How to Help Your Child Build a Reading Habit

Keep Books Within Reach

Ensure that books are easily accessible in your home. It is crucial for children to be able to pick up and explore books whenever they want to foster a love for reading and develop a lifelong reading habit.

Let Your Child Choose

Allow your child to select reading books that capture their interest. If they choose something beyond their reading level, offer a gentle alternative. For younger children, you can pre-select three options and let them make the final choice.

Select books that match your child’s interests. In fact, you don’t have to limit them to books—anything they can read is valuable, including brochures, comic books, and magazines. To love reading, they don't have to read traditional books exclusively; trying to read a magazine about cars because of an interest in them is highly motivating.

Model the Behavior

Children develop by modeling their parents. Your child observes how often you read at home. As parents, you can establish regular reading times together. Reading together and chatting about the book afterward is also a wonderful way to spend quality time.

Read in the same room as your child and talk about what you are reading. Similarly, ask for their thoughts on what they are reading (e.g., what they liked or disliked, who the characters are, their favorite character, etc.). You can also ask questions about what they think will happen next, supporting their abstract thinking skills and imagination. Having a small home library is highly recommended.

Encourage Reading Aloud and Bedtime Stories

You can frequently ask your child to read aloud to you. Reading aloud improves vocabulary, attention span, and comprehension. It is also an important step toward silent reading. Moreover, it gives you an opportunity to see how their reading is progressing, notice where they struggle, and easily recognize when they need help.

Instead of asking your child to read a certain number of pages, it is better to set a time limit. Since every child reads at a different pace, focusing on page count can feel overwhelming for slower readers.

It is highly important to keep reading to your child at bedtime, even after they have learned to read on their own. Reading a story aloud to them provides emotional connection and comfort. These shared reading moments should be distinct from the times they practice reading on their own.

Fun and Creative Reading Activities

You can prepare a shelf, cabinet, or box together that you decorate and organize to store your child’s books. To encourage a nightly reading habit before sleep, you can decorate a shoebox together to place by their bedside as a special book box. They can store their favorite and gifted books there, choosing one for you to read during bedtime story hour.

Make visits to bookstores together. You can talk about the importance of speaking quietly in bookstores and explore books together. You can also take short trips to child-friendly book fairs.

Get creative with books! You can record your child's voice while they read with soft music playing in the background to create your own audiobook. You can also make custom bookmarks together, or even turn your child’s favorite book into a play and perform it together at home.