Children's books: choosing by age, interests and stamina

Publishers' age bands are a useful first filter, but nothing more. So this table doesn't say what a child "should" read at a given age, but what usually works — and where parents most often go wrong.

If you're torn between two levels, go for the easier one. A book that's too easy entertains a child and builds their confidence; a book that's too hard puts them off reading.

Bestseller charts mostly measure marketing muscle, not whether a book works for your particular child. Before you worry about quality, though, check the difficulty — you can do it right there in the bookshop in two minutes:

• The five-word test. Open a page in the middle of the book and have your child read aloud. Five or more words they stumble over or don't understand means the book is too hard to read on their own. Two or three words is ideal: they'll learn something without giving up.
• Paragraph length. For beginning readers, look for paragraphs of about three lines at most and sentences that fit on a single line. A solid block of text running over half a page is a visual stop sign for a six- to eight-year-old.
• Picture-to-text ratio. In early readers there should be an illustration on every spread. For eight- to ten-year-olds one picture per chapter is enough, but a book with no pictures at all loses the reader who isn't yet confident.
• A chapter as a serving. Check how many pages one chapter has. If it can be read in a single evening sitting, your child gets the feeling of finishing something every day — and that's the engine that keeps them reading.

Only then is it time to look at awards decided by people who know the craft:

• The Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Book of the Year Awards have been given since 1946. The Early Childhood and Picture Book of the Year categories are a good source of board books and picture books for the youngest, and they're celebrated each August during CBCA Book Week, when schools hold Book Week parades with children dressed as book characters.
• The CBCA Younger Readers and Older Readers categories suit children who already read on their own and enjoy it; the winners are beautifully written and sometimes more demanding than you'd expect. The Eve Pownall Award covers information books — handy for children who'd rather read facts than stories.
• The Premier's Reading Challenge is a free state program in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania. Children who finish it receive a certificate signed by the Premier — a nice nudge for a reader you're still trying to win over.

And third, children's librarians: they lend books to hundreds of children a year, and when you ask "what are eight-year-old boys into right now?" they'll answer more accurately than any chart.

The final signal is right at home. A book your child finished and then asked for the sequel of is better for them than an award winner lying untouched on the bedside table.

Ages 8 to 10 are a critical time for reading. Your child can already read, so reading aloud at home often stops — and with it, daily contact with books. This is when most "non-readers" are made. What reliably holds the attention of middle primary kids:

Audiobooks win wherever a printed book can't be held: in the car, with a sick child, when drifting off after lights out. Listening builds vocabulary, a feel for language and the ability to follow a plot, much like reading aloud. But it doesn't replace practising reading itself — for school-age children it works best as a companion to the book, not a substitute.

A combination that works: your child listens to a story they already know from the page, or asks for the book to look through after listening. For bedtime listening it pays to build the audio into a fixed ritual — we describe how to put one together step by step in the article Bedtime stories.

When choosing an audiobook, go by four things:

• Track length by age. For a preschooler, pick titles split into chapters of around ten minutes, so listening can end at the end of a story, not halfway through. A school-age child can manage a half-hour track; a full-length recording with no breaks, though, is hard to portion out night by night.
• The narrator's pace. Listen to a sample. A narrator who rattles through the text loses children under about seven — they need pauses between sentences to picture what they're hearing. A slower pace is a strength in children's audiobooks, not a bore.
• Dramatised or a single voice? A dramatisation with music and several actors draws in reluctant listeners and works in the car, where it competes with background noise. For falling asleep, choose a single calm voice reading — sound effects and shouting characters will only wake your child up.
• Where to find them. Many local libraries lend audiobooks online through your library membership, so you can try a title before you buy it — ask at your local library. For the youngest, ABC Kids listen is a free ABC audio service for children up to about five, with Story Time and music, in the ABC listen app and on DAB+ digital radio. How to choose by age and type of audio is covered in our guide to audiobooks for children.

The simplest anchor is a daily read-aloud of around 20 minutes, every single day. Nationwide events such as National Simultaneous Storytime, when one Australian picture book is read aloud at the same time in schools and libraries across the country, show children that reading belongs to everyone. Around that anchor you can build a whole system at home:

A child who reads gets through more books than it makes sense to buy. So it pays to split titles into those that only need reading once and those that should stay in the house. Four sources and the format that suits each: