I had a great conversation with my mom this week, and we talked about my childhood. Mom was an educator her entire career and has been an avid reader her whole life. She knows the value of reading in learning and child development and made sure that reading was part of my childhood routine. I'm thankful she prioritized this for me.

During our chat, she mentioned that despite her efforts, I hated reading as a child and adolescent. I did the assigned reading, but I made my dislike of it known. I told her it wasn’t the act of reading I didn’t like. The problem was that I was forced to read things that weren’t tailored to me or my interests, which felt like torture for two reasons.

First, I didn’t have control. Even as a child, I didn’t want people telling me what to do, especially things I hated doing. This is still true today. I want to drive the direction and outcomes of my life rather than let life happen to me.

Second, it’s difficult for me to do things that I have no interest in doing. I wasn’t interested in learning about Huckleberry Finn or whatever book my school wanted me to read, so it was hard for me to do it.

Combine those two issues and you have a child who hates reading and is vocal about it. Given that I love to read now, I’ll bet that if my teachers had taken time to understand my interests and let me pick books about those topics, I would have loved reading and read more than was assigned to me.