Every parent wants to raise a reader. The good news: most of the heavy lifting happens before a child can read a single word on their own. By the time children are fluent readers (roughly age 7–9), their relationship with books has already been shaped by hundreds of small moments. Here's how to stack those moments in your favour.
Start With Ears, Not Eyes
Before kids can read, they need to love stories. Read aloud every day — not just at bedtime — and make it dramatic. Do the voices. Pause for effect. The goal is not to teach decoding; it's to wire reading into your child's brain as a source of pleasure.
Let Them See You Read
Children imitate what they see. If they watch you scroll a phone but never open a book, "reading" becomes a school thing. Keep a novel on the kitchen table. Read on the sofa where they can see you. Talk about what you're reading at dinner.
Give Them Choice
A child who reads a "trashy" graphic novel they chose is a child building reading stamina. A child forced through a "quality" novel they hate is a child learning that reading is a chore. Take them to the library, let them pick anything, and stay out of the decision.
Read the Series They Can't Stop Talking About
Captain Underpants, Dog Man, The Bad Guys, Wings of Fire — the series children obsess over are gateways, not junk. Children who devour a 12-book series are building the exact stamina they'll later use on Austen and Atwood.
Build a Home Library
Studies consistently show that the number of books in a child's home predicts their future literacy — even after controlling for income and parent education. You don't need a thousand books. Thirty books your child can grab any time beats a monthly library trip.
Read the Same Book 100 Times
Young children ask for the same book over and over for a reason: repetition builds vocabulary, confidence and prediction skills. Read it happily every time. This is how they learn that books are trustworthy old friends.
Match Reading to Their Obsessions
Dinosaurs? Get five dinosaur books. Football? Football biographies. Minecraft? Minecraft novelisations exist and they're fine. Meeting a child where their passions live is the single fastest way to turn a reluctant reader into a willing one.
Use Audiobooks Generously
Audiobooks are reading. They build vocabulary, story structure, inference and attention in exactly the same way as paper books. Pair a long car ride with an audiobook and watch your child fall into a story they'd never have picked off the shelf.
Make Time, Not Pressure
Protected reading time — 15 quiet minutes before bed, a rainy afternoon with a snack and a book — beats nagging every time. If the conditions are right, children will choose reading. Your job is to build the conditions.
Support Struggling Readers With Games
If decoding is the problem, mix in phonics games that make practice feel like play rather than drill. Our free online games include early reading activities that build letter-sound knowledge without any of the shame of a worksheet. Pair them with alphabet worksheets and sight words worksheets for a full foundation.
The Long Game
Raising a reader is the slow work of years, not weeks. Some children click with books at 4; others at 9. Keep showing up, keep reading aloud, keep saying yes when they ask for another book. The children who grow up loving reading almost always had one thing in common: an adult who never made it feel like work.