A mother told her daughter to put back the book that would have hooked her for life

Sarah Mackenzie was working the front desk of a library when a mother and her ten-year-old daughter walked up with a stack of magazines. What did you find, the mother asked. The girl held out a battered paperback with a yellow-and-blue cover, The Penderwicks. You'll love it, Mackenzie said, reaching to scan it.

The mother took it from her hand instead, peering at it skeptically. Is this on the list for school? When the girl admitted it wasn't, her mother's face changed. You're going to waste your time reading something that doesn't even count. She tossed the book back onto the counter and steered her daughter away, still talking, while the girl glanced back at the abandoned paperback.

Mackenzie calls this the moment she became convinced that a sense of duty is quietly killing children's love of reading. She points to Jim Trelease's observation that every child starts school with total enthusiasm for reading, one hundred percent, and that the enthusiasm declines steadily from late elementary school onward, until the average high schooler reads for pleasure about six minutes a day. Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor whose research Mackenzie cites, adds a sharper detail: parents who believe the primary point of reading is academic success are actually less likely to raise kids who love to read, and less likely to raise strong readers at all, than parents who treat reading mainly as entertainment.

The contrast Mackenzie draws is almost comic. Picture a book club run like a classroom, complete with a comprehension quiz at the door and an assigned essay on the way out, and compare it to the book club most adults actually attend, with snacks and an open question about which character was the biggest coward. Nobody would go back to the first one voluntarily. Yet that first version, quizzes and all, is often exactly what children's reading looks like once school gets its hands on it.

Home, Mackenzie argues, may be the only place a child has a real chance of falling in love with a book at all.

Let your child pick books that don't count toward anything, no reading level, no required list, purely because they want to read them. Resist tacking a quiz, an essay, or a diorama onto anything read at home, and leave that work for school to assign if it must be assigned at all. When your child finishes a book, ask what they loved about it instead of what they learned. And pick up something purely for your own pleasure where your kids can see you doing it, so they watch reading modeled as delight rather than one more obligation to get through.