Perhaps Your Child Hasn’t Stopped Loving Books. Perhaps They Just Need Another Way Into the Story.

Audiobooks for reluctant readers are having a moment this Book Week, and it’s easy to see why. This Book Week, we’re looking beyond how many pages our kids are reading and asking a different question: what if a reluctant reader still loves stories? From audiobooks and Harry Potter to screen-free listening, Yoto’s Sharina Simnett explains why giving children another way into a story might be exactly what they need.

It’s Book Week, which means Australian parents are currently doing one of two things: admiring the costume their child miraculously agreed to wear, or standing in a shopping centre at 7.42 pm wondering whether a striped T-shirt and a pair of glasses can reasonably be passed off as Where’s Wally. There will be parades, elaborate homemade costumes that make the rest of us question our parenting and almost certainly at least one child who informs their parent at bedtime that tomorrow’s costume requires a cape.

But underneath all the annual Book Week chaos is something much more important: we’re trying to encourage children to fall in love with books and stories. For some children, that happens easily. They disappear into books, beg for another chapter and need to be told to turn the light off because it is well past bedtime. For others, particularly as they get older and reading becomes increasingly associated with schoolwork, comprehension tasks and assigned texts, the enthusiasm can begin to disappear.

We tend to describe those children as “reluctant readers”. But what if some of them aren’t reluctant about stories at all? Perhaps your child hasn’t stopped loving books. Perhaps they just need another way into the story.

When books start to feel suspiciously like homework

There is a strange transition that can happen somewhere between picture books and independent reading. When our children are little, stories are entertainment. We cuddle up, do ridiculous character voices, read the same book approximately 400 times and accept that skipping a single sentence will somehow be immediately detected.

Then children start school and reading acquires another job. There are readers to complete, words to decode, comprehension questions to answer, reading levels to progress through and minutes to record. All of those things have an important place in learning to read, but it isn’t difficult to understand how some children can begin to associate opening a book with work rather than pleasure.

Sharina Simnett, Country Manager ANZ at Yoto, says it is something the audio platform hears from families as their children get older.

“What we also hear is that as kids get older, books can start to feel like homework. I don’t think kids stop loving stories. They just need content that meets them where they are. That’s where cards like Brainbots Science Fair, or series like Harry Potter and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe come in. Stories with real character development and complex themes that older kids can immerse themselves in.”

It is an important distinction. A child resisting sitting down to independently read a chapter doesn’t necessarily mean that child has stopped being curious about characters, adventures, facts, imaginary worlds or what happens next. Sometimes the obstacle may be the way they’re being asked to access the story rather than the story itself. That doesn’t mean we stop encouraging children to read. It means we can stop treating reading and listening as opponents and start thinking about the different ways stories can find their way into children’s lives.

Your child who “can’t concentrate” may have some surprising evidence to the contrary

Parents of older children will probably recognise this particular mystery. Your child cannot possibly concentrate on the book sitting beside them, yet somehow possesses enough information about Minecraft, football statistics, dinosaurs, Taylor Swift, Pokémon or their current obsession to deliver an unsolicited 45-minute TED Talk on the subject.

Sometimes attention isn’t quite as absent as it first appears. Interest matters, and so does finding the right doorway. Audiobooks can offer children access to stories they might find daunting to tackle independently, particularly as chapter books become longer and plots and characters become more complex. They can listen in the car, while drawing, during quiet time or before bed, experiencing a long-form narrative without every encounter with a story becoming another exercise they have to complete.

And Harry Potter is perhaps the perfect example.

Audiobooks for Reluctant Readers: Why Harry Potter Is Where This Gets Interesting

There comes a point in the Harry Potter series when those books become rather substantial. A child might be completely fascinated by Hogwarts while simultaneously taking one look at the thickness of the book and deciding that, actually, they’d rather do almost anything else. That doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t ready for the story.

Yoto offers the original Harry Potter stories as audio cards, giving children another way to enter that world. For a child who is intrigued by Harry, Ron and Hermione but intimidated by hundreds of pages of text, listening removes one hurdle without removing the characters, language, imagination or sheer pleasure of wanting to know what happens next.

And that can create an interesting relationship with the physical books too. A child may listen first and later want to find a favourite scene on the page. They might follow the printed book while listening, move between reading and audio, or simply discover that they actually do enjoy long stories when the pressure of having to independently read every word is removed.

This isn’t about declaring that listening and independently reading are identical activities. They aren’t. Children still need opportunities to develop and practise their reading skills. It is about recognising that independent reading isn’t the only way a child can develop a relationship with stories. Sometimes falling in love with Hogwarts might be exactly what makes that enormous book sitting on the shelf suddenly worth attempting.

Book Week doesn’t have to be a test of how much your child reads

Perhaps one of the most useful things we can do this Book Week is take some of the pressure off the label of being a “reader”. If your child devours novels, wonderful. Keep the library card busy. But if your child doesn’t, there are plenty of other ways to build stories into family life.

