Paying your child to read a book?

This summer, I paid my 12-year-old daughter US$100 (S$130) to read a book.

- Mireille Silcoff

As far as mum manoeuvres go, it was definitely last ditch, and the size of the payout was certainly excessive. I can't say I am proud - but I am extremely satisfied. Because the plan worked. It worked so well, I'd suggest other parents of reluctant readers open their wallets and bribe their kids to read, too.

My daughter is a whip-smart kid, definitely smarter than I was at 12. But until I resorted to bribery, she'd never read an entire chapter of a book for pleasure. She'd read books for school, but getting her to do that was like pulling teeth, and on her own she'd read a few graphic novels and listened to the audiobooks of the Harry Potter series.

Just before the Covid-19 pandemic, a depressing US survey revealed how much reading for pleasure had dropped among children. Almost 30 per cent of 13-year-olds said they "never or hardly ever" read for fun, a substantial increase from the 8 per cent who said the same roughly 35 years earlier. Given that screen time among children also increased significantly during the pandemic, it's fair to conclude that leisure reading is an increasingly endangered pursuit among children.

But I held a candle for reading. Because I could see that what my daughter was looking for, like so many her age, was escape. To me, that felt developmentally appropriate. The problem was that the easiest way for her to find escape was to plunge into the addictive chaos of her smartphone.