Kids’ Nonfiction Reading Habits: Making Informational Books Stick

I’m Runbo Li, Co-founder & CEO at Magic Hour.

The trick isn’t convincing kids that nonfiction is good for them. That’s the homework framing, and it kills curiosity on contact. The trick is connecting nonfiction to something they already care about obsessively.

I think about this through what I call “obsession bridging.” Every kid has a thing they won’t shut up about. Dinosaurs, basketball, space, sharks, Minecraft. That obsession is the door. You don’t drag them away from it toward nonfiction. You walk them deeper into it through nonfiction.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with basketball. My parents, both immigrants from China, didn’t know much about the sport. But they noticed I’d reread the same Sports Illustrated issues until the pages fell apart. So instead of pushing me toward “real books,” they started bringing home basketball almanacs, player biographies, books about the physics of a jump shot. I didn’t think of those as nonfiction or educational. I thought of them as more basketball. That reframe changed everything. I went from a kid who read because he had to, to a kid who read because the answers to his questions lived inside books.

The routine that works is dead simple. When a kid finishes a story they love, ask one question: “What’s something in that story you want to know if it’s real?” A kid who just read a book about pirates doesn’t need to be sold on a nonfiction book about actual pirate ships. They’re already halfway there. You’re just closing the gap.

The other thing parents get wrong is treating nonfiction like it has to be a book with chapters. It doesn’t. A field guide counts. A photo-heavy atlas counts. A biography in graphic novel format counts. Lower the bar on format and raise the bar on genuine interest.

Kids don’t resist nonfiction. They resist being bored. Make the subject matter feel like a secret they’re unlocking, not a lesson they’re enduring, and you won’t have to encourage them at all. They’ll pull the books off the shelf themselves.

I’ve seen the most success when nonfiction is treated as a “tool” that helps a child do something they already care about, not as a separate category they’re supposed to like. In our household and with families we’ve learned from, a simple routine works: pair one story choice with one “curiosity pick,” where the curiosity pick answers a real-life question from that day (How do volcanoes work? Why do dogs bark? What’s inside a basketball?). The prompt I use is, “What do you want to be able to explain to me in two minutes tonight?” That shifts the win condition from finishing pages to sharing one interesting fact, which lowers pressure and increases ownership.

To make it stick, we keep nonfiction sessions short and predictable: 10 minutes, same time, and the child gets to choose the format (book, magazine, illustrated encyclopedia, kid-friendly manual). I also encourage “browse reading” as valid—captions, diagrams, headings, and the index—because that’s how adults naturally use informational text. When kids realize nonfiction lets them jump around, look things up, and feel competent quickly, it stops feeling like homework and starts feeling like agency.

Getting my kids into nonfiction works best when we actually do what we read about. We’ll follow a recipe from a book or try one of those cleaning hacks. Suddenly the reading isn’t just another task. The information becomes something real, a batch of brownies or a sparkling countertop they made themselves. It stops being about homework and starts being about figuring something out. That’s when they get hooked.

Nonfiction clicks when you tie it to what kids already love. If they are obsessed with space, just leave an illustrated book about astronauts on the coffee table. Don’t assign it. When they find interesting books in shared spaces on their own, reading stops feeling like homework and turns into genuine curiosity. Giving them the choice is what really works.