Doing it in reverse is great too! I never would have read through Neil Gaiman without watching Good Omens or blowing through GoT after the first season because I didn’t want it to end. Reading requires more time, patience, and imagination than a movie or show so anything that will motivate a child to read wins. I found that bribing with the movie after the book helped and also severely limiting screen time while young so that it was more of a reward when it was earned.

Exactly! She is a speed reader though, I can only hope it takes her that long to get through them 🤣

We felt the same way. Movies cut so much out of the books. We also wanted to encourage reading over screen time. If she wanted to watch a movie she had to read a book and she only got one movie a week of screen time m until she was in middle school.

We were more strict when she was younger and have loosened it up a lot. She also was pretty sensitive to scary/suspenseful scenes so knowing what will happen from reading it first helped temper her fearful reaction a little.

At 16 she is a major bookworm and has an incredibly creative mind. For more adult content like Game of Thrones I would absolutely still make her read first. Either way, she loves critiquing movie adaptations now and we have a lot of fun conversations about good and bad scenes, casting, set, what we’d change and how etc.

Agree! I have Game of Thrones on the list too (not banned to oblivion, but she wanted to read them at age 12) but now that my kid is almost 16 I might let that one go. We have a rule that if movies are based off a book, the book has to be read first.