I used to be one of those 'boys who read' (still am, just not so much of a boy I guess, maybe). I would read anything that had letters on it, packaging, comics, stuff that was way over my head and stuff that made sense to me.
There was a second hand bookstore near my grandmothers house that I had a deal with, if I brought back a book the next day after taking it I could exchange it for free. The little hacker in me didn't take long to figure out that for the price of one book I could technically read through the whole store.
Long nights with the flashlight under the blanket to avoid being discovered :)
It never really stopped, I still read, pretty much all day long, unless I'm coding or doing something else.
If you have a kid that likes to read, make sure they don't have to do it in secret, they'll do it anyway and it helps to have everybody on the same page instead of having secrets about your 'habits'.
The internet is changing our reading habits, and I think that those 'electronic media' that are to be kept under control according to the author are really the new books.
Another decade or so and you'll be able to find all that good stuff online and on mobile devices. To deal with the distracting element of that is going to be the real problem, but forbidding their use is to throw out the baby (that vast library out there) with the bathwater.
Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia are accessible through the same medium that leads to major sources of distraction.
I'd like to add that I strongly recommend that kids read only with sufficient lighting. I'm no opthalmologist, but I do believe the primary (sole?) reason my eyeglass prescription is as strong as it is is because, as a youth, I read with poor lighting at night.
There was a second hand bookstore near my grandmothers house that I had a deal with, if I brought back a book the next day after taking it I could exchange it for free. The little hacker in me didn't take long to figure out that for the price of one book I could technically read through the whole store.
Long nights with the flashlight under the blanket to avoid being discovered :)
It never really stopped, I still read, pretty much all day long, unless I'm coding or doing something else.
If you have a kid that likes to read, make sure they don't have to do it in secret, they'll do it anyway and it helps to have everybody on the same page instead of having secrets about your 'habits'.
The internet is changing our reading habits, and I think that those 'electronic media' that are to be kept under control according to the author are really the new books.
Another decade or so and you'll be able to find all that good stuff online and on mobile devices. To deal with the distracting element of that is going to be the real problem, but forbidding their use is to throw out the baby (that vast library out there) with the bathwater.
Project Gutenberg and Wikipedia are accessible through the same medium that leads to major sources of distraction.