It’s twenty to nine on a Tuesday. The dishes are still in the sink, there’s a permission slip buried somewhere in a backpack, and your kid is finally in pajamas asking for “just one more” story. You love them more than anything. You’re also completely out of gas.
If you’re raising a child on your own, you’ve probably noticed that the advice about reading aloud for twenty minutes every single night seems to have been written by someone with a second adult in the house. Some nights it happens. Plenty of nights it doesn’t.
So here’s the good news. You don’t need hours to raise a reader. You need a few small habits and a slightly looser idea of what counts as reading time.
Start by dropping the guilt
Kids don’t keep score the way we think they do. What sticks with them isn’t the number of minutes you logged. It’s whether books feel like something warm that happens with you, or a chore that happens to them.
Dads also bring something of their own to the couch. Dr. Elisabeth Duursma, a researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia, has spent years looking at fathers who read to their kids. She points to earlier American research with low income families, which found that dads reading to their children at age three made a real difference to the child’s language a year later. Her work suggests a reason. Fathers tended to use more complex language and to tie the story back to the child’s own world, like a dad connecting a ladder in the book to the one he climbs at work. Mothers more often asked kids to name colors or count things on the page.
In other words, the way you already talk is part of what you’re giving them. You don’t have to perform. You just have to be there.
Ten minutes is plenty
Forget the idea that it has to be a big block of time. Ten minutes with your phone in another room beats half an hour of reading while you answer work emails. Short books help here too. A picture book that takes four minutes to read is a perfectly good bedtime, and you’ll actually get to the end of it, which kids care about more than we give them credit for.
On the truly rough nights, read one page. Or let them read one page to you.
A tiny ritual that keeps going is worth more than a big one you keep skipping.
Steal reading time from the rest of the day
Bedtime isn’t the only slot. Most single dads spend a surprising amount of time in the car, at the stove or standing in line somewhere, and any of those can hold a bit of reading.
Audiobooks are the obvious one for the drive to school or practice. Pause when something exciting happens and ask what they think comes next. At dinner, hand over the recipe or the back of the cereal box and have them read it out. Road signs, menus, the instructions for a new toy, last night’s scores. It all counts, and it quietly teaches them that reading is useful and everywhere, and that it isn’t only a school thing.
Bath time works as well, with a cheap waterproof book for little ones or a comic propped on the edge of the sink for older kids.
Let them choose (yes, even that one)
If your kid wants the same dinosaur book for the fortieth night in a row, read it. If they’re eight and only want comics, graphic novels or joke books, that’s reading. Kids are far more likely to stick with something they picked themselves, and the stuff they love now is the bridge to everything else later.
A library card might be the cheapest win in all of parenting. Make the trip a regular thing, let them carry the bag, and try hard not to be the one who says “that’s too babyish” or “that’s too hard.”
And leave books lying around. On the couch, in the car door, next to the toilet. A bored kid who spots a book will often pick it up, especially when nobody told them to.
For the nights you’re not there
Plenty of single dads share custody, work late shifts or travel for work, so some bedtimes happen without you. That doesn’t have to break the habit.
Record yourself reading a few favorite books on your phone and leave the recordings for the nights you’re apart. Kids will happily listen to their dad doing a terrible pirate voice again and again. If you can manage a video call, read a chapter together with each of you holding a copy. Keeping a second copy of the current book at the other house means the story doesn’t stop just because the address changed.
Put them, and you, in the story
One of the fastest ways to hook a kid who isn’t that into books is to make them the hero. Children are fascinated by stories about themselves, and seeing their own face on the page grabs their attention in a way a random cartoon character can’t.
That’s the whole idea behind a personalized book from Little Hero Book. You upload a photo, pick a story, and your kid shows up in the illustrations on every page with their name in the text. You can preview the whole thing and change any words you like before it’s printed as a hardcover.
For dads there’s a fun twist. What’s Under There? is a personalized book starring a father and son (it works just as well with a daughter). The story was written for a child and Grandpa, but you can upload your own photo and type in whatever your kid calls you, and suddenly you’re the one at the controls of a rusty old digging machine called The Mole. The backyard cracks open, the two of you climb in, and then something breaks and the drill won’t stop going down. You pass dinosaur bones stuck in rock, a cave full of crystals as tall as buildings, an underground river and the spot where earthquakes start, all the way to the iron ball at the center of the Earth, before Dad pulls every lever at once and shoots you both back home.
It takes about four minutes to read, which is just about right for a tired dad on a school night, and each layer of the Earth comes with one real science fact. Don’t be surprised if you get a lecture on tectonic plates over breakfast.
There’s something else, too. On the nights you feel like you’re getting everything wrong, it’s nice to have a book on the shelf where your kid gets to watch you be the hero of a big adventure.
Keep it fun
Don’t quiz them after every chapter, and don’t let it turn into homework. Do the voices, even if they’re awful. Stop on a cliffhanger now and then so they beg for more tomorrow. Skip a page on purpose once in a while and let them catch you (they will, every time).
And don’t stop too early. Scholastic’s Kids and Family Reading Report has found that kids’ enjoyment of reading for fun drops off noticeably around age nine and tends not to come back. That’s also about when a lot of parents stop reading aloud, because the kid can read alone now. Kids don’t necessarily want that. In a 2015 Scholastic survey, around four in ten children aged six to eleven said they wished their parents would keep reading to them, because it was special time together.
You won’t get every night right. Nobody does, with a partner or without one. But a kid who grows up hearing their dad’s voice in a story, even for five minutes in a parking lot or over a crackly video call, learns something that lasts. Books become the place you two go together.
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Photo Credit: iStock
