What Makes a Parent Love a Child? A Dad Reflects on Reading Battles
The one thing nobody warned me about parenting is how often love feels like sitting very still while a nine-year-old melts down over a book.
My son Leo and I have a nightly ritual: twenty minutes of reading at the kitchen table. The book is a library copy about volcanoes, the pencil is doing absolutely nothing helpful, and Leo is slouched so far down in his chair that his chin is almost level with the table. I can feel the familiar tightness in my chest. Not anger, exactly. More like the weariness of knowing what’s coming.
“I hate reading,” he says for the fourth time this week.
He pushes the book away. He crosses his arms. There’s something theatrical about it, but also something real. The theatrical part is new—he’s learning that drama gets attention. The real part is the way his bottom lip tucks in, which he does when he’s genuinely scared.
Every instinct I have says: correct him. Say something firm about how we don’t give up, about how reading is important, about how he’ll never finish fourth grade if we keep having this fight at 7:42 on a Tuesday. I open my mouth, and then I notice something odd. His hands are on the book, and they’re trembling slightly. Not a lot. Just enough.
A child who is angry crosses arms. A child who is afraid holds onto something.
So instead of correcting him, I say, “That volcano fact is actually pretty cool. Did you know some eruptions are loud enough to be heard in Australia?” I read the sentence aloud to him. Then I say, “You take that one.”
He looks at me like I have grown a second head. But he reads it. He stumbles over “viscous,” and I slide my finger next to the word. Not to point at it, just to sit beside it. He gets through it, and we turn the page together.
It’s not a magical moment. There’s no swelling soundtrack or sudden rain of golden light from the kitchen window. He still fidgets, I still check the clock once, and the next page is a struggle again. But something small has shifted.
The question that brought me here, honestly, is one I never expected to ask: what makes a parent love a child? I asked it to myself, quietly, during one of these tough nights, when Leo had slammed his bedroom door and I was standing in the hallway feeling like I had handled it all wrong.
I expected the answer to be obvious. You love because they’re yours. You love because you carried them, or saw them born, or because of the first time they said your name. And all of that is true. But it doesn’t explain the specific, persistent, daily kind of love that happens after the door slams.
Nobody talks about love as a practical thing. But it is. It’s the decision to sit at a table with a reluctant reader for the tenth night in a row. It’s the decision not to fix the problem with a stern voice, but to say “let’s trade” and read a paragraph yourself, even when you’re tired and your throat is scratchy and you’d rather be anywhere else.
The education side of this is simple, and maybe that’s why parents miss it. Kids rarely misbehave because they don’t care. They misbehave because they’re overwhelmed. Leo wasn’t being lazy about the volcano book—he was scared of getting it wrong in front of me. He was scared that each stumble confirmed that reading is hard for him and that I would eventually be disappointed.
Here’s the thing I wish I had known earlier: telling a struggling kid “I believe in you” is only half helpful. What actually works is showing up in a way that leaves no room for doubt, which is smaller and harder. It’s putting your finger next to the word without saying anything. It’s saying, “That one’s tricky. I always trip over it too.” It’s reading the first page in a ridiculous voice and letting the child correct you, just so they get to feel what it’s like to be the one who knows.
I read once that strong attachment isn’t built through big, emotional moments. It’s built through millions of ordinary ones, where a parent returns to a child again and again, and in each small return the child learns “I am someone who is not abandoned.” Sitting at a kitchen table with a grumpy eight-year-old and a book about lava is not abandonment. It’s the opposite. It’s the most boring, most honest version of love I know.
This is not a story about how being patient transforms a child into a bookworm. Leo still fights reading sometimes. Some nights end with the book closed and both of us quiet. I’ve learned to let those nights happen. When I stop forcing, he starts returning on his own—not always, but often enough. I’ve started paying attention to the pattern.
Kids don’t need a perfect parent. They need a parent who stays. And staying, it turns out, is mostly a series of small, unglamorous commitments. You stay through the homework battle. You stay through the meltdown about the movie being chosen last for movie night. You stay through the long dinner table conversation that goes absolutely nowhere. You don’t leave emotionally. You don’t check out.
At some point during the volcano reading, Leo looked up at me, mid-paragraph, and made accidental eye contact. He didn’t smile. But his shoulders dropped a little. That was it. I still don’t know exactly what makes love take root and hold firm. But I know it happens in those moments when I am present, in my body, in the room, doing nothing spectacular, just holding a page while he finds his place.
Maybe love isn’t really about feelings. Maybe it’s the thing that’s left over after you’ve done the work of being there. It’s a little more mechanical than we like to admit. There is no lightning bolt. There is no magical bond that floats above the chaos. There is just a dad in a creaking kitchen chair, a kid who is afraid of failing, and a book that neither of us really cares about but both of us are reading together.
The other night, Leo came over while I was washing dishes and asked if we could read a new book about the ocean. Not at the table. He wanted to read it on the couch, under the blanket, with the lamp on. I almost said no because I was tired. Then I said okay.
We read eleven pages. He yawned. I yawned. We stopped in the middle of a chapter. He asked if we could finish it tomorrow. I said we would.
I don’t know if this will keep working. We’ll probably have hard nights again. But that’s fine. That’s the point. Love isn’t something you have or don’t have for your child. It’s something you do, over and over, when you’d rather be doing anything else. He asked me to keep reading with him. That’s a small miracle, and I almost missed it because I was too busy worrying about whether I was doing it right.
There’s no grand answer to what makes a parent love a child. But there’s a dinner table, a book, and a promise to show up again tomorrow with a clean cup of tea and a little more patience.
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