Being forced to do anything at all is a fantastic way to begin secretly despising it. Once you’re finally not being forced to do it and are off the hook, you’re more than willing to put it away somewhere where you can forget about the entire experience.
Today’s story is about a really popular hobby that gets driven away by teachers or parents - reading. This man wanted to know if he’s a jerk for not making his 15 y.o. son read for 2 hours daily like his ex-wife does.
More info: Reddit
There's no better way to upset your kids than to make them do something they hate
Image credits: Ed Robertson (not the actual image)
The poster came online to ask whether he's a jerk for not enforcing his ex-wife's "reading rule" on their 15 y.o. in his home
Image credits: u/CapableCutlery
Image credits: Tanya Gorelova (not the actual image)
When her 8 y.o. started falling behind in school, she made her kids read daily, from 30 minutes to 2 hours for the eldest
Image credits: u/CapableCutlery
Image credits: Vlada Karpovich (not the actual image)
Because of the oppressive reading, excessive chores, and other privacy-invading rules, the 15 y.o. asked to live with his dad full-time
Image credits: u/CapableCutlery
The ex blamed the poster for not upholding the rule in his home, but he just wouldn't do it because he didn't agree with it
The gist of this story is that the original poster (OP) is a divorced dad, co-parenting with his wife Amanda in this post.
According to the dad, their 8 y.o. son started falling behind in his reading level, so all of the kids had to read daily. The 8 y.o. has to read for 30 minutes, while the 15 y.o. has to read for 2 hours to keep things “fair”.
This is on top of all the reading and homework that he has to do for school, never mind the A in English that he already has.
When Amanda expected OP to enforce the same rule, he refused, basically saying “my house, my rules.”
Because of this, the son started wondering if he could be with his dad all the time, after having decreased time spent with mom when the rule was first put in place, only visiting every other weekend.
According to OP’s comments, this is not the only strict thing his ex-wife applies to the teen. Apparently, he also has to show his texts to her every night he’s with her, watch his siblings one of the nights he is there, do loads of chores with no allowance, and more.
What’s worse, OP reveals that when he’s there, he does all the chores of essentially 4 people, with other commenters saying that she’s just using the kid as a workhorse essentially.
The funniest comment on the post is someone doing some napkin math and saying that the parents should lead by example by reading 128 hours a day. Chop chop, parents!
Image credits: RDNE Stock project (not the actual image)
But let’s return to reading, shall we? Have you been there? I know I have. Having to read boring books and poetry that doesn’t resonate with me at school and then listen to the teacher’s analyses, as if they were facts handed down by the gods themselves.
It’s draining, it’s boring, it sucks, and worst of all - it makes you want to never do it again.
As a consequence of this, people become repulsed by the idea of reading completely, even if they were an avid reader beforehand.
When a Quora user asked “Why do most high school students hate reading?”, the community had some answers.
A lot of people emphasized the fact that it was the repetition and the slowness of the process that drove them away in the past.
These repeated analyses may be one way to learn to look at a book critically, but sitting in a classroom and listening to your class read a book paragraph by paragraph is really not the best way to engage with any work.
But how can you fall in love with reading again? Or maybe, if you’re lucky (in a twisted sense), fall in love with it for the first time?
BiblioLifestyle has some good advice for you.
The first critical step is to find something that interests you. Think of your interests and hobbies. Maybe you’ve always wanted to dive deep into a topic? Perhaps you’re more interested in self-help and self-improvement of some sort?
You can talk to friends and family to get some recommendations, maybe even going to browse your local library’s selection.
Next, you should create a realistic goal for yourself, whether it’s a book a month or a certain amount of time daily. You should set some time aside for books and if that’s too much - consider audiobooks.
You’ll find more tips on BiblioLifestyle, but for now, start small, don’t push yourself too hard, and keep reading!
The original post collected a solid 10k upvotes (likely a little more, but whatever) and a whopping 2k comments. The community judged the poster not to be a buttface and dubbed the ex-wife one or at least crazily strict at the very least.
The community absolved the poster of any jerkish behavior, blasting the mom for her crazy rules
