The Baby Won’t Stop Crying. What to Do?
By Mark W.F. Condon, Unite for Literacy vice president
Try to feed her. She doesn’t want a bottle. Burping him doesn’t help. Diaper sniff? Nope. Holding and rocking her? No luck. Singing and dancing with him? Nada! Been there?
Sometimes our attempts to soothe a baby just don’t work. Unsuccessful attempts to console a crying baby are roughly equivalent to failed attempts to interest a child in reading, the single most powerful habit an individual will ever adopt.
The child may be doing marginally okay in school, but they’re turned off and disinterested in reading. But why?
This too-common situation indicates that there’s something missing on the offered menu of options. Sometimes the book offerings at school and in the home don’t have what revs kids’ engines. This should not be an “Eat your peas or no desert, young lady!” situation. This calls for a “Pick anything off the menu and it’s yours, young man!” Yet they resist.
Another reason some kids don’t click with books is that reading time has not been a significant daily event in their classrooms or homes. Essentially, a culture of reading is predictably weak or perhaps even nonexistent in their worlds.
As with the fussy infant, parents and teachers must keep trying to figure out what’s going on when we encounter resistant readers and we must provide support for the unique literacy development of each individual child. There clearly is not a programmatic or whole-class solution that works for all children any more than there is for calming all babies.
What’s important to understand is that children don’t learn to enjoy reading through assigned reading lessons. Granted, lessons can be of value if many students in a class exhibit confusion or lack reading confidence. But if we keep doing what we’ve always done—trying to get kids jazzed about reading by dictating what they must read—we’ll always get what we have always gotten: apathetic readers and dismal reading achievement. Rather, we need to infuse essential reading lessons with many invitations for kids to self-select their own reading material and uninterrupted reading time to enjoy it, because kids will always improve as readers from the ongoing relaxed reading of books they love.
The solution also includes creating a classroom or home culture where kids can meet with teachers, librarians and/or parents who will help them find books with stories and information that they yearn for. This helps drive home the message that there are books out there for everyone!
At the same time, reluctant readers must see other kids who they know and admire participating in animated discussions of books they’re currently reading and highly recommend, and discussing their unique pleasures with reading.
When we teach children to explore possibilities and find a captivating or enduring genre, topic or author, and then allow them time to relax and slowly lower themselves into a nice warm book, they’ll begin to grow as lifelong readers.