Encouraging Reading with Healthy Boundaries

Healthy Boundaries Are Great Helpers!

My name is Joyce Long, Ph.D., and I am part of the Community Impact Team at Beacon Health System. Our mission at Beacon Community Impact is to enhance the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being of the communities we serve, so we are delighted to provide these newsletters to parents and guardians. Raising children can be both great fun and very challenging because they are always changing. Over the years, I learned how to help my children develop from pediatricians and child/adolescent experts. I loved it so much that I eventually earned graduate degrees and began offering parent workshops in 2007. It’s a privilege to be writing to you now. At BCI, we believe raising healthy children happens when we partner with families. Thanks for being such terrific partners!

Summer vacation is almost here, so your children have extra free time. What values can they develop or strengthen during the next two months? What boundaries can you and your children put in place to help their healthy values grow?

I love to read and think reading is important, so I wanted our children to experience the exciting adventures hidden in books. They liked spending time outside playing with their pets or video games, so how could I help them develop a value for reading?

Here are some healthy boundaries I used as my helpers.

• We didn’t have extra money to buy books, so I regularly took them to the library.
• At the library, they were free to choose whatever books they wanted. Jenna liked stories and Chris liked sharks.
• The maximum number of books they could check out was related to their age. A 10-year old could take out 10 books. This made it easy to remember how many to return.
• As parents, we made regular time to read to them and with them—even when they were old enough to read by themselves.

These boundaries helped both children develop a strong value for reading. Chris is now a chef, so he enjoys reading cookbooks. Jenna reads novels and interior design books.

With a little bit of planning, we can use summer vacation to build and support incredibly important values and habits in our children—and implementing healthy boundaries definitely helps!