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Comment by GlassOwAter | Hacker News Reader

As someone without kids. Is it uncommon for parents to encourage children to read outside of school?

This varies greatly by parents' education levels.

According to [1] 26% of Americans with 'less than a high school diploma' have 'no books' at home. On the other hand, among Americans with a 'postgraduate degree', 42% have 'more than 100 books' at home.

[1] https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/47712-how-many-boo...

En masse, it’s less common than should be and a lot less than one would hope for. OP sounds like a very responsible and caring parent!

This also requires spare time. In US at least, things aren’t as setup to support such allocating enough time for kids. Forget reading time, even basic sick time is tough for most.

It depends a lot on the parents.

If you'll permit me a generalization, well-off parents generally have more time, energy and money to spend on their children's development. For example, if you're a stay-at-home parent, you have more time to think about how to get your kid reading. Maybe you're teaching them directly, maybe you're buying books you think they'll like, or teaching by example by reading books in your spare time.

If both parents are working double-shifts to make rent, you might just be happy that your kid is being quiet watching TV, so you can get some sleep.

My wife and I are both engineers and work full time. I'm tired at night too, but it's worth going through the effort early rather than later when they're struggling.

I started with the sounds that each letter in the alphabet makes when she first turned four I would guess. It wasn't exactly easy, but we'd try to go through the exercise before she went to sleep each night. At first it would take over a half hour to get through it. After a few months of on and off she had it down pretty well to where sounding out letters was possible. Each step is a challenge that they have to get through and it's also a challenge on the patience of you the parent.

It really depends. Unfortunately a lot of parents don't read or encourage their kids to do so. However, as an engineer, all of my coworkers were reading to their kids at a young age and working with them and got them reading early and have generally set them up for success.

It's becoming a lot harder to push a love for reading. The modern world has a lot more competing for my kids time and attention than I feel like I had as a kid. For me, reading was a natural way to pass the time (and I caries a book everywhere I went!) while I feel like for them it's the last thing on their minds.

This is absolutely true. However, I've noticed that teaching them to get comfortable with reading and limiting the screen time (TV, video games) means that they'll shift to reading or physical activities when bored or when they run out of screen time... especially if you let them pick out the books they want.

I have a friend that has a kid that only wants to play Minecraft....she complains he won't do anything else...but then she enables that by giving him so much screen time. I think if you handle certain things the right way, the problem will sort itself outside certain disabilities.

One frustrating point is that the kids have school provided electronics as well these days.

While I'm not against that, it does prevent a challenge to screen time. They have homework to do and will be doing it until you look away, then suddenly they're back on youtube.

We had to restrict even the school devices to public areas of the home, which is unfortunate.

Yep. I was a little dismayed that my kid was using a tablet for hours at school. I think textbooks are probably healthier with the amount of screen time kids get at home now.

We encourage our first grader to read both English and Chinese, but he is just starting out in both.

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