Rows of lit clay diyas on a decorative tray surrounded by flower petals

Keeping the Reading Habit Alive Through the Diwali Break

Diwali break means late nights, houses full of relatives, sweets appearing from every direction, and a reading routine that quietly falls apart somewhere between the rangoli and the firecrackers. If you're already bracing for the habit to reset by the time school starts again, here's some good news: what actually protects a reading habit over a break has very little to do with sticking to a strict schedule.

What protects a habit over a break, according to the research

The most direct evidence on this comes from a different kind of break — the long summer holiday studied in the United States, where "summer slide" in reading is well documented. In a study published in Reading Psychology in 2010, Richard Allington and colleagues gave low-income elementary students self-selected books to keep over three consecutive summers, with no assigned reading list or requirement attached. The result was a statistically significant reduction in reading loss over the break, with the biggest effect for the children with the least access to books at home otherwise.

The mechanism wasn't discipline or a schedule. It was simply having books they'd chosen themselves, sitting around, available. No one was quizzed on them.

Why this applies to a shorter, noisier break too

Diwali break is nowhere near as long as an American summer, and no study has tested it directly — that's worth saying plainly rather than borrowing the finding as if it were proven for this exact situation. But the underlying idea — that easy access and free choice do more than structure does — doesn't depend on the break being ten weeks long. A child with two or three books they picked lying on the sofa during a four-day break is applying the same principle, just at a smaller scale.

Where this is genuinely just an extrapolation

There's no Indian research on festival breaks specifically, and family reading during Diwali looks different across homes — some quieter, some full of cousins and noise. Treat "access and choice, not schedule" as a reasonable guide, not a guarantee, and adjust it to what your own house actually looks like this week.

What this means for this week

  • Leave two or three books your child already likes out somewhere visible — the sofa, the car, near the diyas — instead of packed away with "school things" until the break ends.
  • Let a grandparent's spoken version of the Ramayana or a Diwali story count as real reading time in the sense that matters — narrative and vocabulary exposure don't require a printed page.
  • Don't hold a fixed reading-time expectation on the loudest days, crackers, guests, and late dinners included. A few skipped days inside a longer pattern of access isn't what the research warns about.
  • If you're gifting books this Diwali, offer your child two or three wrapped options to choose from rather than one surprise pick — choice is doing more work here than the "right" book would.

Sources

Allington, R. L., McGill-Franzen, A., Camilli, G., Williams, L., Graff, J., Zeig, J., Zmach, C., & Nowak, R. (2010). Addressing summer reading setback among economically disadvantaged elementary students. Reading Psychology, 31, 411–427.

Related reading

Find books that fit your 7-year-old this Diwali — take the 2-minute reading assessment

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