cultivating a love for God, the grand story maker. In the end, we all sit at his feet and listen.