[SoftTalker]

Read to your child, and provide books and opportunity once he starts learning to read. He'll either be drawn to it or not. I've had three kids and their interests and things that motivate them are all wildly different. So a lot of it just boils down to "if he likes reading, he'll read."

Do the same with music, and sports/physical activity, and other things.

[sho_hn]

I was not read to as a child, but I was pretty good at reading from an early age and grew to love it. Adult life is busy and many other activities compete for my attention now, but I still manage to finish around 10-20 books a year. This lower bound is not impressive to any serious, habitual reader, but I'm happy I manage to keep it up.

I think what the trick for me:

- My parents read regularly, so it just was a normal part of life in my eyes.

- My parents' siblings would gift me volumes of children's book series for birthdays and holidays. I'd look forward to getting the next book in a series for months, and it was a big exciting event for me.

- Adults were willing to discuss the books I read with me (and sometimes humor me by reading one), so I got recognition from them for what I was doing, and learned to connect over books. If a book was important to me, other people were willing to take my feelings seriously. Being rooted in a book made them legitimate.

- My dad was not a spend-y sort of person, but once a year for Christmas, he'd rifle through a book club catalog with me and let me order more or less any book I wanted. This was exciting, and we got tons of random books at home filling the shelves.

- Access to books, i.e. those full shelves. Bored to tears on a rainy day? My father would tell me to pick a book.

[AlecSchueler]

Just to note: their child might not be a boy. Feels a bit disconcerting to see the male default used here.

[patrickdavey]

I'm actually sorry to see this down voted.

I have a daughter, and it is just crazy once you start reading books how much is needlessly male focussed.

From the first farmyard books where the boy is driving the tractor and the girl is in the cart on the back. To fantastic Mr fox and his four small foxes (all male) etc etc. It's just extremely unbalanced.

In our community, there's every reason not to use a male default everywhere. It would not have changed the original commenters meaning at all to have said "they" instead of "him" and would have been more inclusive. Surely that's a good default?

[theonething]

Here I've seen female and male defaults used as well as "they". I haven't noticed any prevalence for one other the others, probably because it makes no difference to me. I understand from the context that the text is applicable to any gender.

[AlecSchueler]

I'm curious, if it makes no difference to you then why not extend your sympathy to those who feel they are affected by it and simply use a gender neutral pronoun?