Diwali hasn't even arrived yet and you can already picture it: grandparents, aunts, neighbours, all arriving with books, and your child ending up with a pile of ten or twelve new titles inside one week. It feels wasteful to just dump the lot on the shelf and hope for the best. It's also a nice problem to have — if you hand the books over the right way.
The core finding: fewer options at a time gets a child more absorbed in whichever one they pick
A 2017 study by Michal Maimaran, published in the Journal of Decision Making, gave preschoolers either a small set of options — two Curious George books, or two sets of building blocks — or a larger set, seven books or six block sets, to choose from. Children choosing from the smaller set spent less time deciding and considerably more time actually engaged with whatever they picked, nearly double in the block experiment. Children judged the larger sets more fun to choose from, even though they engaged less with what they ended up choosing. More choice felt better in the moment and delivered less afterward.
The bigger picture: the fix isn't fewer books, it's fewer books out at once
You don't have to turn down Diwali gifts or ration how many books your child owns. The practical version of this finding, long used in early-childhood classrooms, is rotation: keep most of the new pile out of sight and bring out two or three titles at a time, swapping in fresh ones every week or two as interest in the current set fades. Your child still ends up reading everything eventually — they just aren't asked to choose from, or half-ignore, an entire shelf at once. A good starting set for the rotation box: pair something familiar, like a Panchatantra favourite such as The Hare and the Tortoise or The Greedy Dog, with one or two of the new arrivals, so the pile doesn't feel like a test.
Where it's genuinely uncertain
Maimaran's study compared two or three options against six or seven — not two against twelve, which is closer to a real Diwali haul. We're reasonably extending the finding, not quoting an experiment run on festival-sized book piles. It's also worth saying plainly: a child who's thrilled to have so many new books and dives in happily doesn't need an intervention. This is a strategy for when the pile itself seems to be the reason nothing gets read, not a rule for every household.
What this means this week
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Tonight, set aside most of the new pile and put two or three books out — one familiar, one new, one a bit of a stretch.
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Let your child help choose which two or three are "out" this week. Having a say over a small set keeps the autonomy without the overwhelm.
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Swap the set when interest visibly dips, not on a fixed schedule — a title that's still getting picked up doesn't need to be rotated out yet.
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Store the rest somewhere visible but not in the daily pile — a basket on top of a cupboard works — so "new books" still feels like something to look forward to, not a backlog.
Sources
Maimaran, M. (2017). To Increase Engagement, Offer Less: The Effect of Assortment Size on Children's Engagement. Judgment and Decision Making, 12(3), 198–207.
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