Roofing It

(Settle down; no, this isn’t a blogpost about a date rape drug. jeez … this is a parenting website for chrissake)

Most of the things that I do with my children tends to fall into two categories. Category One is in the “pure fun” category. Sometimes I’ll just go for a ride on the public transit trains (in Cleveland, we call it The Rapid) with my son just because he loves it. Or we’ll go to the drug store and buy a bunch of licorice or play music and dance or play video games. Category Two is the “crap that has to get done” category: taking them to school, getting clothes on or off; brushing teeth, picking up the playroom, etc.

But like most parents, I try to do things aren’t just fun and aren’t just crap that has to get done (although it doesn’t happen as much as it should). Like most parents, however, one of the things that we do that is fun AND good for them is reading. Early after the birth of our daughter, my wife informed me that, if we were an English class, she was “literature” and I was “grammar.” Translated, this meant that my wife would read to the kids all the time (which she does), but she was looking to me to do the heavy lifting when it came to actually teaching them how to read.

I had some educational training (of dyslexic kids) right after I got out of college, so I just happened to have a professional set of phonics flash cards in my old teaching box. And so when my oldest daughter was three and showed an interest in reading, I started showing her the sounds the cards made and taught her a dozen cards or so and started going over them with her, without thinking about it very much. And then, all of a sudden, I realized that I was using flash cards with my three year old child.

Certainly this crossed the line. Doing this seemed like what we call a “strict liability” offense in the legal profession: if you are using flash cards with your children, it doesn’t matter what your excuse is: the judge doesn’t want to hear it, you’re guilty of overparenting and that’s that. Commercials make fun of behavior like this.

And so I put the flash cards away, intending not to use them, but my daughter requesting the “sound cards” and so I ended up using them 50 or 100 times with her as she was learning to read. Yet another principle of mine out the window.

After 6 or 9 months of enjoying this, she eventually plateau-ed and stopped getting better at reading. It got a tad frustrating for her, so she stopped wanting to try to read, and so it got frustrating for me as well and I’d sometimes nudge her (“come over here and lets finish the cards”). And I think she sensed my frustration and that led her to establish some unfortunate negative associations with reading. What kind of father makes their child dislike reading? The kind that uses flashcards, I guess. I felt awful.

After letting things go for a while, I eventually wanted to start reading in the home again. Thus, I resorted to a parent’s last resort: bribery. Simple candy or toys seemed just too cheap. I wanted to offer something better, and so I said “if you will read to me, I’ll let you read to me on the roof.” This got her attention.

In our old house, we had a screened in side porch that probably ran 10 feet by 18 feet, but there was no house over the porch, so you could climb out of our second story bedroom window onto the lightly pitched porch roof. The trees hid the street. It was actually really really nice. And I could take my 5-year old outside with a book and a bag full of grapes and she’d read for 30 minutes or more. The roof was magic. Her little brother would complain about us getting to go out on the roof, and I explained to him “when you are ready to read, we’ll go out on the roof too.” This was going to be my magic bullet.

But there was a downside (there’s always a downside).

My wife is one of those people that loves a good breeze, the windows always have to be open in the summer unless the air conditioning is on. Unfortunately, some of the screens in our old house were tough to put down. So one day, walking through my bedroom, I heard someone say “Boo.” I whirled around and say no one in the room. I heard laughing and looked out and saw my three year old son, hanging out on the roof by himself. He hadn’t even taken a book out with him. With that incident, my wife brought a swift conclusion to roof reading.

Of course, in our new house, the accessible part of the roof is flat and bigger and really safe. And my four and a half year old son has stalled out on his reading …