A book can help with
For the one who says reading is boring, and means it.
Some children decide early that reading is not for them. It’s hard work, or it’s been made into homework, or they’ve been handed books that bored them, and now the sight of one produces a groan. Pushing harder tends to make it worse, since nobody has ever been nagged into loving anything.
What usually works is a book so funny, so gross, or so gripping that they forget they’re reading. That means comics and graphic novels count, and so do joke books, football annuals and anything with pictures. The aim at this stage is pleasure, not improvement, and the improvement follows on behind.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Making it fun
At this age the trick is books that make a child laugh out loud, and ones they can join in with.
No pictures at all, just words, and the grown-up has to read every ridiculous one aloud. Children find the sight of an adult forced to say nonsense hysterical, and it makes the point that words alone can be funny. Guaranteed laughter, which is exactly what a doubtful reader needs.
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Two friends, speech bubbles, very few words, and enormous comic timing. Because the vocabulary is small and the jokes are big, a shaky reader gets the reward without the slog. The whole Elephant and Piggie series is a gift for children learning to read alone.
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Books they can’t put down
Now you want something they’ll race through. Funny, illustrated and fast beats worthy every time.
A wolf, a snake, a shark and a piranha try to become heroes, told in a fast comic-book style with big pictures and short bursts of text. The pages turn themselves, which is precisely the point. Reliably converts children who say they hate reading.
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Doodles, scribbles, different fonts and a very funny narrator, so the page never looks like a wall of words. It feels more like flicking through a notebook than reading a novel. Hugely popular with exactly the children who resist reading.
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Winning them back
An older reluctant reader needs something that doesn’t feel babyish. Graphic novels do this brilliantly.
A cinematic fantasy graphic novel series with a gripping plot and superb artwork, and enough books in it to keep a child going for months. Graphic novels are proper reading, whatever anyone says, and this one hooks children who’ve given up on prose. A good gateway back in.
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Cartoons on every page, short entries and a narrator who is fairly hopeless, which is exactly why children who say they hate reading will finish it. It is not trying to teach anyone anything, and that is rather the point. Once a child has got to the end of a whole book, the next one is much easier to hand over.
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Something to do together
A no-pressure reading log where comics, joke books and audiobooks all count, because they should. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Literacy specialists are fairly united on this: reading for pleasure matters more than what is being read, and a child allowed to choose freely reads more. Comics, magazines and audiobooks all build the same skills.
So carry on reading aloud long after they can manage alone, let them abandon books they don’t like, and keep it entirely separate from homework. And if reading seems unusually hard rather than simply dull, do mention it to their teacher, since something like dyslexia is far better picked up early.
These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.