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Some of the most formative hours of my childhood were spent inside books, in a world only my own imagination could build from words on a page. No screen has ever given me that exact thing. Now, as a father, I want to give my children that door more than almost anything else.
The Boy With a Book Under the Lamp
Some of the most formative hours of my childhood, growing up here in Port Harcourt, were spent inside books. I can still remember the particular feeling of it. The world around me would fall away, the room, the noise, the heat, and I would be somewhere else entirely, inside another person's mind, living a life that was not mine and being changed by it. When the power was out, I read by lamp, and I did not experience it as deprivation. I experienced it as a door.
No screen has ever given me that exact thing. Screens give me information, stimulation, and connection, and I use them all day. But that particular experience, of being fully inside a book, of my own imagination doing the work of building a world from words on a page, remains something only reading has ever done for me. And now, as a father, I find I want to give my children that door more than almost anything else, precisely because the age they are growing up in is quietly trying to take it from them.
Reading Is Formation, Not Just Information
We think of reading as a way to get information. It is that, but that is the least of it, and if that were all it did, screens would have honestly replaced it by now. Reading is formation. It builds the human being, not just the knowledge base.
Consider what deep reading actually does. It builds a long attention span, because a book asks you to stay with one thread of thought for a long, unbroken time. It builds vocabulary and the capacity for complex thought, because language on a page is richer and more demanding than the language of a feed. It builds empathy, because to read a story is to inhabit another person's perspective from the inside, to feel what it is to be someone you are not. It builds the capacity for solitude, the ability to be alone with your own mind and not flee it. And through all of these, it builds what I can only call an inner life, a furnished interior, a self with depth and rooms in it.
Now notice something. Every one of those capacities, attention, complexity, empathy, solitude, an inner life, is exactly what the screen age erodes. The feed trains short attention, easy stimulation, and a horror of being alone with your thoughts. Reading and the screen are pulling the developing human in opposite directions. That is why reading matters more now, not less. It is one of the few things that builds precisely what the age is thinning.
What Has Happened to Reading Here
I have to name, with some grief, what is happening on our continent. Reading culture among children in Nigeria and across Africa is declining. The pressure pushes everything toward screens, including learning, and fewer children are falling in love with books. And there is a painful irony in it.
Africa holds some of the richest oral storytelling traditions on earth. We are, by deep heritage, a people of story, of the elder by the fire, of narrative carried across generations in the human voice. And yet we are at risk of raising a generation that reads less than any before it, letting a profound inheritance of story thin out into passive scrolling. I do not accept that this is inevitable. The same deep love of story that filled our oral traditions can be poured into a love of reading, if we are deliberate about it. The instinct is already in our children. It is our job to give it a book.
Five Practices for Raising Readers in a Screen-Saturated Home
Here is what has actually worked in my home, offered honestly and grounded in our real context.
### Let Them See You Read
Children become what they see. If they see you reading, absorbed in a book, treating it as a pleasure rather than a chore, they learn that reading is something real people do for joy. If they only ever see you on a screen, that is the model they inherit. This is the single most powerful thing, and it costs only your own example.
### Read Aloud, Long Past When They Can Read Alone
Reading aloud to a child is not just early literacy. It is bonding, imagination, and the association of books with love and closeness. Keep doing it long after they can read for themselves. The child who links reading with the warmth of a parent's voice carries that link for life.
### Make Books Physically Present and Screens Less So
Fill the home with books they can reach, and make the screens a little less available. Children read what is within arm's reach when boredom strikes. If the nearest thing is a book, they will pick it up. If the nearest thing is always a glowing screen, the book never gets a chance. Shape the environment, and the environment shapes the habit.
### Protect a Regular Reading Time
Guard a consistent time, before bed is ideal, that belongs to reading. Predictable rhythms build habits in children far better than occasional pushes. A quiet, regular reading time, defended against the pull of screens, slowly becomes something they expect, and then something they want.
### Let Them Choose
Do not force your taste on them or make reading a punishment dressed as improvement. Let them choose books that genuinely excite them, even ones you think are beneath them, because a child who reads what they love becomes a reader, and a reader will eventually reach for deeper things. The goal is the love of it. Everything else follows from that.
The People of the Book
My faith gives me one more reason to care about this, and it runs deep. Christianity is, in a real sense, a religion of the Book. At the centre of the tradition I inhabit is a text to be read, and re-read, and meditated on slowly across a whole life. The command is to dwell in the word, to chew on it, to let it form you through patient, repeated reading. The central act of formation in my faith is, quite literally, reading.
So when I teach my children to read, to sit with a text, to find meaning in patient attention to words on a page, I am not only building their minds. I am building the very capacity that their spiritual life will one day depend on. A child who cannot sit with a book will struggle to sit with Scripture. A child who has never learned the deep attention that reading requires will find the slow, formative reading at the heart of faith almost impossible. Parents who raise readers are doing something spiritually significant, whether they know it or not. They are forming the kind of attention that the deepest things require.
Start With One Book
I will not end with a grand programme, because grand programmes collapse. I will end with something small enough to actually begin. Start with one book. One child. One regular time. Tonight, or this week, pick a single book your child might love, sit with them, and read. Do it again tomorrow. Do not aim to raise a great reader in a month. Aim only to open the door, once, and then again, and then again. The love of reading is not installed. It is grown, one shared book at a time, and it begins with a single one. Reach for it. In an age designed to keep your child's inner life thin, few things you give them will matter more.
