Writes Mireille Silcoff "I Paid My Child $100 to Read a Book" (NYT).
Should you use money to get your kids to do things you can't reason them into doing? Money becomes the reasoning. Money talks, as they say.
I don't know. But I do know you shouldn't take a 12-year-old daughter along on something you call "a romantic Greek island" "with my boyfriend."
What was the "romantic Greek island"? Santorini? I was just reading about that in "Was This the Summer European Tourism Reached a Breaking Point?/Overwhelmed destinations made high-season visitors the targets of a major tourism backlash" (NYT):
Santorini, famous for its whitewashed buildings and sunsets, was one of the most overtouristed destinations in Europe last year, drawing nearly 3.5 million visitors to an island of 15,500. Cruise ships — 800 vessels brought in 1.3 million visitors — were a major source of foot traffic.... More recently, residents were outraged when Panagiotis Kavallaris, president of the island’s municipal community, posted on social media, urging locals to limit their movements to accommodate more than 11,000 cruise passengers who were expected to arrive on July 24....
If you want to convince your child that reading is a worthy use of her precious time, why don't you demonstrate that you — and your "boyfriend" — spend your time reading books? I recommend devoting your entire vacation — you and that man who is not her father — lounging in the living room, experiencing deep satisfaction, luxuriating in books books books. That is the best "reasoning," better than the money-talks approach: Show by doing.
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I do lots of reading for which I’m paid. I call it work. The books I enjoy reading don’t compensate me with cash.
On the other hand, how was the 12 year old affording “Netflix” and the Internet subscription? Perhaps the mom was funding her daughter’s choice of learning?
Welcome to the future. So many distractions/options today that didn't exist even 25 years ago.
What the actual WHAT?!
The 12 year old seems to have figured it out. Can’t say as much for mom…
…I rejected Williams because I hated the obligation of reading all that important fiction. It would have been drudgery for me. Bring on the non-fiction section.
…uses dad’s login
Parenting gone bad. Off the tracks and derailed.
Fortunately both of our sons took after their mother and were voracious readers of thick books. Did not need to pay off anyone. TBH though, this was at the height of Harry Potter mania in the 2000s. All the kids were reading those books...
If parents read to children daily so that books have always been a part of their lives, kids will love books and know their parents. Classic movies later on. Sadly, college is less likely now to continue that kind of education.
My father taught me the love of reading by role modelling. That and having a medium sized bookshelf with a constant rotation of new material coming in (he and his friends were constantly sharing books) Some classics, some history and some pop fiction.
NYT columnists are raising a sociopath? Gee, what a shock.
Should you use money to get your kids to do things you can't reason them into doing?
my parents paid me to mow the lawn.. does THAT count? if not; why?
I think the daughter should write a NYT piece revealing what it’s like to listen to her mother being fucked by her boyfriend in the next room.
We have a night of no screens once a week. Books are read and pianos are played.
Good one, Wince.
Books are Boomer. The Kamala Harris campaign is all a young girl needs to learn about how to succeed in the world we have created: Find powerful men, and Hawk Tuah.
My parents allowed me to earn money while mowing the lawn. I was grateful, because the lawn was going to get mowed by me one way or the other at any rate. Them allowing me to earn money while doing what I was already going to do anyway was their gift to me. I wasn't "asked" to mow the lawn. I was "expected" to mow the lawn as a way of showing my gratitude for all that my parents provided to me. That is how successful children are raised.
It's better than going to Santorini with the 12-year-old and *her* boyfriend.
My takeaway on this is that the mother is obviously divorced and is thus forced to drag a 12-year-old to her Santorini hotel banging sessions with her latest boy toy.
So, Ann ... you can rest secure in the knowledge that the mother is showing by doing and the kid has learned the lesson.
I'm single father of a 13 yo daughter, and I mostly agree w/ that 12 yo. Except that my daughter actually reads books, too. No Netflix in this house, and for that matter, no TV. Haven't had one since 1967.
At 11, my daughter read McCullough's John Adams bio, cover to cover, and happily, of her own volition, but, then again, she sees me reading voraciously, even in waiting rooms where seemingly everyone is on a phone.
I have nothing but contempt for that self-absorbed and clueless mother, who obviously has more dollars than sense. Bring a 12 yo youth on a "romantic" trip with a "boyfriend" ... Puh-lease ! There's been a very special woman in my life for several years [single mum]. Our kids know and like each other, yet every time we visit, w/ kids or w/out, we happily have separate bedrooms.
Not only is it better for adolescents that way, but neither of us wants our wonderfully deep and genuine love encumbered by "romance" or sex. It's truly "platonic", and since each of us actually has read Plato's 'Republic', we joke that we're one of the very few coalescing couples who understand the meaning of "platonic".
