Why your kids need books beyond their reading level
The first time I read The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame to my boys, my oldest was seven and the twins were four. As I read the first two chapters, I feared the whole story would go over their heads because of its long words and dense descriptions. But when I finished a chapter and asked my oldest to narrate what had happened, he was able to retell the broad, overarching story and major plot points.
Sometimes I assume too little of my kids and try to dumb down what I read to them. But they’re so much more capable that I realize. Kids enjoy a challenge and will often rise up to it. I’m the mom running to do my kids’ zippers and help with their shoes, but when I step back and encourage them to give it one more try, they often find a way. As E. B. White said about writing for children,
Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick and generally congenial readers on earth . . . Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words and they backhand them across the net.
We learn and grow when life is difficult and we’re presented with challenges. Shouldn’t the same be true for our children and their growth as readers?
Children Need Books That Are Beyond Their Reading Level to Challenge Them
For years, I only lifted eight pound weights at high repetitions and wondered why I was never gaining muscle. When someone who had worked with a professional trainer told me I should try lifting twenty pounds, I told them I was incapable. “The only way you’ll ever get stronger is by lifting heavier,” he told me. I now can do three sets of ten reps each with a twenty-five pound weight, and some arm movements I can even use my thirty pound dumbbell. The only way to gain muscles is to continue lifting heavier weights as the current ones get too light.
We will only grow when challenged. In the same way, readers become better readers by reading books more difficult than what they’re capable of. And as E. B. White said, kids want this challenge.
In an article for The Atlantic, a literature professor says that he became the reader he is today when adults gave him difficult books beyond his reading level. He writes,
A teacher gave me Leo Tolstoy and Victor Hugo when I was far too young. I loved to read already, but at that age (13), my diet had been Star Trek novelizations, Michael Crichton, and—thanks to a dull sick day browsing my parents’ shelves—The Bonfire of the Vanities. In early high school, I read War and Peace and Les Misèrables and was absolutely mystified by the density of detail. I was frequently bored—all those pages on the sewer system of Paris—and then suddenly moved to tears by a character like Eponine, who “smiled a little, and died” in the arms of Marius. I was just too immature for other novels: Emma Bovary’s desire and Charles Swann’s jealousy mystified me, because I would not ask anyone out for at least another five years. Inundating myself with thousand-page novels set in the early 19th century, I had nearly every experience one has while reading, and I had them all at once. I came as close to overdosing on Russian mood swings as I could. But by the time I reached the end of high school, I developed a tolerance for what I did not understand, and then I gradually understood it. Once I did begin to understand, I felt an extraordinary desire to repeat the experience. Reading this much made books feel like a “doorway” for me, as George Saunders has called it.
He uses this to defend why, in the current crisis of kids not reading, teachers need to not compromise by only asking students to read excerpts. Instead, professors and teachers need to keep assigning full books to be read. It’s not that the students are incapable; it’s that we’re limiting them. They need to be confused and struggle in order to grow. He writes,
The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they are,” a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.
When I first started lifting heavier weights, my arm would buckle and give out. I thought this was a failure on my part, but instead it meant that my muscles were growing and changing. Our children do the same when we give them or read to them books that are beyond their reading level. When met with words they don’t understand and more complicated plots, they have to stretch their brains to understand. Not understanding right away is okay. I have to resist the urge to finish the word when my oldest is trying to sound out a new word because I know it’s in that struggle that he’ll gain the muscles to read.
Reading Easy Books Might Actually Hurt Our Kids
Because we love our kids, we want to jump in and save them. We want to make life easier for them. We don’t want to see them flounder. But we know that it wasn’t the easy parts of life that made us who we are today; it was the moments of grappling and feeling in the dark. Making life easy for them now might make it harder later. The same is true for reading.
When it comes to choosing literature for children, Leslie Bustard writes in Wild Things and Castles in the Sky, “A steady diet of dumbed-down stories, illustrations, and conversations will not prepare them for all the glorious ways words can be used in times of joy and delight and in times of sorrow and suffering.” She goes on, “These young image-bearers of God will be formed by many, many things. Therefore, we must provide the children in our lives with words, conversations, and stories that will plant the seeds of abundance in their hearts and minds . . . And with these seeds growing in their lives, our children will have deeper roots to draw from in how they love, think and speak.”
Don’t assume too little of your kids. Don’t be afraid to try out more difficult books. They just might surprise you with what they can do.
