Why My Girls Are Not Allowed Comics at Home
I should start with a confession.
I grew up reading comics. Loved them. Still have a soft spot for them. And if you asked me today whether that habit helped or hurt my relationship with reading, I would tell you honestly that it hurt.
I can read business books and non-fiction without much difficulty. That style of writing essentially speaks to you directly. The author is making an argument, walking you through an idea, telling you something. It meets you halfway.
Fiction is different. Fiction asks you to do the work yourself, to construct the world, the characters, the atmosphere, all of it from nothing but words on a page. No pictures. No author talking at you. Just text, and whatever your imagination does with it. That requires a muscle I never properly built, because comics always handed me the pictures, and it shows. I pick up a novel, read a chapter or two, and put it down. My attention drifts. I reach for something shorter, something more direct.
So when my daughters were old enough to start forming reading habits, my wife and I made a decision. No comics at home. House rule, non-negotiable.
Not because comics are bad. Not because of vocabulary or grammar. But because I know from my own experience what happens when a young brain trains itself on short bursts and visual shortcuts. It gets very good at exactly that, and less good at everything else. I did not want to build that in my girls. If I could go back and give myself a different reading childhood, I would. This was my chance to give them one.
They are not deprived, to be clear.
Dogman exists in the world and they are aware of it. When we go to the bookshop they make a beeline for it, sit on the floor, and read as much as they can before we leave. It is a treat, not contraband. The same logic applies here as everywhere else in how we manage their media. It is not about elimination. It is about ratios and defaults.
At home, the default is books.
That default did not appear from nowhere. We built it deliberately over several years, one phase at a time, though I would not have called it a curriculum while we were doing it. It felt more like buying books, going to the library, and paying attention to what they responded to.
Looking back, there is a clear ladder.
The earliest books were about association more than reading. Richard Scarry, Maisy, Disney storybooks, early Dr Seuss. Heavy pictures, simple text, familiar characters. The goal at this stage was not literacy. It was to make books feel like comfortable, pleasurable objects. Something you reach for because reaching for it has always felt good.
Then came the levelled readers. I Can Read series, Dr Seuss mid to harder titles, books where the pictures still carry a lot of the story but the text starts pulling its own weight. This is the phase that coincided with phonics class and eventually the I Can Read enrichment program at Hougang, which I wrote about separately. When they completed that program, something shifted. Reading stopped being effortful and became genuinely enjoyable.
After that we went all out stocking the shelf. Geronimo Stilton. Dragon Masters. Dragon Girls. Jedi Academy. Enid Blyton. Sherlock Sam, our local favourite. Scholastic series. Encyclopedias because they love facts and will read non-fiction just as happily as fiction. These are chapter books with illustrations, stories long enough to require attention across multiple sittings, complex enough to reward it.
This is where they are now, at seven years old.
The next phase is already in progress and my wife is the one driving it.
She has had Harry Potter in her sights for a while. It is her goal for the girls and I think it is a good one. Harry Potter Book 1 sits at a meaningfully higher reading level than Geronimo Stilton or even Enid Blyton. The gap is not just vocabulary. It is the density of text per page, chapters that are longer and more complex, a plot sustained across three hundred pages with no illustrations to lean on.
There is a reason why every film adaptation of a beloved book is, by definition, a lesser experience for the people who read it first. Books ask your imagination to do the construction work. The reader builds the world themselves, the characters, the landscapes, the atmosphere. A film hands all of that to you pre-made. To a reader who built Hogwarts in their own head first, the film version will always feel slightly wrong, slightly smaller than what they imagined. That is not a flaw in the film. It is just what books do that nothing else can.
That is the experience I want my girls to have. Not just the story, but the version they build themselves.
The bridge to get there is Roald Dahl. My girls are already reading BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which puts them exactly where they need to be. Roald Dahl sits just below Harry Potter in reading difficulty but the storytelling is richer and more demanding than anything they have read before. If they move through Dahl comfortably, Percy Jackson is a natural next step, and after that Harry Potter is within reach.
We did not plan this progression from the beginning. But it is satisfying to look at it now and see that it holds together.
The physical library at home is three large shelves, almost floor to ceiling, roughly the width of three chairs side by side. It takes up a meaningful chunk of the living room wall and I do not apologise for that.
We curate it actively. Books they have outgrown get given away, to cousins, to friends’ kids, to whoever can use them. My wife was initially reluctant about this but I was firm. The shelf should reflect where they are now, not where they were two years ago. A shelf full of books that are too easy is a shelf they stop seeing.
We love it when friends give the girls books as gifts. It is genuinely the best present anyone can give them and the people who know us well know this by now.
When we add to the shelf ourselves, the process is more deliberate than it probably looks. We go to the bookshop first, Popular or whatever is nearby, and I browse in person. I want to see the writing, the content, the illustrations. I want to gauge whether it is appropriate for where they are right now, whether it will stretch them slightly or bore them. Then we usually buy online because the price difference is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
I do feel something about that. Popular Bookstore has been part of growing up in Singapore for a long time, and physical retail is genuinely hard when you are paying mall rent. I understand exactly why they price the way they do. I just cannot always justify the difference when I am buying twelve books at a time.
The library used to be the other half of all this.
We went weekly when the girls were younger, to the branch at Hougang Mall. Watching them walk in was something I never got tired of. Their faces changed the moment they came through the door. The best comparison I have is the way other kids look at a theme park. Just the presence of that many books, all of them available, all of them theirs to pick up and open, was enough to produce a particular kind of joy that I did not know was possible in a library branch inside a shopping mall.
That library closed for renovation more than a year ago. It is not due to reopen until 2027 and I miss it more than I expected to. We still go to other branches but it is not the same rhythm.
When we were there regularly, I let them browse freely. They gravitate toward books with nice illustrations, which is fine. But what they borrowed to take home I kept an eye on, making sure it matched their level. Browsing and borrowing are different decisions.
None of this felt like a system while we were building it. It felt like a no-comics rule that annoyed them, a shelf that kept getting restocked, weekly library trips that became routine, and a lot of birthday presents that happened to be books.
Somewhere in there, without quite meaning to, we built a reading culture in our home.
They are seven now, working through Roald Dahl, with Harry Potter on the horizon. The ladder is visible from here. I am curious to see how far they climb.