What we enjoy, and the kids notice, is an ever-deepening and honest intimacy which does not need sex for connection. As they grow into their emerging adulthood, I suspect it provides a much better life-example than that of the mother and boyfriend in the above account.
We then embarked on a beach holiday, along with my boyfriend, to a romantic Greek island...."
how did her mom's boyfriend pay HER? and for what?
maybe, instead of reading.. she should be writing a tell all??
OH!
Maybe, mom should have told her:
Reading other people's works, helps you formulate YOUR tell all
There was a time when worthy people objected to their children reading novels. It was important for children to read the classics in Latin and Greek. That's what really trained the mind and made you a substantial citizen.......I just saw Kaos on Netflix. It's a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. In this version, Orpheus is a rock star and Eurydice has lost interest in him. She's thinking of breaking it off, but, before she can, she gets run over by a truck. She goes to the underworld and there falls in love with a transitioned Amazon. It's a complicated story, but here's the gist: Matriarchy good. Patriarchy bad. Maybe this version will better prepare a child to live in the current world than the Ovid version.
I have two lit degrees, one in English lit and one in Russian. My computer science degree came along later. I still think that my years spent reading just about every major novel and treatise was worthwhile, both financially and intellectually. How you convince young people of this, I don’t know. I’m embarking on a new career (at age 74) teaching piano to young people in a music academy. The academy is full up with students. It will be interesting to see how motivated they are.
I love books and I recall fondly the moment I discovered I could read a book at home on my own! But let's be honest - the time of the word printed on paper has come and gone. Do not despair, humanity had perfectly good ways to communicate before Gutenberg, and we have perfectly good ways now. It's just that we older folks are comfortable with what we grew up on.
We all bribe our children. What's an allowance but a bribe? (Chores can't possibly cover their room and board). If a few hundred bucks helps instill a love of reading, then it's money well spent.
And the bribe isn't just a bribe. To learn about money, they need to have money.
Agreed, though, about the inappropriateness of taking your 12 year old child on a romantic getaway. Hopefully that was a poor description of what she did.
Thankfully, my children all loved reading. It probably had something to do with the fact that we read to them from the time they were infants. There is a bookshelf in every room in our home. When they moved out, each packed up their favorite books to take with them. They have passed that love of reading on to our grandchildren and the gkids regularly let us know what book they want included in their Christmas gifts. The oldest two have Kindles but they say a hard copy of a book is so much better.
We did pay our youngest son $50 back when he was fifteen if he would read the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and write a 3 page report on what he learned from the book. He was becoming a bit of a wise-ass and we thought he could learn something from the book. Years later he thanked us for doing so.
Maybe I'm weird. I wanted to mow the lawn. Loud, dangerous power tools. Yay. No money was involved. On the other hand, my Dad let me use our mower to mow other peoples' lawns for money. Also, Yay. My parents were always reading books, so it just seemed natural. Same thing happened to my kids. No money was involved, except we were happy to spend money on their books.
“But I do know you shouldn't take a 12-year-old daughter along on something you call "a romantic Greek island" "with my boyfriend."
Amen.
It sounds like Silcoff hasn't read Lolita.
I love the smell of smug superiority in the morning...
I've ignored the push to watch Kaos. When you said "a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice", I got excited. Then you said, basically, that the plot is a Babylon Bee joke. I'll continue to avoid Kaos. Thanks for saving me the heartache of watching it.
Reading is essential if you want to be a critical thinker or raise critical thinkers. If it takes a few bucks to get your children hooked on something so vital, so be it.
"I will pay you $100.00 if...."
"Mom, I make more than that in a week selling your pills at school."
“…because novels are the best way to learn about how people’s insides work.”
How people’s insides work? Here is the working title of my new novel: Colón Meets Vas Deferens at the Islets of Langerhans
Kids are always learning, but not necessarily the intended lessons.
The daughter did learn that if the parent doesn't model good habits and behavior, at least throw money at the problem and make sure that people know that you tried.
The daughter also learned that good habits and behavior take effort, while the fun stuff just kind of happens. The daughter just 'landed' a phone somehow, but Silcoff put a billion parental controls on it. The romantic island with Silcoff's daughter and boyfriend just happened, so Silcoff bribed her daughter to read a book on the inappropriate trip. The internet and streaming services just happened to be available in a home filled with books.
One suspects that the daughter has learned to do whatever she wants, just make some gesture to demonstrate virtue.
"What was the romantic Greek island? Santorini?"
Patmos.
Santorini’s is the name of a restaurant in the west side of Cincinnati. Typical diner fare, but they do offer Greek dishes as well. The spanikopida is solid, but the baklava is great. It’s hard to find a place that doesn’t have great baklava, though.
