When I was a child, I was one of those children who would devour books, hiding away in my bedroom, reading for hours on end. I used to imagine I were the characters in the books I read: The Little Princess, locked away in an attic (I demanded my mum would bring my breakfast and lunch up, as I wasn’t allowed out!); Lucy in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe having toast and tea with Mr Tumnus; George from The Famous Five, with her tomboy attitude and best friend Timmy the dog. I nagged my parents incessantly for a dog and insisted on having my hair cut short, like George, and remember how proud I was one day, to be mistaken for a boy by a member of the public. Reading was literally moulding my identity, helping me understand who I was and what I valued.

My eldest son is more similar to me. He once told me how much he loved reading as ‘he could see the story in his head and it was like he was Charlie!’ (Guess the novel!)

But my youngest is very different. He doesn’t see pictures in his head in the same way and will never open a book unprompted. This is a frustration many parents have shared with me over the years. Why doesn’t their child like reading like they did when they were a child?

Over the last year I have read more books than I have for years. In a way, this has been helped by ‘running out of’ TV, something we never used to have to worry about with our limit of four terrestrial channels and children’s programmes only on at lunchtime and after school. It has made me realise how so much in our modern world pulls our children away from books and reading and has got me thinking about how we can try to help our children access the stories which brought such pleasure to many of our own childhoods.

Atticus (again, guess the novel...) may not like reading but he is a very sociable little boy and loves cuddle times. We have made the most of our extra time together this year, snuggling up to read together, sometimes him, mostly me. We fit it in when everyone is bored and wants a break from lockdown.

His reading is improving: he is learning vocabulary from hearing me read to him and he is talking about the stories he is experiencing. He is now starting to dip into some of these in his own writing, creating characters with non-standard ways of speaking like Toothless in How to Train Your Dragon or Gollum from The Hobbit. We have watched the films from these books and then talked about how films are different from books and which are better. We have agreed that maybe The Hobbit feels a bit slow for today’s generation of children and that the film brings in much more action to counteract that.

Overall, despite him not having the love of reading I had, he is starting to get the knowledge of plot, character and genre which I hope will help him with his writing and ultimately in his GCSEs when he gets to that stage. More importantly, I am also sure that although he does not have a love of reading, he does enjoy sharing stories together, whether that is through the narrative of film or through shared reading. He is not an introvert like I was and will never be one to pick up a book on his own. And that is okay. It has made me reevaluate what I love most about books: their ability to forge connections between people through the process of telling stories.