Comment by Andy_Donner

I'm dyslexic and find reading genuinely taxing — my imagination moves faster than I can read, I lose the thread, and I've never enjoyed it. The last book I read for pleasure was when I was fifteen. I don't feel like I'm missing something.

But I read to my son every night and I love it. Not because I'm performing good parenting, but because it's one of the only times he just wants to sit with me rather than run off and do something else. He's completely absorbed. I get to be there with him in that.

He loves books in a way I never did and I'm glad. I wouldn't want him to have my relationship with them. The thread here keeps treating reading as a single thing — either you do it or you don't, and if you don't you're missing out. But being read to and reading alone are completely different experiences, and I think we underestimate how much the first one matters even for kids who will never be readers themselves.