The kid would love Pride and Prejudice and in about five years she could read Middlemarch and learn about adults dealing with the consequences of their actions.
"I do know you shouldn't take a 12-year-old daughter along"
It's worse. I do know you shouldn't expose your child's private life to public inspection for your own writerly benefit. It's callous and selfish. Which goes to show that reading all those books, supposedly, makes not damn bit of difference in cultivating moral sentiments.
If it takes your child a month to read a book, he or she isn't really into that book.
Bingo!
Your farts?
Of course you do Howard! It's a stink you bring along with you.
The book-reading isn't the important part of the article; it's the last paragraph: "Certainly, my daughter’s having landed a smartphone last year — a secondhand iPhone with a zillion parental controls and time limits baked in — is part of the problem. Before the phone, I had a child who was like a gregarious Tigger, squealing with delight at something as simple as a new dessert cooling in the fridge. Post-phone, I had a monosyllabic blanket slug who wanted only to stay in her room with the blinds down, door closed, under a duvet, palming that little rectangle as if unhanding it would make her social life disappear. If it wasn’t her friends or it wasn’t her phone, it was only one thing: “boring.”"
"What was the "romantic Greek island"? Santorini?"
More likely IOS -- the Island of Sex.
If mom went with her boyfriend, it probably wasn't Lesbos.
Back in the day, children learned to love reading because their parents read to them. Did she not do that or is that not working anymore?
these parents do remove all doubt, hey maybe there is a part of the island that doesn't have public orgies,
This reminds me to order a book relevant to my upcoming trip from the Althouse Amazon portal. Right after I finish reviewing the latest posts and comments.
There was a (childless, I think) syndicated parenthood advisor in the newspaper when my son was young. I recall one column where he suggested to a father whose sons wouldn't read that the consequence of misbehavior should be that the boys be kept in a room where there were only books.
Genius, I thought: turn books into a form of punishment. That'll get them interested.
Bribery may not be the best approach, but it's better than that.
I read a book or two a week when I was 12. But they were books I picked out myself.
That kid is wiser at 12 than her mom will ever be.
Don't let me put you off. Kaos is politically correct, but it's also witty and inventive. Jeff Goldblum plays Zeus as a Marvel villain and that alone is worth the price of admission. It's more a hit than a myth. Every era gets the myth it deserves, and this show was thought provoking.
" I told my 12-year-old I would pay her $100 to read a novel.... $100 if she finished the book within a month. We then embarked on a beach holiday, along with my boyfriend, to a romantic Greek island...."
At last a story that mirrors my life.... /sarc
Wait until the daughter learns she can "earn" a LOT more than $100 per month (in goods if not in cash) with the right boyfriend.
Sebastian at 8:35 AM: "...you shouldn't expose your child's private life to public inspection...."
Well said. Is there a tag for these? "Parental Predation," "Progeny Pimping"
"I told my 12-year-old I would pay her $100 to read a novel"
Just how bad is BidenFlation? So bad that you now have to pay your kid $100 to read a book
back in ye olden days before Cable TV, and the internet, book reading didn't have a lot of competition. Yet, the vast majority of poeple still didn't read fiction. Most people don't read literature and never have. And if they do, vast numbers confine themselves to Crime, Horror, SF, and Romance.
Being a naive idiot, I thought when I arrived at Big Univerisity USA back in the 80s i would be involve in intellecutal discussions about history and Lit with my fellow students. And found out that 95 percent of the students couldn't care less. My first first roommate met my attempt to discuss Hemingway with a look of amazement. "I don't read books", he stated.
As stated above, in the early to mid 19th century, novel reading was considered a frivilous waste of time and slightly trashy. Somewhat akin to watching Pro Wrestling or Oprah/Jerry Springer. It took a long time for it to be considered respectable and not a waste of time. Im not sure when Yale/Harvard began teaching English LIt but I doubt they were doing it before 1880
I love the smell of smug superiority in the morning...
Maybe it is time to change your aftershave, Howard.
Then again, it may just be coming out of your pores.
You can apparently learn everything that is necessary to live by watching Netflix and Tik Tok.
Inflation is bad. My father, when I was in the first grade, paid me a dollar for every A I got on my school report card. By second grade I had learned forgery.
What does MCACs charge for assimilating and parsing a book? Andrea?
I can imagine the kid returning to school, and her teacher assigning the class to write a couple of paras about "How I spent my summer vacation."
-----at which point the mom will pay the kid $100 not to write about "what I saw and heard on Santorini."
Howard is probably that boyfriend.
My Oma tried the bribery for good grades route with my older bro and me. We were told that A's were worth so much, B's less, C's and lower nothing. And if we made straight A's (or something equally unlikely, like National Honor Society) she would buy us a sportscar. A red sportscar--she was very specific.
