Austin Scholar #216: The summer reading problem (Pizza Hut figured this out 40 years ago)

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. The summer reading problem (Pizza Hut figured this out 40 years ago)

2. A parent’s playbook for raising a reader (this summer)

3. Scholar’s Sources: Book recommendations

A few things inspired me to write this newsletter:

• My favorite part of Alpha NYC is the library (seriously, I would’ve spent every single day in there)

• I saw a viral video exposing how truly alarming America’s literacy crisis has become. (High school students can’t read the word “extraordinary”)

• Some parents have asked me about summer reading lists

The biggest challenge every parent has during the summer is getting their kid to read. You all know the struggle: your kid is given a summer reading list by their school, they say they’ll get it done, they don’t, and they just end up cramming the SparkNotes version of the books before class.

So what should you do? Well, I believe that every parent on the planet should pay their kid to read a book.

Not always in cash (as we’ll talk about later), but the bargain is the same. You give them a thing they want. They give you pages.

Pizza Hut figured this magic out in 1984. The BOOK IT! program has handed out an estimated 1.5 billion personal pan pizzas to elementary schoolers who hit a reading goal. Forty years and 70 million kids later, it is still the longest-running corporate-supported reading program in the country. Applebee’s runs “A is for Applebee’s”, which is a free kid’s meal for kids who get good grades or finish a stack of books. Panda Express has Read with Me, where if you read five books, you get a free kid’s meal. Barnes & Noble has been doing the summer reading sticker journal forever.

These programs exist because somewhere in a corporate boardroom in the 1980s, an executive correctly understood something most parents are still nervous to admit:

Kids will read for a slice of pizza.

And honestly, thank god, because the alternative is that they don’t read at all (which is now becoming increasingly obvious as high schoolers struggle to read a simple sentence).

Everybody knows that reading itself is great. That’s not the problem.

So much research has been done showing that being a reader is one of the single best predictors of how a kid’s life is going to go. Vocabulary, focus, empathy, writing, test scores, the ability to sit still for longer than a TikTok… it all traces back to the kid who actually reads.

Knowing that has never been the hard part.

The hard part is the motivational model. Because you – the modern parent – are not competing against boredom anymore. You are competing against an algorithmically optimized infinite-scroll machine that has been A/B-tested on a billion teenage brains and is engineered to be exactly as rewarding as possible at exactly the right cadence to make a 250-page novel feel like climbing K2.

A book is slow. Effortful. It asks your kid to concentrate for forty minutes to feel anything.

TikTok is fast, effortless, and pays out dopamine every 1.4 seconds.

You cannot win that fight by also offering slow, effortful, and with a side of “because it’s good for you.” You will lose. You are losing.

So you need more weapons. And you need to actually use them.

“But won’t paying my kid ruin their love of reading?”

This is the worry I get from parents the most, and I just have to disagree. As someone who has loved reading since the day I was born, earning rewards for reading hasn’t made me love it less; in fact, it helped me get through my reading slumps and ensured I always understood that reading is valuable.

Harvard economist Roland Fryer ran a field experiment in Dallas where 2nd graders earned $2 for every book they read. The result: those kids ended up roughly 2.5 months ahead in reading comprehension versus the control group, for an investment of about $20 per child. That is one of the cheapest, most effective reading interventions in the literature, and it absolutely demolishes things like extending the school day on a per-dollar basis.

A World Bank review of the Project READS incentive trial found that incentive-group kids read more books than the control group, and the comprehension gains were largest for kids who were already a little motivated to begin with, showing that the incentives didn’t kill intrinsic motivation.

So now you might be wondering, “how do I actually implement this?”

Here are five different extrinsic motivational models that you can use in your family. You can choose one, mix and match, or try a few different ones out to see what would work best.

1. Pay them.

This is the simplest one. Pay for pages.

You could do something like $5 per finished book under 200 pages, $10 for 200–400, $15 for anything over 400. For high schoolers, bump the long-book tier to $20 if you want to seriously incentivize the doorstop classics (a teenager who finishes East of Eden has put in an insane amount of focused effort, and twenty bucks is a fair signal that you noticed).

