How to Get Through Boring Summer Reading: Tips For Kids (And The Parents Helping Them)
Last Tuesday I found my 13-year-old Javi stretched out on the living room rug, his required 8th grade summer reading book splayed open face-down on his stomach, Cheeto crumbs sticking to the blue paperback spine. He groaned when I leaned over to tap the cover: “Mom, how do I force myself to read this? It’s so boring. Nothing even happens for 100 pages. I just stare at the words and they don’t go in.”
This isn’t a new conversation. Last year, his required summer book was The Giver, and he dragged his feet for three whole weeks of August, cramming the entire thing the night before his first day of school, surviving on energy drinks and half-understood SparkNotes notes, and still missed half the questions on the opening quiz. I get it. I was that kid too. I still remember tucking a copy of Fear Street inside my own required summer reading in 9th grade, reading half the horror book and none of the assigned classic, skating by on the movie version I’d watched the night before. Forcing yourself to read something that doesn’t click doesn’t come naturally, no matter how much adults tell you “reading is fun.”
I almost gave the useless answers first. Just do it. If you start it you’ll get into it. Imagine how much worse it will be if you wait. None of that helps when you’re 13 and staring at four pages of descriptions of fishing knots that don’t matter to the story you’re waiting to start. I also didn’t offer to let him skip it, or just watch the movie. The requirement doesn’t go away, and the point isn’t to cheat the system forever. It’s to learn how to get through a boring task when you have to, which is a skill you need long after 8th grade English.
First, we stopped talking about “finishing the book” and split it into tiny, stupidly small chunks. Instead of a goal of 50 pages a week, it’s 10 pages at a time. After every 10 pages, he gets 2 minutes of scrolling TikTok. That’s it. No big rewards, no new video games, just the thing he was already going to do anyway, split up into small pieces. Last year I took away all his screens until he finished his reading, and he just sat on his bed staring at the wall for two hours, not turning a single page. This time, we used the thing he already wants as a built-in reward, and it’s worked way better. He’ll knock out 30 pages in 45 minutes without complaining, because he gets little breaks along the way that don’t feel like a punishment. If he wants to read more than 10 pages in a go, that’s fine, but he never has to.
Second, we made an official “boring part skip” rule. Javi was stuck last week on seven straight pages describing how Santiago repairs his sail and ties different fishing knots. He’d read the same paragraph three times, still couldn’t tell you what it said, because he didn’t care. I told him to skip it. I don’t mean skip whole chapters, but any paragraph or page that’s just describing something you don’t care about? Turn the page. The only rule is, if you get confused about what’s happening with the main story, you go back and find where you got lost. Teachers don’t quiz you on every throwaway description. I skipped all the wolf fur and sled dog descriptions in Call of the Wild when I read it, and I still got an A on my book report. Most of the time, the boring parts are just filler, and it’s okay to not read every single word to get what you need out of the book.
Third, we started taking turns reading out loud a couple nights a week after dinner. I don’t read the whole thing for him, that’s cheating and doesn’t help him build the habit he needs. But I’ll take the boring description pages, he takes the dialogue. When the book feels less like something you have to do alone, it feels less like a punishment. The first night we tried this, we got through 20 pages in 15 minutes, which would have taken him an hour of staring at the page alone, getting up for snacks every two minutes to procrastinate. We also sometimes read 10 pages while we’re waiting for our pizza at the local shop, or sitting on the porch before he goes out to bike with his friends. Small location shifts make it feel less like a chore you have to lock yourself in your room to do.
I used to think summer reading was supposed to turn kids into lifelong readers, that if the assigned book was boring, the school was doing it wrong, or I was doing it wrong as a parent. But the more I go through this with Javi, the more I think that sometimes, the point of boring assigned reading isn’t to fall in love with the book. It’s to practice forcing yourself through something that doesn’t feel fun, because there will be a hundred boring tasks you have to get through as an adult, and you have to learn how to do it without melting down or putting it off until the last minute. It doesn’t have to be joyful to be useful.
It’s been a week, and Javi’s halfway through the book. He still says it’s boring, he still says he doesn’t get why everyone thinks it’s a classic. Some days he reads 30 pages, some days we skip reading entirely to go to the pool or get ice cream, and that’s fine. There’s no perfect schedule, no neat resolution. He’s not suddenly going to love Hemingway because we split it into 10 page chunks. But he’s not panicking about finishing it two days before school starts, either. That’s enough for me, right now. We’re taking it one 10 page chunk at a time, and that’s the only trick that’s ever worked for forcing through a boring book, anyway.
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