When Deema Al Alami’s son asks for a new book, the answer is always "yes". There are no spending limits and no questions about whether he really needs another one. A game for the iPad, on the other hand, is an entirely different proposition.
“If my son ever says he wants to go buy a book, there’s no budget,” she says. “He can ask me to buy a book any time, anywhere, whenever he wants. If he asks for an iPad game, I make him suffer until he gets one.”
There are other incentives, too. Bedtime might officially be 8.30pm, but reading earns an extra 30 minutes. Books can be accompanied by hot chocolate, while family conversations often revolve around the novels Deema, a Palestinian children's author and co-founder of Arab Child Summit, is enjoying.
“I do these small things just to put it in my kids’ head that the act of reading itself is rewarding,” she says.
It is a philosophy that reflects a growing challenge facing parents and educators across the UAE: how to encourage children to pick up a book when screens offer an endless supply of instant entertainment.
For many families, that challenge is complicated by another consideration. In a country where children frequently move between Arabic, English and sometimes other languages, developing a love of reading can also mean navigating questions of identity, culture and belonging.
Yet experts believe the solution is not necessarily to wage war on technology, but to make books a natural and rewarding part of children’s lives.
The importance of starting young
For Ahlam Bolooki, chief executive of the Emirates Literature Foundation, the groundwork for a lifelong reading habit is laid long before children enter a classroom.
“Our research has found that if you read to your child daily in the early years of their development, there’s a 63 per cent chance that they will read independently,” she says. “If you read to them once a week, that drops to around 19 per cent.”
The figures suggest that what happens at home can have a profound influence on children’s future relationship with books. But establishing that habit may require a cultural shift for some families.
“When we grew up, it wasn’t something our parents did,” Ahlam says. “We are very much an oral storytelling culture, so I remember great aunts and my parents telling us stories of Arabian and folk tales from the region, but it was always oral, there wasn’t a book in your hand.”
Crucially, however, reading should not always be treated as an educational exercise. The Emirates Literature Foundation's Reading for Pleasure programme, launched in 2023, encourages children to see reading as something to enjoy rather than an exercise in muscle memory. The five-year pilot gives pupils at six Dubai primary schools access to books in Arabic and English, and time to read without being tested.
“There needs to be time where children can interact with books freely, not as something they have to do or be questioned about, just going and taking what they feel drawn to and spending time with it.”
It is a distinction echoed by Deema, a former primary schoolteacher, who believes schools can sometimes become so focused on measuring literacy that they neglect the pleasure of reading.
“Literacy rates are improving globally, but are children learning how to read for joy, for pleasure? That is the gap,” she says.
She remembers reading aloud to her pupils every day, an experience they eagerly anticipated, and believes older children should also be given greater freedom over their choices rather than being stuck with set reading lists.
“We have reading lists, but why can’t we give space for students to actually choose their own reading within a certain genre?”
Such an approach, she argues, would not prevent teachers from analysing language, characters or plot while it would give pupils more ownership of the experience and a chance to read stories they can relate to, while showing there are many different ways to write a story.
Competing with the screen
For parents trying to establish those habits, however, books face formidable competition.
Digital devices are embedded in children’s education, entertainment and social lives, while artificial intelligence is creating new ways to access information without necessarily having to read deeply or investigate a subject.
Ahlam believes attempts to eliminate technology entirely are unrealistic. “There is no point fighting technology at this point. It is a part of their lives and it is a part of their future. It is here to stay.”
Children, she argues, must learn to navigate technology and AI effectively. But she worries about what might be lost if they become accustomed to receiving immediate answers.
“The danger in children being exposed to AI so early on might mean that they are satisfied with the early answer and they don’t dig deeper.”
For adults who developed their thinking skills before AI became widely available, questioning information and seeking alternative perspectives may feel more natural. The challenge is ensuring children develop those same instincts rather than simply accepting the first response a machine provides.
Ahlam welcomes recent moves in the UAE to limit laptop use in some year groups, believing children need opportunities to develop their imagination and concentration without constant digital intervention.
“When we talk about reading deeply and developing that love of reading, it’s not only about the act of reading, it’s about building that ability to let your mind wander and ponder on a thought.”
Reading, in other words, is about more than absorbing information. It creates space for reflection, curiosity and independent thought. For Deema, parents also need to examine their own relationship with technology.
“There’s also the element of leading by example. If the kids see that their parents are sitting on the sofa scrolling all night, you’re embedding a behaviour there.”
The multilingual challenge
The UAE's Arab Reading Challenge demonstrates the scale of government support for nurturing reading. Launched under the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives, this year's event – the 10th – attracted more than 40 million participants across 60 countries, organisers said.
But in the UAE, encouraging children to read brings particular linguistic challenges. For many Arab families, English dominates entertainment, online content and much of children’s social environment, even when Arabic remains the language of home and cultural identity.
