Why Parents Should Read to Their Kids

I admit, I have The Muppet Christmas Carol to thank for my first exposure to Charles Dickens. But off-screen and years later, it was through our family’s tradition of reading aloud that I first consumed the beloved A Christmas Carol as words on a page. This time, I was the reader, and my children the listeners. In Dickens’s era, the tradition of verbal reading thrived in early Victorian homes with parents and children equally engaged. Now in the 21st century, this sacred ritual has lost its luster.

Literacy experts raised the alarm last year when newly published data showed fewer parents than ever before actually read aloud to their children. A dismal 41 percent of zero- to four-year-olds are read to frequently, down more than 20 percentage points from 2012. Gen Z parents now regard reading as “more a subject to learn than a fun thing to do.” The same data showed that more than one in five boys ages zero to two are never or rarely read to, potentially worsening the gap in readiness between boys and girls entering kindergarten.

The death of parent-child reading time comes at great cost. Reading aloud to our kids doesn’t merely dictate literacy rates and academic success — it also plays a vital role in the development of emotional maturity.

We know that well-told stories foster imagination in ways that technology cannot. Screens supply a steady stream of images and sound to a viewer’s eyes and ears, leaving little room for creativity or interpretation. Meanwhile, children frequently immersed in books occupy a fluid space between the author’s words and the sights, smells, and sounds they are required to generate in their minds.

A child’s imagination takes flight, for example, in the priceless and temporary suspense of unbelief required by Tolkien’s Middle-earth and C. S. Lewis’s magical wardrobe. We willingly lose ourselves to the whimsy of Pooh and Christopher Robin’s Hundred Acre Wood or the humorous misadventures of Paddington Bear in London’s underground. The limitless and bendable possibilities conjured in worlds of make-believe inspire the creativity and vision children need to confront an increasingly inflexible and downcast world.

Research likewise links emotional engagement in stories with the developed ability to identify and sympathize with others. Empathy is like a muscle. Books help us to strengthen it. For example, in Eleanor Estes’s The Hundred Dresses, my seven-year-old and I stepped into the life of a Polish schoolgirl in Connecticut ridiculed for wearing the same dress to school each day. Our read-through of Number the Stars plunged us into historical Nazi-occupied Denmark through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl and the Jewish neighbor her family risked their lives to protect. These and many other stories take parents and children to worlds far beyond the comfort of a living room couch or a child’s bed.

Books enable us to extend our sympathies to the characters within the story, while expanding our empathies without. The novelist George Eliot described this artistic phenomenon as the “mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”

C. S. Lewis likewise understood the power of a well-told story. “Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage,” he once famously wrote of children’s books. The tales of St. George and the Dragon and King Arthur’s round table are well steeped in bravery. So too are vivid retellings of historical accounts, like that of Ernest Shackleton’s grit and determination with the fate of the Endurance’s crew (to be fair, what little boy isn’t easily inspired by a gripping man vs. nature story?).

Once children learn to read, these shared literary adventures start to wane. Among kids aged five to seven, only 36 percent are read to regularly at home. That figure drops to just 22 percent with eight- to ten-year-olds.

Sure, we can leave our children to discover books on their own once they’ve learned to read independently. Better still, we can use our collective immersion in stories to stimulate conversations between parent and child on topics that are otherwise untouched in the humdrum of everyday life. The simple practice of reading aloud grants parents and caregivers the chance to discuss difficult themes or tortured characters. Tucked beneath blankets and hanging on the author’s every word, we frequently pause to process a character’s action or motive, query a referenced piece of history, or wonder at some facet of a magical realm.

Once upon a time, perhaps you too knew the words of Goodnight Moon by heart. You could even recite The Little Engine That Could. At every well check, your child’s pediatrician lectured on the impact of early exposures to language development. But a few years on, and those delightful interactions with picture books soon gave way to busy schedules. Life crept in. Afternoons and evenings inevitably filled with play dates, homework, and sports activities. Or maybe it no longer felt “fun” anymore.

I too have admittedly viewed The Velveteen Rabbit or Prince Caspian as obstacles to well-earned solitude at the end of a long day. Some nights, it feels tedious. But oh, the reward is great and the ritual too important to neglect. Start early. Start small. Start with books you too could enjoy. Just start, because books read aloud become powerful agents of the mind that shape feeling, imaginative, and courageous children in a world that so desperately needs them.