Among my most cherished memories of raising our kids are the incalculable hours I spent reading aloud to them. Not just during the toddler and early childhood years, with endless recitations of Dr. Seuss’s books, Goodnight Moon, and the Berenstain Bears, though I enjoyed those immensely. I kept reading to our four kids till they were as old as twelve. They loved it and so did I.
Reading with them provided time to bond, cuddle, and talk. They grew to love reading as their vocabularies expanded and attention spans grew. We’d sometimes make a bit of theater out of it, with each of us reading the lines of various characters from “Charlotte’s Web,” “Henry and the Clubhouse” or “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” These books are wonderful classics; try them and see if your kids don’t love them also. We also read plenty of Jewish books, including junior parsha readers as well as novels. As the kids became tweens, we dipped into “Harry Potter,” but without some wizardry, I feared that they’d all have their drivers’ licenses if we read to the end. (We didn’t.)
When I texted my daughter, Yael, to ask if she had any special memories of those evenings reading together, she replied Yes, absolutely!
“I remember that you sat on the floor and leaned against my bed and read whatever I wanted you to read to me,” she told me on the phone. “It was soothing, knowing that was how I was going to end my day at bedtime. It wasn’t just about the reading. You were making time for me. I was the priority. I really looked forward to our reading time. I was sad when you had to go out and couldn’t read to me.”
Yael is now a learning specialist in a private school in Dallas, with a master’s degree in teaching and training in dyslexia language therapy. She encourages parents of her students to read to their children, because “research shows that skill in reading needs to be developed between the ages of five and nine,” she explained. “There is tremendous value in spending time reading to your children. It will encourage their becoming lifelong readers. And unless a kid is a natural reader, having a parent read to them can help them discover the kinds of stories they like.”
Yael added that for any kids who have language-based learning differences, “reading on their own may not be something they are ever comfortable with, but reading to them is one of the greatest things you can do. Even my eighth-grade students love it when I read stories to them in class.”
However important I felt it was for me to read to my independent readers “back in the day,” as one of my sons likes to say, I think it’s urgently needed now. Our phones and other digital devices are separating us from one another. Too many kids are going to bed with an iPhone instead of a book. Educators are desperately trying to cope with the disastrous fallout of kids’ much shorter attention spans and spiking anxiety levels, problems that researchers consistently link to kids in isolation, focused on a screen.
The good news is that these issues can begin to be healed through real face time, when parents and children share the magic of storytelling. This activity can help keep kids feeling attached to you and safe with you just when you might begin to feel them slipping away. Reading with your kids also gives them a chance to ask questions about what they’re reading — or, in fact, about anything at all that might be on their minds when they are relaxed enough to pop out with it. These are golden opportunities to have meaningful conversations with your child.
In a time of high anxiety for so many kids, taking the time to park your phone in another room and park yourself next to your child to read and talk is an investment that will pay huge dividends.
In a time of high anxiety for so many kids, taking the time to park your phone in another room and park yourself next to your child to read and talk is an investment that will pay huge dividends, while creating beautiful memories that you both will always treasure.
Judy Gruen’s most recent book is “The Skeptic and the Rabbi: Falling in Love With Faith.”
