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As all parents in this reading-kalyug, I have struggled to steal my children away from the land of screens and tempt them into the world of books. It is true that good podcasts and Youtube explainers can provide a young person with a wealth of information; and also that well-made TV series, documentaries and movies can be excellent entertainment. But the stillness of mind that comes with reading, ironic since it is an activity that requires the mind to wander the other worlds that inhabit a book, is difficult to replicate. Screens are mental overload. They fracture our brains into a prismatic way of seeing, so that our attention spans are diminished, and we are afflicted with a restlessness born of clicks and scrolls.
Yet, I have failed to reason my way into declaring the “superiority” of books to screens. And, over time, following many debates with the offspring, I have even conceded that “superiority” may be the wrong word to use.
The younger generation is experiencing a return to the primacy of orality over the written word. Nonetheless, they are still compelled by stories, and their minds are still open to the wonder of learning. They see books as a delivery mechanism rather than the kind of sacred objects deserving of reverence that I grew up believing them to be. My own biblio-proclivity as a youngster was probably the result of the fact that there simply wasn’t much besides books that could feed my imagination.
And yet, spurning cold rationality, I have an emotional need to pass on my love of books to my boys. To be a reader is to never have solitude turn into loneliness. It is to exercise the brain, while nourishing the soul. If my boys come to love books, I will worry less about their lives beyond mine.
The solution that I have devised is to allow screens in the house, but to romanticize books by stacking a series of ritualistic habits around the act of reading. I hit upon the idea when I learned about the psychological concept of “layering habits.”
This is the science: our brains build a strong network of neurons to support current behaviors. The more we do something, the stronger and more efficient the connections between the networks become. For example, our brains are very efficient at remembering to take a shower each morning, or to make a morning cup of chai, among the hundreds of other little daily habits that we perform reflexively. We can take advantage of these strong connections to build new habits, by identifying a current practice that is already second nature to us, and then stacking the new behavior on top.
Examples of layering habits can include:
Again, the reason that habit-stacking works, is that our current habits are already hardwired into our brains, so linking new practices to these makes it more likely that we’ll stick to them. All of which is to say that I have built a ritualized and romantic mesh of habits around bedtime reading that is now the most cherished time that my younger son and I share.
Half an hour before bedtime, we both put away all the screens. My phone is taken to the study for charging by him, which signals that I am “disconnected” from elsewhere and focused on the moment. Nico then makes two cups of steaming chamomile tea, while I dim electric lights and set out fragrant candles on my bedside table. We then snuggle under our “special” reading blanket together.
Some nights, I read out aloud to him. Other nights we read separately, together. The effect of these rituals is to create a deliciously cozy circle of endorphin-zinging love, one that becomes associated with books. And voilà: a reader is born.
If social psychology is correct, then this bedtime reading habit should extend for my little one into his adulthood and beyond. That is if we haven’t all become AI-directed cyborgs by then.