Deema knows the imbalance from personal experience. “I’m bilingual. I grew up reading primarily English and Arabic books, but most of the English books did not reflect my identity in any way,” she says.
Now a mother herself, she makes a conscious effort to introduce her sons to books that reflect their culture and experiences, “I believe that reading is not about deciphering the words and understanding, but seeing yourself and others in different experiences.”
She believes the availability of Arabic children’s literature has improved considerably, helped by smaller publishers and parents determined to produce the stories they could not find for their own families.
Through her From Mother to Author programme, she supports Arab mothers who want to become published writers.
“When I was young, for every one Arabic book about friendship, you would find 30 incredible titles in English. Now, I think Arab children are seeing themselves more and more.”
But greater availability does not automatically mean children will encounter those books.
“Entertainment is primarily in English, especially here in the UAE,” she says. “Unfortunately, teachers, Arabic teachers, Arab parents, they are fighting a tsunami of English content.”
She believes too much responsibility is placed on schools to produce confident Arabic readers when children have relatively limited opportunities to engage with the language outside lessons.
“We give them 200 minutes a week and we tell them we want bilingual kids. We’re expecting way too much from children who are not exposed to the language.”
The answer, she believes, is to make Arabic a language of enjoyment rather than something associated primarily with schoolwork. “Should it just be in the classroom? Are parents trying to make it accessible in terms of an enjoyment language at home?”
More than two languages
Dr Fajer Bin Rashed, assistant professor and literacy researcher at the Australian University in Kuwait, argues that even describing many Arab children as bilingual fails to capture the complexity of their linguistic lives.
A child might speak a regional variety of Arabic at home, study Modern Standard Arabic at school and use English in other lessons or social situations.
“When I refer to Arab children that speak an additional language like English, French, Spanish, I never refer to them as bilingual children,” she says. “I always refer to them as multilingual children.”
That distinction matters when assessing literacy.
Unlike children who learn to read in essentially the same language variety they speak at home, Arabic-speaking pupils must often bridge a gap between everyday speech and the formal written language.
Dr Bin Rashed's research focuses on literacy education, bilingualism, multiculturalism and social-emotional learning. She warns against drawing simplistic conclusions from international reading assessments that compare children growing up in very different linguistic environments.
“The danger of international assessments is where Arab children are compared to those in the USA, for example, or anywhere where they speak the same variety of English at home and at school. That isn’t equal.”
However, she rejects the suggestion that growing up with multiple languages necessarily delays reading development. “I don’t think that raising bilingual or multilingual children actually slows down the reading. It doesn’t.”
Children’s progress, she says, depends on their exposure to each language, the opportunities they have to practise and the social environments in which those languages are used.
Skills developed in one language can also support learning in another, although the extent of that transfer varies.
Dr Bin Rashed believes parents should embrace the natural movement between languages rather than treating it as a problem. “Some people think of code switching as a negative thing. Code switching is a natural part of bilingual communication.”
For families, this means reading together need not involve rigidly separating languages. Parents can explain unfamiliar words, translate ideas and move between Arabic and English while maintaining the pleasure of the story.
The important thing is to understand what they hope to achieve from the experience.
“Are you reading for pure joy? Are you reading to help improve an additional language? Are you reading for bonding? Are you reading for social and emotional development?”
Each is a legitimate reason to open a book.
Making reading irresistible
All three experts return to a deceptively simple principle: children are more likely to become readers when books are part of the world around them.
For Dr Bin Rashed, that starts with parents demonstrating the behaviour they want to encourage.
“I always say it to everybody: model, model, model reading. If you’re not going to model reading in front of your children, they’re not going to do it.”
Ahlam believes schools can help compensate when reading is not already established at home.
She highlights the transformative influence of a good school library and, particularly, a librarian who understands how to connect individual children with the right stories.
The Emirates Literature Foundation School Librarian of the Year Award 2026 recently honoured the top UAE school librarians at the Museum of the Future in Dubai.
“You see the difference of someone who’s just sort of keeping the lights on and keeping it tidy, and someone who has created a safe space in their library and knows how to find the right stories for the right child,” says Ahlam.
For younger children, Deema believes physical books remain especially important.
Even before they can understand the words, babies and toddlers are learning through the experience of handling books, turning pages and exploring how they work.
“They’re biting, they’re chewing on the book, they’re throwing the book, they’re opening them. For me, this is reading.”
She believes that, as children grow older, reading should become something they associate with freedom, pleasure and family connection rather than obligation.
Ahlam, meanwhile, is optimistic that a generation raised in the digital age might ultimately rediscover the value of books.
“I think if things are cyclical, maybe we were the generation that dropped off and they’re going to bring it back,” she says. “Because they’re growing up in such an incredible era of children’s literature as well.”
The challenge for parents and schools is ensuring children have the opportunity to discover it. And that may be as simple as putting down their own phones, picking up a book and showing children what they have been missing.