Listen to an audiobook together on a long drive. Read a physical book aloud even though your child is technically old enough to read it themselves. Let them listen independently before bed. Try graphic novels. Find factual books about whatever obscure subject has currently taken over your household. Listen to a story and then leave the physical copy somewhere accessible without announcing that this is secretly an educational strategy.

Most importantly, talk about stories. Who was your favourite character? What would you have done? Was the ending terrible? Who do you think is actually the villain? The goal isn’t surely to raise children who can dutifully tell us how many pages they completed tonight. We want children who are curious about ideas, people, places and worlds beyond their own.

The screen-free conversation is more nuanced than “screens are bad”

There is another reason audio has become increasingly interesting to parents, and it isn’t because families are suddenly attempting to remove every piece of technology from their children’s lives. Screens are part of modern childhood. They’re part of school, communication, entertainment and family life, and most parents aren’t looking to transport their households back to 1987. What many of us would quite like, however, are more options for those moments when every request for entertainment seems to end with somebody asking for a device.

“We’re finding that more parents are actively looking for screen alternatives, not because they’re anti-technology, but because they want something better. They’re looking for safe technology that kids can use independently, without an algorithm deciding what comes next. Content that has a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s exactly why Yoto exists.”

That idea of a beginning, middle and end feels particularly relevant. Much of the digital content available to children doesn’t naturally finish. One video leads to another, recommendations keep appearing and “one more” can become a negotiation worthy of international diplomacy. A book or audiobook has a different rhythm. You can become completely absorbed in it, but eventually the chapter finishes and, ultimately, so does the story.

For families who aren’t anti-screen but would quite like the household entertainment menu to contain something other than screen or no screen, audio provides another option.

But does listening to an audiobook actually “count” as reading?

This is probably the question lurking underneath the whole conversation, and it is worth being precise about the answer. Listening to an audiobook isn’t the same activity as independently reading words from a page, so it shouldn’t replace opportunities for children to practise reading. But that doesn’t make listening to stories somehow worthless or “cheating”. The two can exist alongside one another.

If a child independently reads for school and then wants to listen to Harry Potter for pleasure, we don’t need to turn the second activity into another lesson. If they become fascinated by a character and subsequently pick up the physical book, wonderful. If they listen while following along with the text, that’s another experience again. If they simply lie in bed and disappear into Hogwarts for half an hour, they have spent half an hour immersed in a story rather than scrolling through an endless feed. Perhaps we don’t need to keep score quite so aggressively.

What happens when the Bluey years are over?

One misconception around children’s audio is that it belongs primarily to the preschool years. It is easy to picture a three-year-old listening to nursery rhymes or Bluey; perhaps less obvious is the nine or ten-year-old absorbed in a complex fictional world, science content, music or a podcast.

For Yoto, that ability to continue offering relevant content as children get older is deliberate.

“The best part about Yoto is that it grows with your child. From nursery rhymes and Bluey for toddlers, to Harry Potter, Olivia Dean and the BBC Earth Collection for older kids, there’s something for every age and stage. And beyond the cards, there are daily podcasts, free radio stations and sleep sounds too. Parents often come to us for their toddlers and stay because their kids continue to grow with it. It’s a product they’ll reach for day after day, week after week, year after year.”

For parents, that evolution matters because children don’t simply graduate from wanting stories. The stories change. Their interests become more sophisticated, their patience for anything they perceive as “babyish” disappears with alarming speed, and suddenly the child who once demanded Bluey is ready for stories with more complicated characters and themes. The challenge isn’t necessarily keeping them interested in storytelling. It may simply be continuing to put the right stories in front of them, in formats they’re willing to explore.

So try a different Book Week experiment

This Book Week, if you have a child who tells you they don’t like reading, perhaps don’t immediately reach for another book and explain that they simply haven’t found the right one yet. Instead, try finding the story first. Ask what they’re interested in and work backwards. Put an audiobook on during the school run and see whether they complain when you turn the car off halfway through the chapter. Let them listen while they’re drawing or building Lego. Try the first Harry Potter story with the physical book sitting nearby. Let them choose something you would never have chosen for them.

Then resist the temptation to turn the entire exercise into homework. Children don’t necessarily need every story followed by a comprehension question to have gained something from it. Sometimes they can simply wonder what happens next. Somewhere among the Book Week costumes, reading logs, library bags and last-minute requests for a cape, perhaps that’s the part worth protecting: a love of stories. Because perhaps your child hasn’t stopped loving books. Perhaps they just need another way into the story.

Discover Yoto

Families looking for screen-free audio stories, music, podcasts and educational content can explore Yoto Australia, including its range of content for younger children and older listeners.

Disclaimer: This article contains commentary supplied by Yoto and has been independently written by Parenthood360. Quotes attributed to Sharina Simnett have been reproduced from commentary supplied to Parenthood360. Product ranges, content and availability may change and should be confirmed directly with the brand. Audiobooks can complement children’s reading experiences but do not replace opportunities to learn and practise independent reading. Products or experiences may be provided to Parenthood360 for editorial consideration; coverage is not guaranteed and all editorial opinions remain independent.