I had an interesting conversation with my son this last Father's Day, after he had invited me to his cookout. I'd mentioned how well his 7 year old daughter seemed to be doing, and he told me that to encourage her to learn to read, he offered to pay her two bucks a book, and it was working very well for the child. To a seven year old two bucks once or twice a week just for reading a book would seem like free money. But let me tell you some of the background to this.
My son was a very normal child as a little boy. He was our first child and in some ways seemed to delight in causing me problems. I don't really think that is unusual, he was just being himself. As he aged through his school years he seemed to get more satisfaction from trying to cause me grief than from studying at school to help his grades and education. I tried what I could to encourage him to learn to read well, which has simply been invaluable to me during my life, buying him books and keeping the house populated with reading materials, but to no avail.
Aside from my son's aversion to reading, I recognized very well what he was doing in school, because I had done it myself when I was his age. I disliked school intensely, and I still have a hatred of the smell of new Levi's jeans from the first day of school. My solution was to go the library in the morning and get a book, and then read it surreptitiously during the day to help me overcome the boredom. My teachers didn't protest my reading for the most part, even though they were aware of it.
I tried and tried to encourage him to read, but nothing seemed to work. His mother became convinced that he had a learning disability, and from our conversations about the matter managed to convince my son that he did indeed have a learning disability. I protested that he was just being a lazy and rebellious child, and was not in the least disabled, but to no avail. After his high school years (he did graduate years ago) he chose to enter the labor workforce and worked at a couple of good companies, UPS and a tire manufacturer, making pretty good union money. The tire manufacturing was a terrible, hot job and he started to think about options to the hard labor life. He decided to try college, and enrolled part time. It took a few years to graduate as an accountant, but he stuck with it and succeeded. He found he wasn't learning disabled at all. He now has a good job and makes good money.
Because of that, I was not surprised by my son's wish to encourage his daughter to read, but was shocked by his surprisingly simple solution to the problem. I wish I'd thought of that when he was young, it would have saved both of us a lot of grief. I gave my son a heartfelt compliment for having come up with such a simple solution to encourage good and beneficial behavior from his daughter.