The Current - Why this mom paid her kid $100 to read a book

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

Mireille Silcoff loves books, but her 12-year-old daughter was more interested in screens than reading. That is, until the author offered her kid $100 to read a novel. Silcoff shares how the deal panned out, and why she’d recommend the tactic to other parents. 

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Growing up, Mireille Silcoff was one of those kids, you know the kind, under the covers with a flashlight and a book. Like a lot of parents, though, she is more likely to find her own 12-year-old daughter under the covers with her phone. And so Mireille made her daughter an offer. If you read one book, I'll give you $100. She wrote about that deal in the New York Times, a deal that some readers called out as a bribe. Mireille Silcoff is an author, cultural critic, regular contributor to the New York Times Opinion section

and New York Times Magazine, and she's in our Montreal studio. Marais, good morning. Hi, pleasure to be here. Glad to have you here. Why did you offer your daughter $100 to read a book? I mean, quite simply, I offered her $100 to read a book because she refused to read a book.

And it was important for me that she understood what it was like to read a book for pleasure, not something that you have to read for school or whatever. And I just started increasingly seeing as she turned 12 that she might never do it on her own. And so it was a bit of a desperate measure. You know, I tried cajoling. I had tried other stuff. I tried, I'll buy you any book you want or, you know, let's get a library card or, you know, I had all kinds of ideas, but none of them worked. And so I resorted to cold, hard cash. And she read it and I think the deal worked, but that was how I got to it, was just seeing astoundingly, you know, somebody who's 12 years old who might get to 14 or 15 or

16 never having read a book for pleasure. You said it was like getting her to read was like pulling teeth. It was like pulling teeth. Yes. Yes, indeed it was. I mean, she would read whatever she needed to do for school. But the idea of picking up a book in your spare time because you like it, because it's something that you want to do, because it gives you something, was just not in her wheelhouse. It was not something that she knew how to do. And furthermore, it was not something that she knew how to do. And furthermore, it was not something that she felt she needed to do. There are so many other cultural things she could be doing out there from, you know, podcasts to movies to series to doing stuff, interactive stuff on her phone,

that it was kind of reading why. And so it's very hard to explain to someone how a novel changes you, for instance, because this is fiction we're talking about, right? You know, and what you can get from that. The only way you can really figure it out for yourself and figure out what becoming truly immersed in a spate of deep reading can do is to actually experience it, is to do it yourself. And I just felt like she was never going to do it. And so I came up with this ungodly amount of money, $100, and said, if you do it, I'll give you this because that's how important it is to me. What did you think?

I've said in a few previous interviews, nobody in my house gets a hundred bucks for anything. So this was super, super high stakes. And she felt like she had a job, right? And that was kind of part of it. It was transactional. It's transactional on purpose. Like you have a job, read for pleasure. It sounds counterintuitive, but the sum was so high that she couldn't not do it. She couldn't take it lightly. What did you think she was missing out on? I want to come back to the deal and how it worked out, but go back into what you thought she was missing out on by not reading. You know, a lot of people now will speak about the capital I importance of reading, and they'll point to how reading builds empathy, you know, and other vectors like that.

But for me right now, looking at the culture of teenagers and tweens, it's a bit of a pathetic place now. It's hard to watch because they've got this hot, addictive thing in their pocket all the time that they always want to look at and that they feel is their portal to the world. You know, they truly feel that. And, you know, so it's this kind of beehive between them and the phone. And it's the same hornet's nest that we all recognize. We get stuck in it as well. But when you're 12 and you're a bit under-experienced, you might kind of think that's all there is. You might think that, for instance, being on social media for one hour and then coming off and being depressed is just bit under-experienced, you might kind of think that's all there is. You might think that, for

instance, being on social media for one hour and then coming off and being depressed is just normal. That's just the way the world is. You know, you have this bad feeling for about half an hour every day after getting off social. And I needed my daughter to know that there are other things you could do. There are other portals. There are other ways that you can be alone with your ideas, that you can commune with your insides, that you can feel somebody else's ideas other than resorting to the phone. And so it was really that. For me, of course, there are all kinds of other reasons that reading is important, and we all know what they are. But in this particular instance, it was trying to drive a

wedge in between my growing teen and technology, because I saw that she was using technology to escape. And I was like, wow, I know a really good other way to escape that she doesn't know about that I want her to know about. And so it was as simple as that. You're a good mom. But as I mentioned, you grew up, you know, in a life where you were surrounded by books and you were the person like me under the covers who was reading when you're supposed to be sound asleep and they have the flashlight or what have you. Did you feel this as a failure is a strong word, but did you feel it like as a parenting failure? No, I feel it as a cultural failure. A cultural failure.

