“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.”
— Emilie Buchwald

A British department store recently surveyed 2000 parents and discovered that the traditional bedtime story is becoming a thing of the past. According to this survey by Littlewoods housewares store, only 64% of these parents read a book to their children, and only one in five read a book every night. As many as 4% said their children do not own any books at all.

No books? I cannot imagine a childhood without books. I grew up with walls of books, and we created similar walls for our family, and now my daughter and her husband are creating similar spaces for books for my grandchild. A bookless home is the equivalent of poverty of the imagination.

Studies show that children who read for pleasure make better progress in school from age 10-16, not only in such obviously-connected subjects as spelling and vocabulary, but also in math, as compared to children who rarely read.  A child learns to read for pleasure by learning the pleasure of being read to.

Reading a book to a child teaches many valuable lessons:

• How books “work”: There’s an author, a title, and a beginning, middle and end.
• Vocabulary building: One of the best ways to build a child’s vocabulary is by reading and learning new words—and seeing how those words actually function. It’s the difference between seeing a tool in a hardware store and seeing how that tool is actually put to good use.
• Sequencing the unknown: A well-written book makes us continually ask the question, “What happens next?” And the really good books make us imagine what might happen before we even turn the page.
• Practicing life lessons: Children learn to view the world through the eyes of others in books they read. They can learn how to behave, what happens at the dentist, how it feels to be bullied, how to work together, etc. And they learn by experiencing the lessons their book characters live through—a more powerful lesson than if a teacher were to announce, “Today, class, we will learn about going to the dentist.”
• Art appreciation: A well-written and illustrated book is often a beautiful thing to behold. For a small child, especially, it is the pictures that tell the story and engage him, not the printed words.
• Exploring unknown worlds: Books take children on adventures to lands they might never know about otherwise—both real and fantasy.

It’s never too early to begin to read to a child! Read to a pregnant belly, read to an infant, read to a toddler. And nobody is too old to enjoy being read to!

“So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install,
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.”
— Roald Dahl,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

© Melissa Clark Vickers 2013

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