Lead Dominoes
Note: for readers especially pressed for time, the key takeaways and action steps for this post are provided at the end.
What if there were one thing you could do as a parent that would take mere minutes of your time, but would have a massive impact on your children’s development, arguably rivaling much of what they will learn in school? Consider the following.
It’s 1980. I’m 15 and am with my family, up at our then-cabin. I am slumped lifelessly, adolescently, in a chair, possibly trying unsuccessfully to solve a Rubik’s Cube, which is new that year or marveling over a stack of Post-It notes, also new in 1980 (sticky, but not too sticky!).
When my dad suddenly drops a pile of books in my lap. He says only, “You might like these.”
I was now holding a stack of seemingly random books culled from his shelves: All the President’s Men, The Bear, Catch-22, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. They smelled dusty, their pages a bit brown with age. I looked up, but he was gone.
My dad was at that time someone who spent much of his waking life working at a high-stress corporate job, and who was, and still is, a man of few words. He had never suggested I read anything before, let alone a full stack. My curiosity was piqued.
That somewhat cryptic act would for me be life changing. I read and relished each of those books, which led to a lifetime of seeking out other books I would love, which in turn led to a love of learning for its own sake, and also to a career working as a writer.
And after what feels like a thousand years and several lifetimes, I have my own young teen son. While the cabin is gone, and Rubik’s Cubes and Post-its remain, I am now aping my dad’s book strategy. Only because of a number of developments in the intervening years, I think we parents can implement a book strategy that is even more powerful than my dad’s.
Power of the Domino
You are busy, to the point that you may not be able to make it through this article, no matter how many cliffhangers I embed in the text to urge you on (though I really would stick with this, as the advice to come really is potentially life changing. Seriously!).
We parents are often in relationships in which each spouse has a career, while also trying to be active in our kids’ lives, and also hopefully sharing domestic chores, and then—and here it gets really precarious—even aiming to get in a date night, which too often is the Jenga piece that brings things tumbling down and sets us parents to fighting. The issue is time.
In the face of this struggle with the lack of sufficient time to do all we need to for our kids, including supplementing their educations in ways that are necessary given trends in the school system, we can look to the lifestyle gurus, like Tim Ferriss, who make the case, when confronted with a shortage of a resource like time, for seeking out lead dominoes to save the day.
A lead domino in your life is a single issue that by addressing, you in turn resolve a series of others, just as setting the lead domino in motion spares us from having to knock over dominos individually. My dad spent maybe fifteen minutes picking out books that, thanks to all the books I subsequently read, resulted in a lifetime of mental development.
Why Books
Fifteen minutes. This was parental efficiency worthy of Guinness, but before getting into tactics you can try, it is important to take a brief, but fresh look at books and why they are such powerful levers. And any such refresher on the power of books begins with a reference to the many minds that achieved great heights largely by reading books alone.
You’ve heard it before. Abraham Lincoln, Edith Wharton, and August Wilson—the list of those largely self-educated by books is long. This is not suggest our kids go with books alone, but if we get them on robust reading regime in parallel to school, they will be less reliant on schools, and we are less vulnerable to schools not be all we would like.
Part of the reason for this effectiveness is the efficiency of books themselves represent. Books often represent years and even decades of thinking and research on behalf of some author’s well developed mind, sometimes even a lifetime. We need to remember what a miraculous system of the knowledge transfer this represents.
And let’s not forget the absurd value at which this dense knowledge can be attained. Consider Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, author or Thinking Fast and Slow, for example. The book is available on Amazon for $11.20 right now. Inflation is ravaging many family budgets, but $11.20? Click a button and it is at your house in three hours or less. Or maybe you instead opt to check it out instantly for free on Libby. Nobel Prize thinking, just like that.
Possibly the strongest reminder of the power of books may be the most unsettling. Book banning and book burning continue to be alive and unfortunately well. Sad, but impressive, despite the onslaught of technology, old fashioned, inert, and still all-too-flammable books retain the power to scare humans.
Lastly, there is the most poetic, which is the power of books to transport. Think of the way time and space fall away when you are engrossed in a book, and then watch your kid silently reading, and realize that, while the body is there, a part of them is in another realm. Books are the original metaverse.
Tactics - Part 1
Part of the genius of my father’s strategy was to simply realize that at 15 his teen son was ready to read adult books, and so he selected some of his favorites, which happened to combine quality writing and also a level of drama, or excitement, or humor that made them page turners, rather than the overly literary good-for-you literature that was the province of school.
As I thought about this formula for my son, I was likely first reaching for The Great Gatsby as an irresistible starting point, when I realized there was a world of books that now existed that weren’t around when my dad was selecting that first dusty stack, and this new world included genres filled with books that have even had a bigger impact on my life than those first.
Consider a category we can call Malcom Gladwell books. These are books like Gladwell’s Blink, books that typically popularize recent scientific findings to explain the surprising and often counterintuitive ways our minds work, and they often do in ways that are highly engaging and are fun to read, filled with lots of catchy examples and anecdotes.
These books dominate non-fiction best-seller lists in recent decades, are prized by business leaders, and have made a profound difference in how I live my life, so it has been thrilling to recommend and then watch my son plow through books like Atomic Habits, Incognito, and The Obstacle is the Way.
