Readnauts started with a form. Our seven-year-old brought home a read-a-thon sheet from his class, the kind where you log your reading and collect pledges. It made me wonder what would happen if the whole family had a goal like that, all the time, for fun.

What happened surprised us. Seeing everyone’s progress in one place, kids and grown-ups together, motivated them more than any sticker chart ever had.

That is one family, and I am not going to dress it up as science. But I have thought a lot about why it worked, and about when it would not.

What a quest is

In Readnauts a quest is a shared goal over a set stretch of time: a summer of reading, a read-aloud month, a school read-a-thon. The goal is counted in pages. Every book any reader logs during those dates moves the whole quest forward, and it still lands in that reader’s own library. Points are weighted by reading stage, so a picture book and a novel both count.

You can also share a quest with other families using a code: cousins, close friends, a class. Only reading totals are shared, never anyone’s books. Each quest has a leaderboard.

Why I think a shared goal helps

Three reasons, all of them ours rather than a study’s.

It is shared. One goal that everybody adds to is different from a race. A five-year-old’s picture books move the same bar as her brother’s chapter books, so she is helping, not losing.

It has an end. “Read more” never finishes. “Ten thousand pages by the end of August” does, and finishing feels good.

The grown-ups are in it. When we are on the same quest, reading stops being something we tell the kids to do.

Summer is the obvious time to try one. School is out, the library is running its reading program, and a family quest can run right alongside it, counting the same books.

What the research warns about

Here I have to be straight with you, because quests use points, and the research on rewards is not a cheerleader.

A review of 128 experiments found that rewards people expect for doing a task tended to reduce their interest in it afterwards, more so for children. The same review found that positive feedback increased interest. And a study that followed 740 children for three years found that reading mainly for outside reasons went with weaker reading later on.

So a quest can backfire. It backfires when the prize becomes the point.

How to set one that stays healthy

  • Keep it short. Two to four weeks. A quest that drags becomes a chore.
  • Make the goal clearly reachable. A quest you finish teaches “we do this”. A quest you abandon teaches the opposite.
  • Put everyone in, including you. It is a family goal, not a task for the children.
  • Celebrate the finish together. The reward should be more reading life, not a toy: a library trip, a read-aloud night, the poster on the fridge.
  • Rest between quests. Reading should carry on quietly when nothing is being counted. If it stops dead the day the quest ends, the quest was doing too much of the work.
  • Talk about books, not standings. The leaderboard is there for fun. The conversation should be about what everyone read.

When to skip quests altogether

Skip them if a child gets anxious about where they stand, or starts picking books for their length. Skip them if reading is already happening happily in your house, because you do not need to fix what is working. And skip them for a while if a quest just ended badly.

Nothing in Readnauts requires a quest. Books go into each reader’s library whether or not one is running. A quest is a tool for getting moving, and you are allowed to put it down.