Bookish Parenting: Expectations Versus Reality
Reading to your children is wonderful, and it is something parents are told they should be doing from the day they were born. Reading to your children even when they are babies can lead to better vocabularies and literacy skills. I recently read Reading Magic by Mem Fox, a great book that goes into more detail about the benefits of reading aloud and how we can make the most of these read-aloud experiences. Being the compulsive rule-follower that I am, I’ve tried to do everything I’m ‘supposed’ to do as a parent, and especially when it comes to reading. But there are still five ways I feel like I haven’t quite succeeded.
- I didn’t read to my baby when I was pregnant with her. Apparently babies can hear in utero (at least after a certain week of pregnancy/development), and you are encouraged to read to your pregnant belly. I didn’t do this. I was busy trying to read all the books I wanted to read before the baby arrived, and figured she’d get plenty of books read to her once she entered the world.
Me: Brown bear brown bear what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me. Red bird red bird…
Tilly: *Hands me another book, makes the noise indicating she wants me to read.*
Me: Beep beep! Sheep in a jeep on a hill that’s steep. Uh oh! The jeep won’t go. Sheep leap to push the jeep…
Tilly: *Hands me another book, makes the noise indicating she wants me to read.*
Me: I’ll tell you a story of this, and I’ll tell you a story of that. I’ll tell you a story of cavernous caves and a chimp with a magic hat…
Tilly: *Hands me back the first book*
Me: (without skipping a beat) …what do you see? I see a yellow duck looking at me. Yellow duck, yellow duck, what do you see?
https://www.instagram.com/p/BsKH9HOHLDI/
Attention span? What attention span? Again, perhaps this is something that will improve as she gets older. But for now, reading is not really a quiet, contemplative activity where we sit still and listen to entire stories. Reading happens in pretty much every room in the house, where she’ll toddle up to me with a book asking me to read it, and then wander off almost as soon as I start reading. We read a lot of beginnings. (If you look closely at the Instagram picture above, you can see that I’m reading two books at once.)
So despite the best of intentions, it turns out the magic of reading aloud isn’t what I imagined, at least not for now. I’m going to keep doing it the way we have been doing it so far (read widely, read often, and sometimes read the same damn book over and over), and hope that one day we will have that enchanting bedtime reading experience, and we can read endings as well as beginnings.