If cash isn’t the right currency in your house, the same idea works for screen time, late bedtimes, or whatever else your kid actually wants.

But it’s important that you make them have a short conversation with you about the book before they get paid. It forces them to hold the book in their head for one extra beat after they close it, which is when most of the actual learning happens. This is also an opportunity to connect with your kid and talk about the things they’re thinking about.

2. Run a book club.

Pick one book and a few of your kid’s best friends. The kids read the book over two weeks. At the end, you host a movie night where you watch the adaptation together and the kids “defend” the book versus the movie. Which was better? What did the movie miss? Who got cast wrong?

The argument is the analysis. Yeager’s research on adolescent motivation is unambiguous: kids will do extraordinary intellectual work if you let them be a little bit of a hater about it (see Austin Scholar #183 for the full case on this). A book club where the deliverable is “rip apart the movie” is a book club kids will actually show up to.

3. Let the easy books count.

If your eight-year-old wants to read Wimpy Kid for the fourth time, let it count. If your twelve-year-old tears through the entire Percy Jackson series in three weeks, that counts too. The literary value of any single book matters way less than the fact that your kid finished a 350-page book in a week and wants to start the next one.

Reading is a muscle. The muscle gets built by reps. The reps get built by enjoying it.

This is not a license to hand your kid whatever’s on the YA bestseller shelf at Target – plenty of “middle grade” and “YA” books today have content that is wildly inappropriate for a twelve-year-old, and your job as the curator of the reading list hasn’t gone anywhere. Pre-read or skim the books you’re not sure about. But within the universe of age-appropriate books, lean toward whatever your kid is actually excited to finish, even if it’s the literary equivalent of mac and cheese. The reps are the point.

I read a lot of mac and cheese in elementary and middle school. I also got a perfect score on the reading portion of the SAT. Those facts are related, not in conflict.

4. Watch what works for them specifically.

Not every kid is the same animal. I’ll give you the example I know best, which is my younger sister.

She was not a natural reader. She did not curl up on the couch with a book the way I did. What got her reading wasn’t pizza or pocket money – it was the feeling of being smarter than everyone in the room. So my parents handed her East of Eden. Then Crime and Punishment. Then The Brothers Karamazov. The harder and more imposing the book, the better, because the reward she actually wanted was walking into school and casually mentioning she was three hundred pages into Dostoyevsky.

She is now an extremely well-read adult. The motivator wasn’t the books. The motivator was status, and the books were the vehicle.

Some kids are bribed by pizza. Some by bedtime. Some by movie nights. Some by the chance to feel a little superior at brunch. Your job is to figure out which currency your kid actually accepts, and pay them in that one.

5. Some miscellaneous ideas

• Stay up as long as you want, but you have to be reading

This was the one that got me. I read most of my elementary-school summers under the covers with a flashlight, hours past lights-out, feeling like I was getting away with something. (My parents, of course, were thrilled.) The “I’m sneaking around and cheating the system” is an incredible motivator for kids, so try and use that to your advantage.

• Movie nights

They want to watch Brave with you? They read the book first (Disney has actually published a ton of books adapted from their films, so check those out!). Hunger Games? Book first. Bridgerton? Book first (Mom will need to pre-screen, since the content in this one is pretty adult, but you get it). You can then compare and contrast the two and talk about which conveys the story better. This is an easy add-on and a simpler version of the book club.

• A reading list with status attached

Don’t just hand them ten books. Hand them ten books and say, “This is the list of books that the kind of person you said you wanted to be at 25 has read.” For a teenager especially, that framing can be life changing – and can get them to read challenging, intellectually stimulating books.

• Family reading

Thirty minutes a couple nights a week, everyone in the living room with a book. Kids learn by imitating, so if you demonstrate the behaviors you want to see from them, they’ll copy you.

With input from myself, an Alpha reading specialist, and a former NYC public librarian, here’s a comprehensive list of book recommendations for all ages: