My Child Does Not Love to Read, And I’m (Starting to Be) Okay With That

Last fall in Maine, my eleven-year-old son contacted a sharpshooter and requested two deer heads. Once or twice a year on Peaks Island, where we live, a professional marksman ventures into the woods at night to cull deer and maintain ecological balance. Neighbors recounted tales of extreme deer overpopulation on the island before I moved here, starving and gaunt with ribs like broomsticks, scavenging gardens and unending trash cans. So when Theo made his request, I anticipated the inevitable arrival of carcasses.

Despite my tenderness for living things—I am the sort who plucks worms from asphalt after rain—I complied. While my son was at school, I retrieved a cardboard box from the ferry dock: two heads, tongues slack, eyes fixed in eternal gaze. When he returned home, I handed him rubber gloves, and he set to work skinning, simmering, scrubbing, and brushing until the bone gleamed white. The skulls now rest on Theo’s bookshelf, flanked by nature’s curiosities: eggshells, feathers, polished stones, a whale vertebra discovered on the beach. What you won’t find are many books.

I wanted a carbon copy of myself. What I have is a person entirely his own.

My son is a burgeoning biologist—brilliant, intrepid, insatiably curious. But he does not love to read. He’ll immerse himself in a thrifted college textbook on moose behavior or deer biology, yet novels are, in Theo’s estimation, “a waste of time.” On foot and with his Nikon in hand, he has tracked and cataloged the deer herds on the island, recorded their distinctive traits (Chubbs is by far the largest buck, Tiny has a broken antler, neither have been culled), and mapped their territories on a hand-drawn island chart. Theo can catch, clean, and cook a striped bass to feed our family. He knows their migratory rhythms and the scientific name, Morone saxatilis. But coaxing him to linger over a chapter is nearly impossible, often excruciating. “Why read about people doing things,” he asks, “when I can be doing them myself?”

For a long time, I tried everything to spark a reading habit: bribes, punishments, deals brokered with chocolate and screen time. None of it worked. And if I am honest, my panic stemmed less from him than from me. I am a writer. Literature is the atmosphere I inhale, the terrain I traverse; books are my deer heads. How could my child, my flesh and blood, avert his gaze from them? Meanwhile, my author friends post images of their preteens curled up with Crying in H-Mart or A Little Life, which makes me want to hurl a book across the room; my son barely tolerates five minutes of The Week, Junior.

Before motherhood, I envisioned little bookworms reciting Mary Oliver on the playground, dog-earing Beloved by age ten. Instead, I have a mini-me who cherishes skulls over paragraphs. The sting, I realized recently, was not about Theo’s abilities but about my assumptions. I wanted a carbon copy of myself. What I have is a person entirely his own.

The irony is that at his age, I wasn’t a reader either. I didn’t fall in love—or, more precisely, become obsessed—with books until I was around twenty-one, a freshly hatched adult. It happened in Mongolia, of all places, where I spent summers assisting an archaeologist. In the desert steppes outside Ulaanbaatar, I realized I was bored with the project’s mission; I was far more interested in the stories of the nomads traversing camelback on land we were temporarily inhabiting (and digging up, which felt ethically fraught). Story existed in the living, not the exhumed. I no longer wanted to excavate bones; I wanted to learn how to narrate life. I pivoted to creative nonfiction, immersing myself in craft. I studied books as rigorously as a coach studies game plays. That is how I became a writer; that is how I became a bookworm. Reading was not my beginning—it was my accompaniment. Each pang of anxiety over my son’s disinterest is tempered by that memory.

Parenting guarantees no literary replicas. It is the quiet cultivation of autonomous humans.

Literary parents often equate reading with empathy, intellect, and future success. We assume that quiet engagement with a book is the sole path to cultivating humanity. But literacy and storytelling extend beyond print. Theo possesses remarkable abilities I could not have foreseen: empathy, insatiable curiosity, irreverence, vivid imagination. When he returns from school, he is not reading Charlotte’s Web; he is inhabiting his own multiverse, protagonists of his story in real time. He is not behind—he is elsewhere. Boots muddy, camera in hand, he tracks deer herds, photographs labeled, maps annotated. He recounts the narratives of the forest and its inhabitants. If that is not reading the world, I don’t know what is.

And yes, we do read together. Bedtime finds us with A Young People’s History of the United States or Pam Muñoz Ryan’s The Dreamer, tracing young Pablo Neruda through rainforests and tempestuous seas. Reading has undeniable benefits—vocabulary, empathy, knowledge—but culture frames it as a moral good, a marker of superior parenting. Plus, the concept of reading is evolving—screens, visual media, narrative gaming, oral storytelling. Maybe my son is a reader, just not in the ways we were taught to recognize. After all, what is a story? Cause and effect. Empathy in action. Curiosity pursued, questions asked, fully immersed.

This is what I have not learned in a book: parenting guarantees no literary replicas. It is the quiet cultivation of autonomous humans. Liberation lies in relinquishing projection, in surrendering the desire for children to mirror our priorities and accomplishments. Our children’s stories unfold regardless of whether they are bound in books, and our role is to witness, facilitate, and sometimes step aside. Theo’s story will not be measured in pages or library cards. It will be measured in the vigor of his curiosity, the depth of his attention, and the audacity of his explorations. Perhaps one day he will embrace literature on his terms. Or perhaps not. And that is not failure; that is life.