Reading challenging books with kids is fun and probably useful

The rose-way in Giverny, Claude Monet, before 1922

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I was looking through my diary from the summer of 2020 and found this entry about Maud, then three years old, in late toddlerhood.

25th of July 2020. I was doing the dishes. Maud came in.

“I have looked a little in books,” she said.

“You have?”

“Yes,” she said. “A human book.”

“What book is that?”

“A book.”

“What was it about?”

She led me to the sofa and picked up Spring by Karl Ove Knausgård. It is an autofictive novel about a day in the life of Knausgård and his fourth kid. They are traveling to see the mother who is staying at a psychiatric ward after a suicide attempt.

“There is a human picture at the end,” Maud said and flicked through the pages for a while. “Can you read the picture?”

“It isn’t a picture book,” I said. “All it says is the name of the person who painted it. Anna Bjerger. But I can read the book if you want.”

“Yes.”

The writing is of the kind that three-year-olds can make sense of, I figured. It is people moving about and saying things. This should make it easy enough to explain to Maud what happens. I opened it to the first page, where Knausgård wakes up with the six-month-old baby screaming at dawn.

“Why in the darkness, why does it scream?” said Maud.

“Well, you scream sometimes when you wake up, don’t you?” I said. “Why do you do that?”

She thought about this for a while. “Did it wake in the morning?”

“Yes, the baby woke in the morning,” I said. “But I want to know why you, Maud, why do you cry at night?”

“Why did you say night?” she said.

“Well, this baby cries in the morning. But you cry mostly at night.”

I read on as Knausgård lifted his baby out of bed, and carried it to the toilet, where he held the baby with one hand as he looked for a diaper.

“The dad in the book takes the kid to the toilet,” I said after finishing the paragraph.

“Why?” said Maud.

“It needs to change its diaper.”

Knausgård looks out the window and sees a thin band of light on the horizon. Maud said, “Why?”

“The sky was pink, I said. The sun was about to go up. That was why he saw a band of light.”

This reading session intrigued me, so I started reading more of my books to Maud. At first, it was a bit fumbling like this. Maud’s questions were all over the place, and it also took some time before I learned to calibrate what we read in a good way. Maud was fascinated by the complexity of the emotions portrayed in the books, but she could only follow along when the writing was concrete. As soon as it moved over to abstract arguments or multitemporal narration, she got confused, and I had to skim and summarize, which was a bit exhausting.

When my wife Johanna heard me explain the parallels between Animal Farm and early Soviet history to Maud, who was four (“. . . so Snowball is actually Trotsky, and Trotsky wanted to export the revolution beyond Russia whereas . . .”), Johanna thought I was being a bit of a Tiger mom.

“I think you are trying to impress yourself more than doing what would be best for Maud.”

I put the book aside. Johanna took over. She didn’t read Animal Farm. She read War and Peace instead. But unlike me, Johanna, sensibly, didn’t go page by page. Instead, realizing Maud was four, she pulled out the storyline about Natascha and told it to Maud in short installations every day. The boys throwing a policeman into the river with a bear tied to his back, the romantic scheming, the manipulation, the scenes where Natascha cares for the weak Andrei—every day Maud would harass Johanna, “Have you read more yet?” 

This is what I’ve come to like about reading serious books with the kids. It is about figuring out a rich reading experience that both parties are excited about. Books that pull you in and open a space for deep conversation.

There are children’s books that have summoned this energy for us—Torbjørn Egner, The Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but generally speaking, children’s books are a drag. The characters are flat; the science is so simplified that it doesn’t make sense; there is no mystery to unravel. When the kids pick books at the library what the staff presents them with is an affront to the human soul. There are no interesting conversations to be had about these kinds of books, and conversations are what make reading together fun. For Johanna and me, it is only books that excite us, that allow us to model what a deep love of reading means. The kids are perfectly happy listening to children’s books, but even they—or at least Maud, who is six now—can feel the flatness. Her emotional reaction to run-of-the-mill children’s books is similar to my reaction to reading Twitter: it is something you can sink into, to pass the time, but it doesn’t leave her excited about life.

