How to get your kids reading — even in the age of screens and AI

Looking for a present for a young child? Amid the cultural maelstrom of 21st-century America, there’s a gift that’s better than anything in the toy aisle.

Nothing will have a bigger lifelong impact than instilling a young person with an intense love of reading. And since March is National Reading Month, there’s no better time to start.

While the brain candy of colorful screens is a child magnet, there are ways parents can compete with such allure.

You may have seen this bumper sticker: “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” That may be true for some children, but in most homes, a mother or father is a child’s first and best teacher.

Blessed with encouragement

I was blessed with a mom who was both a caring parent and a teacher — a reading specialist. With her encouragement, I absorbed the basics of reading before kindergarten, and for the rest of my academic endeavors, I consistently read years ahead of my grade level.

My aversion to math meant that whatever learning successes I achieved in my young life were rooted in my ability to read quickly and retain the information.

Although these skills were a crucial component of my success in college and graduate school, this reading proficiency dramatically assisted me in law school, where I consistently ranked in the top tier of my class.

Those pondering a career in law may be deterred when they learn that most successful law students read at least two hours of dry material for every hour of class time. That means a law student may spend 40 hours a week reading court opinions written decades or even centuries earlier, packed with terse legalese. Reading well really matters if you want to be a lawyer or most other careers.

Brain-candy blues

While the brain candy of colorful screens is a child magnet, there are ways parents can compete with such allure. One that worked for me was the permission to stay up past my normal bedtime if I was reading in bed. I plowed through several books a month using that laudable loophole.

Parental encouragement like this is worth the effort. Studies show early readers do far better in their later academic endeavors. They also become better writers. Whether writing in cursive or typing on phones, writing well opens doors that nothing else can.

The downward trend line of Americans reading is as obvious as a tuba in an elevator. The more exposure to watching videos a young child has, the lower the chance of success in future learning endeavors. Worse yet, some studies suggest that poor reading skills make it more likely that kids will engage in other behaviors parents fear, like teen pregnancy, delinquency, and addiction.

RELATED: How the laptop revolution destroyed public education

Blaze Media illustration

Chatbot challenge

AI makes the matter worse. AI engagement often doesn’t require typing or reading. Push a button and ask the chatbot a question, and you’ll hear some kind of answer. Whether it’s correct or not, you’ll likely have to do some — ahem — deeper reading.

Parents need workable solutions that don’t feel like making a child take the one bite of cold broccoli he’s been rebuffing all dinner long. That’s why, when my children were younger, we set aside times when the family sat together reading silently, each of us enjoying our own selected book. Even 40 minutes of this twice a week will move your child far ahead of most peers.

Our kids also enrolled in a reading challenge. After finishing several books over a few weeks, they were invited to an event where they skated with a few local NHL hockey players on the big-league rink. I still remember their wide eyes peering up at those elite athletes. It was clear that this incentive made those hours with books worth even more than the stories they read.

Book ’em

Parents can offer similar rewards. Trips to the library end with ice cream. Older kids can read aloud to the preschooler down the block. The family applauds after three-minute book reports at dinner.

Our family discussed books all the time. We recommended books to one another and then shared the insights we gained. To this day, we refer to key moments from novels we all read and how those insights apply to something in our lives.

How to get there? It starts with showing children that there’s something a screen simply can’t offer, like the electric thrill of a world built entirely from their own imagination. When a boy reads a story, every dragon is his dragon, scaled in colors he chooses, breathing fire that smells exactly how he imagined dragon fire should smell. A girl reading of a magic castle can determine how dark the shadows around it appear. And the face of the explorer inside is hers.

No director, no animator, no algorithm decides what wonder looks like — the child does. That creative power is genuine adventure, the kind that stretches young minds in ways passive viewing never can. A video delivers a finished world; a book hands a child the raw materials to build one.

The best gifts don’t come wrapped in paper or require a charging cord. They come with dog-eared pages, late bedtimes, and kids who never quite stop reading. That’s the gift. Just children, books, and a world they built themselves.