How to Help Your Kid Get Through Boring Required Summer Reading: Real Tips That Don’t Involve Nagging
Last Saturday, I was on the front porch folding my 13-year-old Javi’s soccer uniforms, still sticky with grass and Gatorade from morning practice, when he trundled out holding his dog-eared copy of The Scarlet Letter. He dropped it on the step at my feet, slumped down, and asked, “Mom, how do I force myself to read this? It’s so boring I’d rather scrub the inside of the fridge.”
I knew exactly how he felt. When I was his age, I got assigned Moby Dick for 10th grade summer reading, and I stuffed it in the back of my closet until three days before the first day of school. I crammed the whole thing on a 4-hour car ride home from our family vacation, didn’t retain a single detail about whale anatomy, and got a C on the first essay because I based most of it on a 10-minute SparkNotes summary. Last year, Javi tried the same trick with his assigned biography of Harriet Tubman—he watched a 15-minute YouTube summary, got caught when his teacher asked a question no summary covered, and walked away with a zero on his first assignment. So this year, we’re trying something different: no big speeches, no empty threats, just small, manageable steps to get through it.
I didn’t give him the line everyone always gives, that “it gets better halfway through.” He’s bored right now, and that’s what matters. Instead, I gave him one non-negotiable rule that takes 15 minutes max a day: read 10 pages out loud to the dog, then you can put the book down and do whatever you want. The dog doesn’t care if you misread words, zone out mid-sentence, or complain about the plot while you read. Reading out loud keeps you from staring at the same paragraph for 10 minutes without absorbing anything, which is the biggest reason boring books feel impossible to get through. Javi rolled his eyes so hard I thought they’d get stuck, but that afternoon I heard him in the living room droning to our 8-year-old golden retriever, who just lay on the rug snoring through the whole thing. After 10 pages, he closed the book and went to play Roblox, no complaints, no fighting. That’s already better than the hour-long standoffs we had last year.
Next, I swapped the big end-of-book reward for tiny, immediate rewards after every small chunk of reading. I used to think “finish the whole book and we’ll go to the water park” would motivate him, but that reward is too far away for a 13-year-old to care about when he’s staring at a boring chapter today. Now, every 20 pages (about two days of 10-page reads) gets a scoop of his favorite mint chocolate chip ice cream after dinner. Every time he finishes a full chapter, he gets to pick what show we watch as a family after dinner. It’s low effort for me, no big planning or expensive gifts, and the payoff comes right after he does the work. He’s been begging for ice cream almost every night, so he’s been showing up to read just to get it.
I also told him he can skip the boring parts. A lot of classic required reading is full of pages of description that don’t move the plot at all, and 9 times out of 10, the teacher isn’t going to quiz you on that three-page description of 17th century Boston that Javi complained about. I pulled up the study guide his 9th grade teacher posted online to check, and none of the discussion questions even mention that section. So he skipped it, moved on to the part with the dialogue and the plot, and still knows exactly what’s going on. The point of summer reading isn’t to read every single word, it’s to get the gist and practice showing up for a task you didn’t choose. Skipping the slow parts takes away that feeling that the book is endless, which is half the battle.
It hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Three days ago, he hit a stretch where he just refused to pick up the book. He slammed it shut on the coffee table and said it was still stupid, that he didn’t care what happened to any of the characters, and he wasn’t going to read another page. I didn’t nag him, didn’t take away his games, didn’t give him a lecture about responsibility. I just sat down next to him on the couch, picked up the book, and read 10 pages out loud to him while he folded his soccer socks. Then I asked him to read 10 pages back to me. We did that, and the next day he went right back to reading to the dog. He still says the book is boring, that it’s a waste of time that could be spent reading his favorite sci-fi novels. But he’s 200 pages in now, two weeks ahead of the pace he needs to hit to finish before school starts.
As a part-time 8th grade teacher, I see this same struggle every fall. Hundreds of kids leave their summer reading to the last minute, cheat with online summaries, and come away hating reading even more than they did before. The problem isn’t that kids are lazy or hate reading. It’s that most required summer reading is picked by adults for adults, and it almost never lines up with what a 13 or 14 year old actually cares about. Forcing yourself to get through something boring doesn’t have to mean sitting for hours hating every minute. It just means breaking it down into small enough pieces that it doesn’t feel like a huge punishment.
Last night, we sat on the porch eating his post-chapter ice cream, and he said, “It’s still the most boring book I’ve ever read, but it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.” I didn’t tell him he’d grow to love classic literature one day, I didn’t give him a speech about why it’s important. I just nodded and said, yeah, that’s how most required work goes. Some things you just have to get through, and that’s okay. We still have 100 pages left, and I’m sure there will be a few more days where he refuses to touch the book. But right now, this is working. It’s not fancy, it’s not going to turn Javi into an English major, but it’s a whole lot better than cramming 200 pages in the car on the way to the first day of school, which is the best I can ask for right now.
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