Are Summer Reading Lists...Diet-Adjacent?
It's a lot of tracking, is all I'm saying. (Plus thoughts on scheduling exercise, making meadows, and the childless cat ladies in all of our hearts.)
Friday Thread: What are You and Your Kids* Reading?
I’ve been reading so many great books this summer. I just finished Nisha Sharma’s If Shakespeare Were An Auntie trilogy— so much fun and book #3 comes out soon! (And Nisha will be on the BT pod first week of September!) I’ve also loved
’s excellent new memoir More, Please. And I just started Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise and was hooked from page one.But something else I’ve been thinking about a lot is kids and summer reading. Because every June, teachers send home these big, long reading lists. Sometimes there are mandatory assignments (my soon-to-be sixth grader has to read two books from a list and be ready to give a book talk about at least one). Sometimes they are optional but are they really?? (My soon-to-be second grader is “encouraged” to read at least five books, track them in a log, and then turn that log in for a certificate from the principal.) If you’re a parent, you likely feel some version of my pain here: We hear endlessly about the perils of “summer slide,” but there are also MANY PERILS involved in getting your kids to do anything approaching homework during the summer! This kind of thing quickly becomes parent homework and by parent homework, I mean more labor for the parent socially conditioned to shoulder the family’s mental load and feel the cost of not doing the assignment.