The Opinions - Why I Don’t Regret Paying My Kid $100 to Read a Book

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Mirielle Silcoff received backlash when she wrote a guest essay for Times Opinion about paying her 12-year-old daughter $100 to read a novel. In this audio essay, Ms. Silcoff explains why she doesn’t regret her decision, and why she felt like the experience for her daughter was worth the cost.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is Marais Silcoff. I'm a journalist, a cultural critic, and an author, and I live in Montreal, Canada. I recently wrote an article about paying my daughter $100 to read a single book. My 12-year-old is a very gregarious girl, or traditionally has been the type of kid who would get excited at a new dessert cooling in the fridge, jump up and down on any given occasion with excitement and glee. And then she got a smartphone and turned into, as I write in the article,

something of a monosyllabic blanket slug. We entered what I call the Duve Cave era, which was suddenly my 12-year-old would disappear into her room. and I'd find her with the door closed, the blinds down, the lights off under her duvet, just on her phone. I'm 51, I'm Gen X. I don't know any parent of kids my age who aren't in a huge daily tussle about technology and how to manage it. And I feel like no matter how many parental controls, no matter how many blackout periods you put in, it can feel like a bit of an unwinnable battle

for parents because it's you against TikTok and Snapchat and Apple and Amazon and, you know, this entire giant billion and billion dollar thing that's just taken over the entire culture. You know, I'm a single mom. I'm at home alone with these two girls. There's no way I am going to beat Snapchat. While I respect parents who have been successful at not giving their children phones or limiting their use. For my household, I didn't think that that would be the thing that would work. Many of the reasons that she has a phone are the same reasons that I have one. She needs to organize her busing the next morning. She needs to figure out who she's walking to school with. A lot of parents are having trouble getting their kids to read. There was an extremely depressing

Pew study that came out around 2021 about enjoyment of reading. In 1984, you had 8% of kids who said they never read for fun. And in 2021, you had something like 33%, a huge, huge jump in kids that said they never read for fun. And to me, there's a kind of precious culture that's come about around reading. And in that I would put the Jane Austen book book book. bags and the wallpaper that looks like the spines of classic penguins and all this stuff that I don't think is very good for reading. I think it's good for book culture, but I don't think it's good for reading because you'll have the case of a daughter like mine who doesn't have the natural inclination to read, who can say to me legitimately, Mommy, I'm not a reader. She said,

Mommy, I'm not a reader, as if she were saying, Mommy, I'm not into anime, or Mommy, I'm not a skateboarder, right? Because you have to be a book lover or a book worm. And to me, it's a bit frustrating because, as I said to my daughter, which she found totally gross, I want her to see reading as just a normal daily function, like going to the bathroom. I find it irritating when parents of my generation will be like, well, I was a bookworm, and this was how many books I read, and children should do that now, too, and they should just do it out of their own volition. To which I say, look at the culture that we've created for these kids. Like, there's distraction and attention grab at every single corner anywhere they go in their lives,

and you expect them to naturally and easily just sit down for hours on a Wednesday night with a book, I mean, it's a hard sell now. And so in the case of reading with my daughter, I offered this insane amount. She immediately said yes because nobody in my house gets $100 for anything. And that was really part of the point because I wanted for her to understand that I felt reading was so unbelievably important for her and so meaningful to her life that I was willing to give her. a mint in money in order to try it. And that knowledge, I think bred a certain dedication in her. She really felt like she had a job.

Here I should say that I worked really, really hard to find what would be the best book for my daughter. And a lot of crazy people said, like, Wuthering Heights or Le Petit Prince. And I'm like, if you want my daughter to never want to read ever, yes, let's give her Wuthering Heights as the first novel she ever reads in full. for pleasure. And so the question was, what would she love? Not what would be edifying, but what would she love? And it turned out that this Jenny Hand book, the summer I turned pretty, came up again and again. And so that was the book I chose. So one thing that many of the people who say children

should read more will point to is that reading builds empathy, right? I remember what it's like being 12. You want to check out. You want to get away from your parents. It's hard. There's so much going on in your life. There's so much going on in your body. And when you're watching reels or even watching a movie, no matter how interesting, no matter how emotional, no matter how empathy building, let's call it, the content is, it's still being thrown at you as an experience that's complete. It's not asking very much of you. It's not asking you to build any muscles. You know, I'm an author myself. And when you're writing a short story or when you're writing not novel or whatever, you necessarily have to leave gaps. You can't write every single thing that's going on

in your protagonist's mind. And those gaps are the place where imagination and understanding and empathy and all of these things that we want to breed into our children, that's where it all happens. It happens in the gaps. And in the media landscape as it stands now, there are no gaps. So after the essay published, there was a lot of backlash, not surprisingly. You can't headline an article. I paid my kid a hundred bucks to read a book and not have half of America immediately hate you. I guess I was just putting myself out there and being like, hey, this is the crazy thing that I did in my house. Oh, well, shrug emoji, whatever works.

As obnoxious as this experiment sounds to pay your child 100. in order to read a single novel. In the case of my 12-year-old, it actually worked. It did work. She read one. Now, it's only a couple of months ago. Who knows what she'll be like at the age of 15 or 16 or 32 or 32. But it did work for now. She read the book. She enjoyed it. She asked for the sequel. She read that. Now she's reading the third part in this series, but I don't think I would pay my kid to read again. Nobody has to pay a hundred bucks, right? Maybe there's something that would work in your own household. But I think the important thing is just to try to put a dent into that experience

so that your kid can get a bit of perspective on what's happening on that little hot, blinking rectangle that they just want to spend all of their hours on. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vichaca, Phoebe, Lett, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris.

Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samueluski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.