If you’re worried that your daughter won’t want to be in a mother-daughter book club because she doesn’t like to read, don’t be discouraged. A book club can be a great place to nurture a love of reading for children of all ages, particularly if you feel that your child’s interest in books has not been piqued. For one thing, when you get together for meetings she’ll see other moms as well as her peers talking about books they enjoyed reading. If she has fun in the social time of book club, it may encourage her to put effort into the preparation time, which involves reading the book.

What if your daughter doesn’t like to read fiction? A book club can include nonfiction, poetry, and many different types of fiction. Reading a variety of genres can help her discover that she likes to read more than she thinks she does.

While it may be true that your daughter can’t choose every book you read in book club herself, you can talk with other members about adding more genres to your selections.

When we started a book club with my youngest daughter, she didn’t like spending much time with a book. She was active and loved being outdoors often, and I worried that she wouldn’t want to stay in the group if she wasn’t interested in the books. But we read lots of different genres in our first year: two non-fiction memoirs, one book of historical fiction, two fantasy tales and one novel about a girl in modern times. The variety helped my daughter get much more interested in reading than she had been previously.

Of course, if you suspect your child has an underlying difficulty in understanding how to read, the tactics above may not help. You may want to talk to her teacher about diagnosing possible learning disabilities if you see her struggling to decode words that she should be able to understand.