Most reading habits don't fail because kids dislike books. They fail because "reading time" becomes one more thing a tired parent has to enforce at the end of a long day — which makes it feel like a chore to everyone involved.
Attach it to a moment your day already has
Habits that need their own new time slot tend to be the first thing that collapses when a week gets busy. The ones that survive get folded into something already happening — the wind-down right after a bath, the stretch while dinner finishes cooking, the last few minutes before the light goes off. Nothing new gets added to the day's list of decisions; a book just slides into a slot that was already there.
Repetition is the habit doing its job, not stalling
A toddler asking for the exact same book on night thirty isn't a sign the routine has stopped working — it's often the clearest evidence that it is. Predicting what comes next on a familiar page is real language practice, arguably more active than hearing something new for the first time. Save the pushes for variety for whatever you choose to add on top, not for what a child keeps reaching for on their own.
A short read that happens daily beats a long one that doesn't
One board book, finished, most nights, is a genuine win. The target was never a thirty-minute session — it's a small daily touchpoint that doesn't take willpower to keep going. The lower the effort a habit demands, the more likely it survives a genuinely busy week.
Keep the shelf small and let it turn over
A wall of forty books competing for attention is, oddly, less inviting than five that feel new right now. Boredom with a stale shelf is often the actual gap a tablet ends up filling. Swapping in a handful of fresh titles every few weeks — not the whole collection, just enough to feel new — tends to do more for a stalling habit than any pep talk about reading being important.
If you're looking for a starting point, our age-based collections are grouped by exactly this kind of stage — toddler, preschooler, and early reader — so the books on hand actually match what your child can enjoy right now.