The school year ends and the reading habit often goes with it.
Not because children stop loving stories. They don't. But because the way reading was structured in school, assigned titles, reading logs, comprehension questions, trained them to treat books as work. Remove school and they remove the work.
The fight most parents are trying to win in summer is not really about reading. It is about reclaiming books as something a child does for pleasure, not compliance.
Let them choose badly
A 9-year-old who wants to read the same Captain Underpants book for the third time is a child who loves reading. Let it happen. A parent who redirects toward "something more educational" is, in that moment, teaching the child that their taste is wrong. That lesson lasts longer than any summer reading list.
The right book is the one a child will actually open.
Make the books visible
Books that live in a pile on the dining table get read. Books shelved in the bedroom, spine out, do not. A basket of 5 to 7 books in the main living space, changed every few weeks, is one of the simplest reading habits a family can build.
Read alongside, not at them
Reading a book yourself, in the same room, is more persuasive than any screen-time negotiation. Children notice what adults do with their free time. If the parent is on a phone, the phone becomes the template. If the parent is in a book, that becomes a possibility too.
You do not need to read together or discuss what you read. Just be in the same room, reading, sometimes.
Keep the bar low
Picture books do not age out. A 12-year-old who picks up a picture book during the holidays is a 12-year-old who still finds joy in a story told quickly, beautifully, in 32 pages. Do not correct that instinct.
Graphic novels count. Long magazine articles count. A chapter before sleep counts. The goal in summer is not to hit a reading level. It is to keep the thread intact so that picking up a book still feels natural in September.
Children who are allowed to abandon a book they are not enjoying learn something worth knowing: their time has value, and a story has to earn its pages. That judgment is exactly what makes a lifelong reader. The opposite, grinding through something because they started it, teaches the opposite.
Before school ends, do this
Take your child to a bookshop or library and let them choose 4 or 5 books for the summer. No list. No theme. Just: what do you want to read? Frame it as the opposite of assigned reading. They pick, they decide the pace, nobody checks.
That trip takes under an hour. It can change how 8 weeks feel.
The children who come to us as readers, and sometimes later as writers, nearly always describe some version of the same memory: a summer when the books were just there, accessible and unassigned, and they read through an entire shelf without anyone watching. That is the kind of reading that stays with a person.