My kids are 4 and 2. When they get to where they can read independently I intend to make sure they have flashlights, and if I have my shit together I'll make sure they always have batteries.
Years ago I thought the same thing, but one of my kids will stay up reading until well past midnight and absolutely obliterate his health over it.
Re: shit togetherness and batteries, a great (maybe too great) solution is a dimmable headlamp with rechargeable batteries which charge from a USB port or something similar. They tend to get excellent life on a charge, and being able to dim them is nice so you don't have the flood light on white pages effect before they're going to sleep.
All of my kids have one and I've never needed to swap batteries or remind them to charge them. They take them camping, too. They're a great thing to have handy.
I used to stay up all night to read, too late for my own good and my parents eventually started taking away every light source at 10pm or so (that's when I was less than 11, so it was really late enough).
I ended up collecting toys that glow in the dark, I would recharge them until 10 next to the light, and managed to read with them for a few minutes more (not much longer I guess). Under white bedsheets I would have enough light to be able to labouriously read sufficiently large-printed letters.
I guess my point is just that some kids absolutely do need some limits even for reading and other "good" activities, and they will use any means they can find to work around the limits you give them.
If they love reading, they’ll love reading. Anything that becomes an obsession for a kid to the point where they are forgoing sleep (food, social interaction, etc.) is probably unhealthy. Kids don’t have enough executive function development to adequately moderate themselves.
Ah, then the paradoxical key is to ban books. What you want more of: reject, what you want less of: become the boyfriend's new best pal. No so much reverse psychology as manipulating oppositional tendencies.
