I Hate Reading

Ok, I don't hate reading; I happen to LOVE it! Reading, in fact, is one of my all-time favorite past times. But far too many boys hate reading.

According to the research:

• boys take longer to learn to read than girls (Interesting note: According to the book Why Gender Matters, the area of the brain that handles language develops, on average, SIX YEARS later in boys than in girls)
• boys read less than girls
• boys don't value reading as a leisure activity
• the older a boy gets, the more likely he is to consider himself a "nonreader"

Now, two young boys have capitalized on boys' almost-universal dislike of reading. Ten-year-old Henry Bacon and his brother, twelve-year-old Arthur Bacon, have written a book, I Hate Reading: How to Get Through 20 Minutes a Day of Reading Without Reading.

The book was born -- obviously -- of their dislike for the 20 minutes a day their school required them to read. And while the book itself is funny, the story behind it is not. Two bright boys -- who were so disenfranchised with the idea of forced reading that they wrote a whole book about how not to do it.

I'm not a fan of forced reading. I'm not a fan of forced anything. I much prefer to let children come to what interests them, and to give them the time, freedom and opportunity to explore those interests.

In the case of reading, that may mean waiting until they're ready. That may not be possible if your kids are in public school, but even so, consider the developmental science. Most boys' brains are not ready to handle reading in kindergarten, and forcing them to do so before they're ready only leads to feelings of frustration and inadequacy, which can later turn into -- you guessed it -- a hate of reading.

Work with your schools, if you must, to promote developmentally appropriate curriculum. And in your own home, provide an array of reading materials. Boys, far more than girls, prefer comic and non-fiction books. Stock your house with magazines, comics (even the Bible comes in comic form now, and there are plenty of comic-style history books), and all kinds of non-fiction. In the meantime, read aloud, anything your boy wants to hear. I personally am sick of reading Bulldozer over and over, but my three-year-old loves it, and I'm determined to keep his love of books alive.

Fight!

My boys (ages 3,5, 8 and 11) fight constantly. Don't believe me? Check out this excerpt from my article in the January - February issue of Home Education Magazine:

"Battles are part of our daily existence. Some are imaginative recreations of light saber battles or elaborate pirate swordfights. Others are purely physical explosions of energy (think wrestling on the living room floor). Still others are verbal, the natural tendency of boys to one-up each other. Whether it's handstands of fishing, countning or singing, whatever one of our boys can do, another claims he can do it better. Then, of course, there are the disagreements: Who gets to use the computer first. What channel to watch on TV. Whose turn it is to feed the cats."
My husband reassures me that fighting is a perfectly normal part of being a boy, but I just don't get it. I, of course, am a woman. I've never felt the need to tackle someone, just because he was nearby. And so I worried. After all, I want my boys to grow up to be productive members of society, and productive members of society don't wrestle each other at the first sign of a disagreement.

Then I read Why Gender Matters, a ground-breaking book by Dr. Leonard Sax. Boys, he writes, fight a lot -- in fact, boys fight 20 times more than girls, according to one psychologist who spent a year observing elementary schoolchildren at playgrounds. But the fighting doesn't seem to be destructive. The same psychologist found that boys who fight each other usually end up being better friends after the fight.

It turns out that human boys are not the only young mammals with a proclivity toward physical violence. Primatologists (scientists who study apes and monkeys) have long known that young male primates are far more likely to fight than young females. Some of this tendency towards physical aggression appears to be training for adults roles; among primates, males are far more likely to hunt and kill prey than females.

But it seems the aggression is also an important part of socialization, at least for males. "Wrestling and fighting with other males teaches them the rules of the game," writes Dr. Sax. "If young male primates are deprived of the opportunity to fight with other males, those males grow up to be more violent as adults, not less."

Looks like there's some hope for my boys after all.