What is in this guide
There are two different children behind this search and they need opposite approaches.
One cannot read comfortably. Reading is effortful, decoding takes all their attention, and avoiding it is a completely rational response to something that is hard and makes them feel bad. Pushing this child to read more, for enjoyment, is asking them to do the difficult thing more often.
The other can read perfectly well and does not want to. Reading competes with things they prefer, and nothing about it is hard.
Work out which one you have before doing anything, because the approaches that help one actively harm the other.
The threshold question
Listen to them read something slightly below their year level, out loud, for two minutes.
If it is fluent and expressive, with few stumbles, you have a will-not problem. Go to the second half of this article.
If it is slow, word by word, with sounding out, substitutions, skipped words, or if they lose the meaning by the end of the sentence, reading is hard work and that is what the avoidance is about.
If you are unsure, ask the teacher. Australian schools assess reading regularly and the teacher can tell you within a minute where the child actually sits. This is a much better source than a parent’s impression, and asking is not an imposition.
If reading is hard
Talk to the school first. Not to a tutoring company, not to an online program. The school has the assessment data, knows what support exists, and can refer for further assessment where appropriate.
Ask specific questions: where is my child against expectations, what is the specific difficulty, what is being done at school, what should we do at home, and should we be seeking any assessment.
Do not run your own program. A parent teaching a different method to the school’s produces confusion, and reading instruction is a genuinely technical area. Phonics instruction and how reading is taught has been the subject of considerable attention in Australian education policy, and the school is the right place to start.
At home, reduce the pressure rather than adding practice.
Read to them, a lot, above their reading level. This is the most valuable thing a parent of a struggling reader can do. It builds vocabulary, comprehension and the sense that stories are worth the trouble, none of which requires the child to decode anything.
Audiobooks are reading. For a child who cannot yet decode fluently, audiobooks give access to stories at their comprehension level rather than their decoding level, and that gap is exactly the problem. Australian public libraries lend audiobooks free.
Keep home reading short and finish on a win. Ten minutes that ends well beats twenty that ends in tears. Home readers: how to survive the nightly routine covers the school’s nightly reader specifically.
Never make them read aloud in front of siblings who read better.
Watch for the emotional side. A child who has decided they are “bad at reading” has a belief that will outlast the difficulty, and that belief is often the harder problem.
If they can read and will not
Different problem, different tools. Eight things that work.
1. Let them choose, including things you do not rate. Graphic novels, comics, joke books, fact books, magazines, game guides, the same book eleven times. All of it counts. A child reading a comic is reading, and the single fastest way to end a reading habit is to disparage what they chose.
2. Non-fiction. Many children who reject novels will read about sharks, space, cars, minecraft, sport or how things work, indefinitely. Fiction is not the goal, reading is.
3. Series. A child who finishes book one of a series has the next seven decided for them, which removes the hardest part, which is choosing. Series are the single most effective structural trick with reluctant readers.
4. Read to them past the age it seems necessary. Reading aloud to a competent nine or eleven year old is not babying them. It is often what reconnects them to books, and it works with a novel above what they would choose themselves.
5. Make the time exist. Reading loses to screens every time because screens are easier. A fixed reading time, ideally the fifteen minutes before lights out with the light staying on a little longer for it, is a genuine bargain most children will take.
6. Let them see you read. Weak on its own and real over years.
7. Use the library, properly. Free, and the volume matters more than the quality of any individual choice. Borrow ten books, let eight be abandoned. The library is also where the librarians will find exactly the right book for a specific child, which is a genuinely underused free service. Free things to do with kids these school holidays covers what else libraries run.
8. Stop making it a performance. A child who has to report on, be quizzed about or read aloud from everything will stop. Reading needs to be theirs.
What tends not to work
Reward charts for pages read. They produce page-turning rather than reading, and when the reward stops so does the reading.
Removing screens to force reading. Produces resentment directed at books.
Levelled readers as the only reading. School readers are a teaching tool. A child whose entire reading diet is a levelled book they did not choose has no reason to think reading is enjoyable.
Pushing books you loved. Sometimes it lands. Usually it is your childhood, not theirs.
Comparing with a sibling. Reliably counterproductive.
When to get more help
Talk to the teacher if: progress has stalled, the child avoids reading specifically rather than schoolwork generally, they were fine and have gone backwards, or they show real distress around reading.
Ask the school about assessment if difficulty is persistent and out of step with everything else the child does. Schools can arrange or refer.
A GP is the right first step for vision and hearing, both of which affect reading and both of which are frequently the overlooked explanation.
This article does not diagnose anything and no pattern here is a diagnostic indicator.
Next: homework battles: what to change first covers the wider afternoon, getting kids to bed without the two-hour battle covers the tiredness that affects all of it, and free things to do with kids these school holidays covers using the library.
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