What good is pleasure reading?

There are a lot of tempting diversions in this digital age. Sitting down with a book is a real commitment. Why should we make that commitment?

1. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. Read about it in the New Yorker article "Can Reading Make You Happier?"

2. Decrease stress, increase vocabulary, improve empathy and sense of belonging, slow cognitive decline, and many other things, according to this NBC review of research, in "Why 'getting lost in a book' is so good for you, according to science."

3. Don't forget the benefits of "pleasure," including the benefits of building intellectual, social, and inner life pleasures. Jeffrey Wilhelm reviews the wide range of benefits in this Edutopia article, "The Benefits of Reading for Pleasure." This article has a great "how to encourage reading" section as well.

4. For the most thorough review of the research, including academic, affective, and social benefits, head to the New Zealand National Library's article, "Reading for Pleasure: a Door to Success."

How can teachers and parents encourage kids to build a habit of pleasure reading? I haven't seen a better article about this than Daniel Willingham's article in the American Federation of Teachers website.

Here a summary of his advice for teachers (but don't just read this! the article gets into the weeds in the best possible way about the topic):

• Students have adequate time set aside for reading; they need at least a 20-minute reading period to get into their books. Teachers set the duration dependent on their students’ reading stamina (i.e., how long they can sustain attention).
• Students freely choose what they read. Choice is enormously important for motivation,9 but there must be teacher guidance and teacher-set limits. Given the chance, some students will pick books that entail no reading at all. (As researcher Nell Duke ruefully noted, “independent reading time” too often turns into “independent find Waldo time.”)10Teachers must not only monitor text difficulty, but also ensure that students are exposed to a variety of genres.
• Students have ready access to a good number of books.
• Students have some opportunity to feel a sense of community through reading with book discussions, recommendations, and other sorts of activities that avid adult readers practice.
• The teacher actively teaches during this time: fielding questions, helping students select books, and conferring with students. The alternative is that the teacher reads her own book at the same time as the students, with the idea that she’s modeling what a good reader does. But students can’t necessarily appreciate what she’s doing. Teachers actually teaching during in-class reading time seems to be essential to student success. Some of the most careful experiments indicate that without this feature, students don’t benefit from silent reading time in class.11

words