How I Taught My Daughters to Love Books: Ages 0 to 6
Here’s the thing. Loving books and loving reading is essential for our kids’ future, in my opinion. It gives them freedom when they’re older.
When my 8-year-old started reading books by herself, beginning to end, I was surprised to feel an overwhelming sense of relief: Now she can learn anything, study anything, discover anything, and learn about herself by empathizing with the characters: Father’s job 50% done!
I really was surprised to find out how big a part of parenting I believed teaching to read is.
Reading is freedom.
And, sure, I know I’m biased because I’m an author. I grew up as a bookworm, I loved to fall into imaginary worlds for hours, and I think reading fiction is probably more important than most people do.
But I’ll take that hit: Reading is more important to me than to most people, but reading is still super important. The freedom of imagination is a bigger experience for me than it is for many others. But it’s still a necessary part of a healthy mind. Not teaching your kids to love reading early and to make reading easy may mean they’ll never really read. There’s so much temptation that takes us away from that-thing-with-the-pages-that-requires-concentration-for-long-periods-of-time: shows, games, and social media steal our attention and concentration.
We forget how hard it is to read in the beginning. It’s an effort. If you don’t make that effort when you’re young, it won’t become easier over time. If you don’t take the time to read a lot of books at the age when you have the least patience, you’ll read slowly and sluggishly for the rest of your life, and you’ll never feel ‘free’ to read.
The only way to give kids (future adults) the freedom to read anything is to get them to read a lot, for fun, at a young age.
This is the first article in a series of articles about how I solved, and am still solving, that problem in my house with my three daughters. I can’t promise it will work for everyone. But this is my story about stories.
Stage #1: The Super Early Years
I started as early as I could: At a few months old the books you can read to the babies are simple, usually one word a page. And most of them are still beyond their comprehension. But that’s the age you get in at. That’s the age in which I started sitting with my daughters and reading books to them.
This is the most important part: Whenever I read to them, I would hug them or hold them. I caressed their hair and shoulders as I read to them. I wanted them to have a memory of warmth and love when they read. It’s a positive feeling to return to. Reading becomes a good, warm, safe place where you feel loved. So the need to return to it is great.
Stage #2: Reading in Bed
As each girl got marginally older, my wife and I put our kids to sleep by lying next to them in bed. First, we would tell a couple of stories from a couple of books, then we would talk to them about today or tomorrow, then we’d let them fall asleep.
The thing here was to show a wide variety of books. At this age, you have to read one book many times for it to sink in, but every so often we would change books so the girl will know a wide variety and see that there are many kinds of books and stories.
At this age, they love stories. The human brain needs stories to learn from and grow. They ask for stories.
Now move forward a few years. The girls are sleeping in their own beds. But every night, with few unavoidable exceptions, our daughters would hear stories from us before they fell asleep.
This process is intimate. It is quality time with a parent, which kids need and love and want. If we ever needed to miss a day, they would show us how much they needed that story from us before sleep.
It’s comforting, it’s intimate, it shows them their parents love them and spend time with them, and… it’s a habit.
Habits are hard to break. Habits are things we don’t want to break, that we need a conscious effort to break.
And then the eldest girl began the first grade…
In my next article I’ll explore how to get them from loving stories to getting used to reading for themselves and enjoying it. See you then!
