Many people are well aware of the benefits of teaching our children to love reading. 【小题1】 Here is how you fit yourself in regular reading with your children.

Select a suitable time of day. The most suitable time of day is often bedtime but it might not be suitable for you. So it is important to consider your free time throughout the day. If reading a goodnight story at 8 pm. has you yawning(打哈欠)and trying hard to remain awake, perhaps a story before dinner, or a story in the afternoon will work out better. 【小题2】

Break down the reading if necessary. Rather than try to go through five chapters of a large book each night, cut it down to two chapters. 【小题3】 When the choice is nothing at all, books with fewer chapters will be much preferred by your child.

Read loud together. 【小题4】 If an older child who is able to read finds this “unfair” or “annoying”, you can let him read something that interests him and read it out loud to the family. Another way to gather more than one child is to read stories in turn and have each of them listen politely. As a result, they will love hearing and favor such group activity.

【小题5】 It goes a long way. When your children read anything -the label off a packet or a book, be sure to praise their reading at every chance you get. Thus, you are creating a reading culture in your family, which is an important way of helping children cope with their feelings and problems, as well as answering their curiosities, and developing their imagination.

Digital reading appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Astonishing numbers of people with years of schooling are in effect illiterate. This month’s Ljubljana Manifesto (宣言) explains: “The digital field may promote more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many temptations to read in a superficial and scattered (零散的) manner — or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.”

That’s frightening, because “higher-level reading” has been essential to civilization. It enabled the enlightenment and an international increase in empathy. Without it, we would suffer a lot. As the Ljubljana Manifesto notes, “as much as one-third of Europeans struggle even with lower-level reading skills.” More than one-fifth of adults in the US “fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category”. Separately, post-pandemic reading scores for American 13-year-olds are the lowest in decades. And the Washington-based Center for Global Development recently estimated that literacy in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa among those with five years of schooling has decreased by 10% this past half century.

Experts in the Ljubljana Manifesto record the demerits of digital reading: “Recent studies of various kinds indicate a decline of critical and conscious reading, slow reading, non-strategic reading and long-form reading.” When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorb hundreds of pages of details thoroughly and begin to capture the world’s complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are “skimming, scanning, scrolling”. The medium is the message: doing deep reading on your phone is as hard as playing tennis with your phone. Recently, a bright 11-year-old told me I was wasting time on books: he absorbed more information faster from Wikipedia. He had a point. But digital readers also absorb more misinformation and seldom absorb fine perspectives.

In short, as professors from Northwestern University foresaw in 2005, we are returning to the days when only an elite (精英) “reading class” consumes long texts, which is worrying.

Have you ever felt that reading a good book makes you better able to connect with your fellow human beings? If so, the results of a new scientific study back you up, but only if your reading material is literary fiction (文艺小说).Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York, have proved that reading literary fiction improves the ability to sense and understand other people's feelings.

In a series of five experiments, 1,000 participants were given texts to read, either parts of popular fiction, or more literary texts. The pair then used a variety of Theory of Mind methods to measure how accurately (精确的)the participants could identify feelings in others. Scores were higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.

"What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others,” said Kidd. “Some writing is what you call ‘writerly’, you fill in the gaps and participate, and some is “readerly”, and you’re cheered. We tend to see “readerly” more in fictions like adventure and romance, where the author put down your experience as a reader. Writerly fiction or literary fiction lets you go into a new environment and you have to find your own way,’’ Kidd said.

However, although Castano and Kidd proved that literary fiction improves social empathy (共情) , they were not prepared to use the results to determine whether a piece of writing is worthy of being called literary. “These are aesthetic (美学的)and stylistic concerns which as psychologists we can’t and don’t want to give opinions about,” said Kidd. “Neither do we argue that people should only read literary fiction; it’s just that only literary fiction seems to improve Theory of Mind in the short term. There are likely benefits of reading popular fiction — certainly enjoyment. We just did not measure them.”