A few months ago, I experienced one of my greatest moments of parenting satisfaction. I looked in the rearview mirror of my minivan and saw that all three of my children — ages 11, 9, and 6 — were reading books. Twenty minutes passed in which there was no sound in the car except the turning of pages. Suddenly, for the first time in more than a decade, I had visions of lolling on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, enjoying a novel without interruption. But then Meghan Cox Gurdon had to go and ruin it all.
In her new book, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction, Gurdon, the Wall Street Journal’s children’s book critic, argues that if we want to improve our children’s behavior, vocabulary, and attention span, we should not simply let everyone go off to their own corners to enjoy whatever book happens to suit them, at least not always. Rather, I should consider reading aloud to them each night — for an hour.
The evidence about reading to small children is clear, which is why most middle- and upper-class parents do just that. Whether it’s bedtime reading or storytime at the library or just looking at picture books in the middle of the afternoon, we know instinctively that reading books with toddlers exposes them to new words, makes them wonder about pictures, and encourages conversations between adults and children that might not otherwise take place. Indeed, if you’re the kind of parent, as I was, who has trouble carrying on a conversation for hours with a child who does not understand words yet, books are a saving grace. They provide a script for what can seem like long days of putting on a one-woman show.
Screen time does not do this, as Gurdon explains in her discussion of the latest research on brain activity. When children listen to someone reading a book, “you’re getting a little bit of cooking,” one researcher tells her while looking at images of brain scans. When they listen to a book and look at the pictures, he says, “Bam! All these networks are really firing and connecting with one another.” But when they watch the video of the same story, “the lights are on … but nobody’s home.”
Unfortunately, when it comes to the way we occupy our kids, the old adage is true: You get what you pay for. It’s very easy to put kids in front of an iPad. It will keep them quiet, but it will be of little benefit to them in the long run. Reading books aloud to your children, on the other hand, requires a lot of short-term effort — you can’t do anything else while you are reading a book to a toddler, no unloading the dishwasher or checking your email — but the payoff is huge.
This is where Gurdon’s book is truly a gift. She reminds us that telling stories aloud is a deeply embedded part of our humanity, allowing us to forge connections across generations, and that reading as a family can fortify our emotional bonds. “As babies grow into toddlers and then into children, and then, incredibly, into adolescents, the picture books and novels they share with their parents and siblings produce a special kind of adhesive. It builds the family, helping to create that secret society … with its common store of words, scenes, and characters.” Parents benefit, too. “The time we spend reading to our children can feel like a return journey to destinations we visited long ago and never thought we would see again.”
She describes heartwarming scenes of reading aloud to her own five children over the course of two decades, of soldiers overseas recording themselves reading books aloud so that their young children will have a source of connection to them when they return. She goes to England, where she finds groups of older people gathered together to listen to books being read aloud and teachers who find that kids who were never interested in reading can’t wait to have stories read aloud to them. One autistic boy, who cannot talk or read on his own, tells Gurdon through a keyboard how he feels when people read to him. “It takes me to another place in which I’m completely normal.”
She speaks with a woman who found herself tired of engaging in small talk with her elderly father, sick in the hospital. The woman picked up a biography of Winston Churchill that someone had brought him as a gift and began to read aloud. “Right away, it changed the mood and atmosphere,” she told Gurdon. “It got him out of a rut thinking about illness. It wasn’t mindless TV, and it wasn’t tiring for his brain or eyes because I was doing the reading.” The adults and older children who have someone to read to them describe it as a “luxury.”
The benefits are so blindingly clear that you will get to the end of The Enchanted Hour and wonder, “Why don’t we do this more often?” It is easy to come up with excuses. My children are at different ages with different interests and different bedtimes. How many hours does this woman think I have at the end of the day? But frankly, I find that when I read to my youngest — the only one for whom a 15-minute bedtime story is still part of the routine — the other children gravitate toward her room. Even if it’s Beverly Cleary or Beatrix Potter or another book that they read years ago, they sit rapt. Maybe I should take a hint.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Be the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat.