Bro dropped out under duress and went into the Army; I graduated in the top half of my class a few years later.
OTOH she did loan me money when I was in college (low interest, and repaid within a few years) to buy a used VW Beetle.
I don't think my younger brothers ever got the same offer, not that it would have worked any better with them.
But I always liked to read, which I viewed then--and still-- as its own reward.
I read to my youngest son every night from near infancy. He saw me reading constantly, we went to library regularly and we'd both come home with new books to read. He grew up surrounded by books. He taught himself to read by age 4. He read a lot through grade school, once in Jr. High/high school all he read was Stephen King (granted he read almost all of King's books). Since then, almost nothing. Sometimes it just doesn't 'take'.
High/high school all he read was Stephen King (granted he read almost all of King's books). Since then, almost nothing. Sometimes it just doesn't 'take'."
Or maybe it does. King is hard to beat until you're ready for Updike and Roth.
Boyfriend. Girlfriend. Girlfriends daughter. Anybody else getting a bad vibe from this?
Should have given her Bonjour tristesse, written by an 18 year old girl who, BTW, quit high school to finish it, and never did finish high school. Just to show her what an 18 year old is capable of. It's a towering work of heartbreaking genius, that's what I call it, out of jealousy of the writer.
I suspect all parents have had issues getting children to read. I did learn on a Jordan Peterson podcast recently that studies have seen a major change in childhood development around the 2012 time frame. The researchers associated this with the more ubiquitous use of smartphones (first iPhone came out in 2007).
I wonder if explaining books in the age of smartscreens is like discussing buggy whips? I’m not concerned with what you can learn from observation on Netflix or elsewhere (sure, they could learn things you don’t want to be learned, but that’s possible from books too). I wonder how much children are losing imagination and paint mental images without something drawing the image. And losing empathy from just understanding someone’s story without judging appearance (including far less “racists” things such as posture and expressions).
I read to my kids when they were illiterate preschoolers, and they rapidly gained the ability to read for themselves as they aged and learned. Then they started exploring the online world, the same way I explored a library when I was their age. They can carry all the world in their pocket. A book can be enjoyed, but the entire world at their fingertips is more useful to them.
When I was maybe in third grade and way behind on my reading skills and motivation, my librarian mother offered up a series of bribes over the summer: five books equaled a certain level of prize; ten an even better level. After ten books I was hooked and cleaned her out of prizes for the summer. It took the bribe though to get past the inertia.
With three kids of our own I read to them every night: sometimes for two hours. In addition to reading through the entire Bible three or four times, we read over two hundred books--history and literature. I remember all of us sitting under a weeping willow tree one May and June, tending a fire, and me reading Tolkien's Trilogy to them for the first time. After dinners they would be begging to get on with the story. So this is one way we homeschoolers got our kids addicted to reading, by reading to them.
I am now and for four years have been reading via Whatsapp with my grandson. We've finished the Trilogy and are onto his request: Dune.
Tough stuff for a 13 year old, but I know learn he's started reading books on his own. It does require some creative approaches to wean them partially off the screen.
I would have thought Mykonos. I’ve been to Santorini, in a cruise, but it was right after cruising was opened up following the COVID-19 pandemic so we didn’t encounter much crowding. Our guided excursion was to Akrotiri, an archaeological site where a town was buried by lava from the eruption circa 1600 BCE that destroyed the Minoan Civilization, however, so there may not have been that many tourists there even if things on the island were jammed with sightseers. At the end, the excursion dropped us off at one end of the main shopping district and we had to make it to the other end to take the funicular down to where we could board a tender back to the ship. That made the district uncomfortably crowded, and, again, there was only one cruise ship (ours) anchored in the ancient caldera. So, yeah, perhaps a pain in the ass for resident and tourist alike.
I can't imagine not reading. Even with the phone I am reading something. I recall in junior high taking up Run Silent, Run Deep. I was up until after 2 am reading it. I finished it the next day. History (especially naval or WWII) is my big draw. Plenty of other types of fiction, though not so much as the "proper fiction" of school and college. Mysteries, mostly pre WWII, Carr, Christie, Sayers, Marsh etc. And biographies of people from the 17th - 19th centuries. And of course PG Wodehouse.
Classic bad parenting. Paying a child to read a book turns the activity from reading for pleasure to reading becoming work. I'm all for real capitalism, but there are some things in life that people should want to do without needing to be paid. But with people like this it's all about quick and easy solutions to problems and hedonism. (And if you were to ask them, point blank, they'd probably say that capitalism sucks and socialism is the way to go.)
You guys have cut Howard a break- when Howie was 5 his father told him he buried a thousand dollars in a jar in the park. Finally, when Howie was 35 and 13 shovels later, his father told him it was a joke.
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