When I give presentations to parents, I talk a lot about how a love of reading is caught not taught. If we are telling our children how important it is read while sitting in front of the tv it’s just not going to work.

Inevitably, I will have a mom who hopes that I will side with  her in a marital disagreement. The question will go something like this, “Yeah! I tell my husband he needs to read more books. The kids think he only reads newspapers and magazines. They’re not going to see him as a reader, right?”

Wrong.

And it’s super important that they see him reading his newspapers and magazines. If the girls relied only on me, they would think that newspapers and magazines were things that sat on the living room table until I got sick of looking at them. I really only seem to make time to read books. And the internet, of course. But it is so, so important that children learn the importance of other mediums for reading.

Thanks to Rob, Caroline now sneaks out in to the dark, bare footed to collect the newspaper. I won’t let her on-line in the morning, so how else is she going to get her sports scores!