Another great and arguably new genre that I think is fitting for teens is what we can call the Jon Krakauer genre, books, like Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, that are about true events, that read like novels, and that are packed with interesting information about some realm of life most of us would otherwise be unfamiliar with.
The Perfect Storm is another great example. My son loved both of these books, though caveat emptor, as they each involve plenty of mortality (spoiler alert: the storm wins). There are many other options of this sort, including the great and life affirming Seabiscuit (for the horse lovers among us) and so many others.
There is also the modern memoir, which has been among the largest growing sectors in publishing for years. Into the Magic Shop is among the greatest for young teens (just try it), while David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me is also amazing for those who are ready for it (the audio version is particularly revelatory—though again, for those who are ready).
There are so many excellent memoirs, books that function for our teens as case studies about the highs and lows of real life, with Wild, The Glass Castle, and Educated all being great fantastic chronicles by women authors (and, once more, make sure the memoirs you pick match what your kid is ready for).
I could go on, including the particularly school-relevant category of books that take a fresh, big-picture look at human history (e.g., Sapiens and Guns, Germs, and Steel), but the clock is ticking and we need to cover critical strategies for reluctant readers.
Tactics - Part 2 - for Kids Who Remain Reading-Reluctant
Books like these—modern, well-crafted, and often best sellers—have the power to hook many of our kids, including many who do not, as of this moment, think that they like to read.
Of the kids who still resist reading, we parents are once again lucky to live in the era we do, as it arms us with compelling tools for these resistant adopters, first and foremost of which is the audiobook, the greatest boon to kid reading since J.K. Rowling.
You have likely noticed that audiobooks have seemed more prevalent in recent years. What you might not know is just how successful. Growth of audiobooks have been skyrocketing, with their rapid growth expected to continue on for years to come. This growth represents a massive cultural shift to book listening.
Listening to books has some obvious appeal, including its efficiency, making it possible to ‘read’ books while engaging in activities like road-tripping, or doing chores, or playing with Legos. They also are a godsend to those with cognitive issues like dyslexia.
The power of audiobooks is even more profound if you factor in the way in which being read to carries deep emotional resonance for most of us, linking back to the days when we were read to as children, pleading with our parents to be read just one more.
And listening to books is so incredibly easy. Audiobooks can be accessed via smartphones, using either Audible or a library app like Libby (which provides kids the additional appeal of getting to use those phones, albeit for good), or by having kids tell a nearby a smart home speaker to resume a given book.
There are plenty of other tips that can help encourage kids to spend time reading the books you select, including making sure electronic versions are readily accessible on the smart phones, Kindles, and tablets they may have access to.
And there is always a technique you can break out for the toughest cases. Set aside time to read out loud to your teen yourself, selecting a book both of you want to read. The appeal of you reading to your aging child really is deeply, deeply rooted in their minds. They may resist at first, but not for long.
This parental reading out loud is also great with books that are a bit of stretch to your teen’s comprehension, as is the case with many classics of literature, and which is a technique I advocated for in a previous post, Be the Bridge.
If all else fails, I think it is important to establish that some level of reading beyond school assignments is non-negotiable (other than obvious cases where developmental or behavioral issues preclude it). There are an endless variety of books to choose from and, increasingly, of ways to read, but helping to develop our children’s young minds with the sort of great books I have described should be right up there with brushing teeth, attending school, and not pursuing a career as a mime as parental lines in the sand that can’t be crossed.
Finally
Reading books changed my life in profound ways and was among the top ways in which real learning occurred in my mind, and it all goes back to my dad’s effort to set that domino in motion.
Now, all of this time later, with my son reading the books I have described, often doing so at his own behest, often in order to lift the drudgery of chores, I am in awe of how much better prepared he is to understand and take on the world at 14 than I was for a good decade or two past that early milestone (14!).
I fully think that this life-changing magic is available to most parents, to the point that you can go from finding it hard to imagine what I am suggesting to a point in time when you have to set limits on the extent to which your kids are listening to great books.
I sincerely hope, if nothing else, you can get to have the experience of marveling how lucky your teen is to be taking in powerful books with so much of their lives still ahead of them. And I further hope they are able to look back and take pride in all you set in motion, you savvy parent you, by focusing on this lead domino.
Should the topic ever come up in the future, with your adult child asking about your sagacity in implementing an early reading regime, please do provide a small footnote of credit back to my dad, Sigurd Ueland, and the great 1980 stack of summer reading.
Take-aways, caveats, details, fine print
Reading great books is arguably the single most powerful tool for supplementing the education of our children.
It is worth reminding ourselves of just how powerful books remain, despite all that has happened.
It is also important to note that there are a number of genres of books that didn’t exist when we were young—books that both have the power to change lives and are enjoyable to read.
Technology, particularly audiobooks, have made it all that much easier to make the most of great books, both old and new.
The result of all of this is that we parents can readily engage our kids in a book reading regime that will, in the end, rival their schooling in terms of the positive impact on their developing minds.
For anyone who would like help with such a strategy, including book recommendations, feel free to reach out to me through the email: leif@leifueland.com.
Purchasing books on this page through the links does provide some very, very modest funding for the site—certainly not anything that provided motivation for this piece,