Yep. I feel like this is the world that we have built for our children. My daughter did not create Snapchat, right? We did. Our generation did. Gen X did. We created all of that. So it's my responsibility if this is the world that they've been plunged into, to throw in some life rafts. Right. So I didn't feel like it was a failure as a parent because there's no parent who can really well go up against Snapchat and Instagram and Google and Amazon and all of the, you know, this massive behemoth kind of situation of

technology. I'm just a single mom at home alone with two daughters trying to make things work, you know, and there's no way that I could beat Snapchat. That's not something I can do, right? And so I feel like it's us against the culture more than feeling like it's a personal failure. I did all the right things. I read to my children from when they were zero years old. You know, my home has books from floor to ceiling. I myself am an author. I've still always got my nose in a book. They've been surrounded by all the right things. But the culture is just way, way, way too attractive, you know, for just things like having books around to go up against. You know, to say to a kid these days on a Wednesday night at 9 p.m. when there's nothing much else to do, why don't you stick your nose in a book? Why don't you open a novel? It's a very

tall order. Because while I say there's nothing else to do, for them, there's a million other things to do, and they all happen on the phone. And we know that, right? We live in the same world. Adults have trouble reading now, too. You know? Of course we do. When was the last time you completed a novel in the same way you could in the 1990s? Yeah, it's a different thing. It's a different thing. We're losing our capability to read deeply. And so having come to that point and you decide $100, this is what I'm going to give you to

read a book. You were really careful about the book that you chose, right? I was. I researched it intensely, which might seem like over-parenting, but I just felt like I've got this one chance, so I've got to get it right. And so I really canvassed friends. I went on Facebook and kind of put these questions out. You know, which book would you suggest for, you know, this type of girl?

I kind of described my daughter. And, you know, hilariously, a lot of people had some really weird ideas about what a 12-year-old would like to read, like Wuthering Heights. ideas about what a 12-year-old would like to read, like Wuthering Heights. Like, if you want my child to never read a novel again, let's make Wuthering Heights the first book she ever reads. Le Petit Prince. I mean, it went on and on. This was more people being like, this is, you know, in some fantasy land of what would actually work.

But the book that came up again and again was Jenny Hand's The Summer I Turned Pretty, which is a teen romance. And it's a series, which was useful because my daughter read the book, loved the book. She had a month to read it. She read it in two weeks, asked for the second one, read the second one. And then when it was time for her to read the third one, which she wanted to do, it was back to school. And so she did it on audio book, which is just fine. But she really got into that series. So as far as I'm concerned, the plan worked. Who knows, you know, where she'll end up when she's 15 or 16 or 30 or 50 years old. But for now, I have someone that knows what a novel can do because it's happened to her.

So how did that feel when you saw her? I don't know where she was in bed or sitting in a chair or laying on the couch on the floor or whatever. But when she was there, not on the phone, but reading a book for pleasure. The greatest sense of relief I can describe as a parent. It was great. It was great. I mean, look, it was short lived. She's back on her phone

and this and that. But what I hold, you know, as a wish or as a hope is that she's got this thing in her back pocket now. And by this thing, I mean the knowledge of what it means to get deeply into a book. And I hope that in times where she would need something like that, she'll remember and she'll pull it out, right? Instead of pulling out her phone. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

So you admitted in writing about this that the whole idea can kind of sound a little obnoxious to offer your child $100 to read a book. Totally gross. Well, when you wrote about it in the New York Times, what sort of reaction did you get? Well, I got a bifurcated reaction, right? I got like two reactions, like anything happening in the United States at the moment. So there was one camp who kind of said, like me, whatever works, you know, everything, many things in parenting are transactional. And so why not this? And there were a lot of cognitive behavioral psychologists, I'm not sure why, who came out in favor, a lot of school teachers who said that they use reward systems. But then there were many, many, the parents who read a lot of parenting books who kind of said there's intrinsic learning and there's extrinsic learning.

And extrinsic learning means something that doesn't come from the inside, from the volition of the child, isn't going to stick, isn't useful and is a bad way to parent. I'm of the mind now that parents are in such a pickle with teens and technology that intrinsic versus extrinsic, I really don't care. I just don't care. I am in a whatever works mode of parenting right now in trying to steer my child into places I consider healthy. Why do you think people would say that? places I consider healthy. Why do you think people would say that? I mean, you're publishing something, so you know there's going to be a reaction, but why do you think people would come out and push back as hard as they did on what you did? Well, I think there's two reasons. Number one, journalists and writers out there will recognize what I'm about to say, but when

you're a journalist, you don't write your own headlines. And so when an editor writes a headline that says, I paid my kid 100 bucks to read a book, and you should too, immediately you will have half of America or whoever is reading hating you, right? So there's a bit of an inflammatory headline. But I think the other reason, that's kind of the surfacy reason, I think the other reason, which is more deep, is that parenting is extremely difficult right now. And it's extremely difficult right now because people are working full-time. Women are working full-time. Parenting is much, much more intensive than it used to be. We're on top of our kids all the time. There are crazy numbers out there about how parents spend 40% more time with their children, even if they're working more than they used to,

than they did 20 years ago. And these apps are designed by the designers to be addictive and to keep those kids on their phones as long as possible. Yes, absolutely. And while me, as somebody who knew the analog world, because I'm 51 years old, can sometimes come to a point where I recognize that, I feel like kids who are 12 or 13 or 11 and just coming to using technology might not

recognize that as quickly. And so the toxicity just goes in, right? And I put all kinds of parental stuff on her phone. You know, she does. It's not like she's got free range. You know, there's a million stops and things on her phone to make her not use it all the time. But it's a bit of an unwinnable battle when had become, what, a monosyllabic blanket slug? Yeah. I mean, I call it the duvet cave era, right?

So when she was 10 or 11, she was very gregarious. And as I write in the piece, she'd get very excited over something as simple as a dessert cooling in the fridge. fridge. And then when she turned 12 and got her first phone, you know, suddenly I'd go into her room and find her, you know, under the covers with the blind down, with the door closed, you know, handling that hot piece of technology as if her social life would fall apart if she unhanded it for even one moment. And so there was a huge, huge change. And it was pretty instantaneous, but it would be silly of me not to look into the fact that that's when puberty properly hit as well. So, you know, there's a constellation of things that may have happened around the age of 12. just her general sociability. Things changed. And suddenly, if it wasn't phone or it wasn't friends, it was boring. And that was a new thing because the phone is just so stimulating, right? And so put anything up against it and it seems boring. Is that why giving her that $100, you say you

weren't proud of the decision, but you were satisfied with it. I was satisfied with it because it worked. And I would recommend to any parents, if you want to get your kid to read, if you don't have a reading kid, and, you know, there's an unbelievably depressing Pew study out there that shows that children who read for pleasure, that in 1984, you had only 8% of kids who said they never read for pleasure. And in 2020 or 2021, I can't remember the exact date, you had something like 33% of kids around the age of 12 who said they never read for pleasure. 33%, that's one third of children who say they don't do it, they don't know how to do it. And I would throw in there, they don't understand why they need to do it. And to your point, the bribe is worth it. Like if you can interrupt that behavior, the bribe, $100 is a lot of money for anybody, especially for a kid. But you believe that whatever you can offer as, I'll use that word, a bribe to interrupt

that behavior is worth it. Yes. I think an interruption is like the perfect, perfect way to put it. Yes. Interrupt, get in there, try to put a wedge into it and see what can happen. The important thing for parents right now is just opening up other portals so that there are other places that the kids can go other than sticking their nose right into their phone. And I've done very little talking in this interview about the

beauty of literature, the importance of reading, what novels can do for one. You know, all of that stuff is true too, but it might be hiking for your family. It might not be reading, right? It might be something else. My main goal was 50% reading and 50% get the heck off that other thing. Is the hope that this will stick? I mean, we often as parents will do things thinking that maybe this will plant a seed and that down the line, the child will understand the glory of whatever it is that you force them into doing and they will do it of their own volition. Is your hope that the $100 creates not just a temporary intervention, but creates a change in behavior? The $100 did exactly what I wanted it to do, which is introduce her to the beauty of getting immersed into a book or two or three or a series. That's what I wanted it to do. And it did that. The rest

is really up to her. The seed was planted. It's in her. I think it's in her deeply enough. And let's see if it flourishes, right? Let's see if it comes out. We don't know what the world is bringing, right? Technology is getting ever, ever more into our bodies. There's AI coming. God knows, right? It's like a scary future. But now she's got this thing, you know, she knows how to pick up a paper book and just start at page one. And I do think that that's something that's in her now. And I know that it's such a useful, important, and dramatically deep thing for a human that I think it will stay in her. I was on an airplane recently and I saw people all around, partially because

you can't look at your phone, but I saw a lot of people reading books, actual reading, like actual books in their hands, paper books in their hands, and was encouraged by that. It is encouraging because we've all had that really depressing metro or, you know, subway epiphany where you just look up for one second and see that every single person is on a device, that there isn't one person who's not on a device. And it's just kind of like, whoa, oh my goodness, this is the world we're in. So I would love to see an airplane like that. So in the meantime, the Christmas break is coming up. She's going to have a bit of time off from school. Yes.

Do you think she's going to read over the school holidays? I'm going to take her to the bookshop and try to get her interested in something else. And let's see if it works. Will you pay her to read over the school holidays or is this a one and done check? No. if it works. Will you pay her to read over the school holidays or is this a one and done check? No, and nor will I pay her younger nine-year-old sister who's so jealous at this point. She was like, will you pay me if I eat fruit? And will you write an article about it? So the answer to that one is not quite yet.

You know, no fruit, no fruit payment yet. Yet. Ever, frankly, but no. But I thank you very much for this. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure speaking to you. Ray Sokov is an author, cultural critic, regular contributor to the New York Times Opinion Section and New York Times Magazine. Would you pay a child in your life to read a book for pleasure?

Would you pay a child in your life to read a book for pleasure? What else have you done that has worked to get a kid to put the phone down and pick up a book? Email us, thecurrentatcbc.ca, or even better, pull it. See, we're talking about putting the phone down. Pick your phone up just briefly and record a voice note, and then you can email it to us, thecurrentatcbc.ca.