The other day, Johanna and the girls read The Gospel of the Eels by Patrik Svensson. It is part scientific history of the European eel; part memoir of Svensson’s father, who used to fish eel with Svensson and then died of lung cancer from handling too much asphalt as a road worker. It is a story about social class, which was something new for Maud, and it fascinated her to think about how people will repeat patterns they are familiar with even if they don’t like it (like the father who lived a working class life even though he leaned intellectual) while others break the pattern (like the son). “I need to brush up on Bourdieu so I can explain habitus to Maud,” said Johanna. We also got into a long discussion about how Aristotle, despite his capacity for observation and logic, concluded that eels spawn from the mud.

Apart from being exciting, I suspect reading books that challenge and intrigue us as adults has benefits when it comes to reading comprehension. Maud’s decoding skills—her capacity to sound out words and sentences—are roughly in line with her age grade. But she is precocious when it comes to comprehension, the part of reading that schools struggle with. These days, there is no need to summarize and simplify the average nonfiction book unless we are reading a section that veers into philosophy. She can read between the lines, ask the right questions, summarize for herself, and so on.

We can understand this through the lens of cognitive apprenticeship. The basic gist of this pedagogical framework is that the reason learning reading comprehension is hard, and why most never learn to do it in the true sense of the word, is that most of what we do when we read is hidden in our heads. Unlike a kid learning to cook by hanging out in the kitchen, a novice reader can’t figure out what to do by looking at Dad reading an essay with his face pressed against his phone.

What happens in the darkness of our skulls when we read? If you slow down and pay attention, you might catch some of it. A good reader is “asking questions” about the text. The reason I put quotation marks around “asking questions” is that the questions are often nonconscious. But if you’d spell it out, what passed through your head during the last paragraph was perhaps something like: “Cognitive apprenticeship? I’ve never heard the term before. I wonder how it relates to what I know about cognition and traditional apprenticeships?” “Before Henrik got into this topic, he was talking about reading grown-up books with kids—where is he going?”

You connect what you read with what came before; you project where you are going, you notice what confuses or surprises you; you draw parallels to other things you’ve read or life experiences; and a hundred other little things that a weak reader does not.

Most students never learn to do this. After 15 years of schooling, they can sound out the words, but they can’t extract the ideas that the words are pointing toward. The statistics on reading comprehension among adults are quite depressing.

Cognitive apprenticeships are an attempt to correct this. Collins et al, who worked on cognitive apprenticeships, suggested that the reason so few can read is because they have never seen anyone do it. They have seen books. They have seen words. They have seen grave faces looking at words. But they have never seen the questions and strategies that are playing out behind those grave faces.

To counteract this, Collins et al devised a series of teaching strategies that would pull these questions out and make the reading process visible so you could learn it the way you learn to cook. I’m not going to go into all of the techniques (which you can find listed on Wikipedia) because, despite liking the general idea, I think the way they approached it was misdirected. They proposed that a teacher should design a series of assignments that would imitate what happens in an apprenticeship.

When I get to that point of their theory, I go, “Wait a minute? Isn’t the whole point of apprenticeship that you don’t have to sit in a classroom? That you get to go out into the real world and do stuff?”

I do understand why being able to reproduce it in classrooms is a good thing. Cognitive apprenticeships work better than many of the alternatives in class. But it is also much harder than just doing a normal apprenticeship—which a parent can do for half an hour each night.

And this is where reading Animal Farm etc fits in. Reading serious literature with kids makes the strategies that Collins et al suggested intuitive and obvious. You don’t have to plan exercises and be clever the way a teacher has to be (and most fail to). You can just be yourself.

If we try to do a cognitive apprenticeship while reading a book adaptation of Disney’s Aristocats, it takes great effort. Not only do we need to not die of boredom. We also need to remember to fake that we are asking questions since the text is really too flat for any questions to arise. The questions, and tactics, and insights that guide deep reading remain hidden. But books that force us to talk about what we read to make sure that it makes sense to Maud—these books pull out our hidden thoughts so Maud can see them. And then she imitates us.

If you like this, you might like the post about doing socratic dialogues with children.