You can't force a child to love reading. You can build the conditions in which it grows.

The problem is rarely the screens

It is easy to believe that reading has simply lost to screens — that there was a fair contest for your child's attention and the phone won. That story is comforting because it makes the loss nobody's fault.

But look closely at the houses where children still read, and screens are present in most of them. The difference is rarely that those families banned the devices. It is that reading, in those houses, never turned into work.

That is the thing worth sitting with. For most children who have gone off reading, the decisive event was not the arrival of a screen. It was the moment reading stopped being something they did and became something that was being done to them — for their vocabulary, for their marks, for their improvement.

Why reading-as-improvement kills it

There is a particular way of caring about a child's reading that quietly destroys it.

It looks responsible. You choose books that will stretch them. You steer away from the ones that won't. You ask what they learned. You keep a gentle eye on whether the reading is the right kind, at the right level, doing the right work. Every part of it comes from love.

And the child feels all of it. They register that reading is being watched, measured, and improved — that it belongs to the same category as homework and marks. A thing that is watched and measured is a thing you can fail at, and children are extremely good at avoiding things they can fail at.

This will not turn a reluctant reader into a voracious one overnight, and any programme that promised that would be lying. What it can do is remove the specific pressure that is holding the habit down, and let it come back at its own pace — which, for reading, is the only pace that lasts.

Availability, modelling, autonomy

Strip away everything and three plain conditions do most of the work.

Availability. Books within arm's reach, in the rooms where the child actually spends time — not shelved neatly in a study nobody uses. A book that has to be fetched is a book that competes badly with a screen that is already in hand.

Modelling. A child who never once sees an adult read for pleasure has been shown exactly what reading is for: it is a school thing, a children's thing, something you're made to do and then grow out of. A parent reading their own book, visibly, unbidden, teaches more than any encouragement.

Autonomy. The child chooses. Comics count. Graphic novels count. The same book for the fortieth time counts. Something well below what you know they're capable of counts. The act of reaching for a book by choice is the entire habit you are trying to build, and it does not form when the choosing is quietly overruled every time.

None of these is complicated. What makes them hard is that they require an adult to stop doing the things that feel like helping.

Reading aloud, longer than you were told

Most parents stop reading aloud around the time a child can read independently, on the reasonable assumption that the job is done.

It is worth reconsidering. Being read to is a distinct pleasure — it asks nothing of the child, carries no risk of getting it wrong, and keeps reading bound up with closeness and comfort. That matters most precisely at the age when independent reading starts to feel like effort and school has begun to claim it.

Continuing to read aloud, well past the point it seems necessary, is one of the quietest and most effective things a parent can do. It keeps a warm association alive through the years when it is most likely to cool.

The Indian layer: English, mother tongue, and pressure

There is a version of this whole question that is specific to Indian homes, and it deserves naming.

Reading here often arrives freighted with English-language pressure. Reading well in English is treated as a proxy for a bright future, and so the reading a child does gets quietly conscripted into that project — which brings back the exact improvement-pressure that kills the habit. Meanwhile the supply of genuinely appealing children's material in most Indian languages is thin, so a parent who wants their child to read in the mother tongue is often working against a real scarcity, not just a preference.

There is no clean solution to hand you, only an honest way to work with it: keep the pleasure ahead of the language question, use what is actually available to you, and resist letting reading become one more arena of competitive achievement. A child who reads happily in any language is far more likely to grow into a reader across languages than one who has been made to read anxiously in the "right" one.

None of this asks you to care less about your child's future. It asks you to trust that a child who loves reading will, over years, out-read a child who has been made to perform it — and to hold your nerve while that slow thing happens.