Summer is a time for beaches, and swimming and sandcastles.  It’s a time when parents brave shouts of outrage and plaster their kids with sun lotion.  It’s a time for longer days and later starts. And it’s a time for a reading really good books.

Reading is a habit, and if your kids are anything like mine, it can be hard habit to get them to adopt.  In competition with iPads and and phones and video games, a paperback can seem a little tame.  In our house, we’ve decided to earmark a certain hour of the day as a time when all electrical entertainment is switched off and we all sit down together and read.

I’d be lying if I said this happens without protest.  But after the initial moaning about what terrible parents we are and how awful it is to have to sit down with a book and how much they HATE reading, a silence descends.  A meditative peace.  For a few precious minutes, when I glance up, I can see my two restless, fidgety, boys relaxing into the pages of their books and losing themselves in another world.

All too soon the books are slammed down : “I’ve read ten pages!” and the shouting and wrestling and buzzing and beeping, with an unwatched TV blaring in the background, starts once more.

But I know, that one day, they will have the reading bug too and, with it, a free passport to a million other worlds far more enduring and exciting than any battery operated device can give them.