Reading habits in families fail in predictable ways: they're built on enthusiasm, they depend on one parent, and they collapse the first busy fortnight. The ones that last are smaller than people expect and attached to something that was happening anyway.
Attach it, don't schedule it
A plan to read for thirty minutes each evening requires a decision every evening, and decisions fail on hard days.
Reading after teeth and before lights-out requires no decision, because it's part of a sequence that already exists. The anchor is what makes a habit survive, not the willpower.
Keep reading aloud past the point it seems necessary
The most valuable single thing in this article.
Most families stop when the child can read alone. But reading aloud does something independent: it gives a child access to stories and sentences above their own decoding level, it keeps books associated with closeness rather than homework, and it's often the only part of the day with no task in it.
Ten-year-olds still want this. So do some twelve-year-olds, though they may not say so in front of anyone.
Let them choose, and mean it
A child's reading volume goes up when the choice is genuinely theirs, and down when it's supervised. That includes the books you'd rather they didn't read — the series, the comics, the one far below their level, the one they've read five times.
Rereading in particular looks like stagnation and is doing real work. Fluency is built by covering familiar ground fast.
The hardest version of this is keeping your face neutral when they show you their choice. Children read enthusiasm and disappointment accurately.
Make books physically available
Children read what's lying around. Books in the room where the family sits, in the car, in a bag, next to the bed. A bookshelf in a bedroom gets less use than a pile on the kitchen table.
The library is the cheapest version of this by a wide margin, and a regular trip where they pick whatever they want is worth more than a careful purchase.
Read where they can see you
Unwelcome and well supported: children in households where adults visibly read books read more themselves.
Reading on a phone doesn't transmit — they can't tell what you're doing. Fifteen minutes with a physical book in the same room as your children does something no amount of encouragement does.
Expect it to break
Every family habit lapses. Illness, exams, a hard few weeks, a child who suddenly refuses.
A lapse isn't the end of the habit, and treating it as one is what ends it. Restart without comment or ceremony.
What to avoid
Reward charts and book counts, which replace the reason for reading with a score. Reading as a condition for something else, which makes it a cost. And quizzing them afterwards — the questions turn a story into an assessment, and a child who's being tested is no longer reading for pleasure.
What success looks like
Not a child who loves reading. A child for whom reading is normal — something that happens in your house, unremarkably, most days. That's the thing that lasts into adulthood.