Books

How to Raise Kids Who Love to Read

Novelists Stephen and Tabitha King raised a family of wordsmiths. Their sons Joe and Owen are both published novelists, and their daughter Naomi, a Unitarian minister, writes daily prayers.

When Joe (Hill) published his first novel Heart Shaped Box, he explained why he wanted to join his parents in the storytelling vocation: “It sounds very Victorian, but we would sit around and read aloud nightly, in the living room or on the porch. This was something we kept on doing until I was in high school, at least.”

Gathering the entire family to read aloud probably sounds quaint in an era when some families communicate mostly via text message and others can hardly find time to eat together once a week. But like the King’s our family enjoys read together as a family a few times a week. Here’s why. Reading together has tremendous benefits for both kids and parents. It can:

Create lifelong readers

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has surveyed adult reading every year since 1982. In 2012, they reported that only 54 percent of adults in the U.S. had read a book that wasn’t required for work or school during the year.

Kids may learn how to read and write in school, but schools clearly aren’t creating lifelong readers. Books compete with an ever-growing contingent of television shows, video games, and hand-held devices for attention, and the sad reality is, books are losing.

The good news? It’s easy for parents to encourage kids to read for leisure. All we have to do is read! Jim Trelease, author of The Read Aloud Handbook, calls it the “sponge-factor” of education.

“Parents can encourage reading by keeping print books in the home, reading themselves, and setting aside time daily for their children to read,” advises Common Sense Media.

Reading aloud as a family is an excellent way to foster a lifelong love for the written word.

Develop focus and listening skills in both parents and kids

“Is Google making us stupid?” Nicholas Carr asked in an Atlantic Monthly article. “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. . . . Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.”

We’re probably all a little too familiar with Carr’s sentiment.

Concentration is a powerful tool. It enables us to work efficiently, stay task-oriented, and enjoy our leisure time. But modern life encourages distraction—from the running news feeds on cable news, to the always-beckoning sirens of email, Facebook, and Twitter, to the skimming paradise that is the Internet.

Don’t be surprised if you find it hard to sit and focus on a story for even a half an hour a day. But practice makes perfect. Reading and listening to others read is a fun way to develop listening and concentration skills. Our kids, who don’t remember life before the Internet, need to develop and practice these skills even more than we do.

Build kids’ literacy skills

Reading with parents exposes kids to materials they might not be able to tackle on their own yet. It helps kids increase vocabulary, work on pronunciation, speak confidently, and gives them a chance to ask questions and build comprehension skills. Reading well is also the foundation of writing well, which might explain why all those King kids are professional writers.

Provide more reading and bonding time for families

A family reading tradition allows you to spend more of your day cuddling with the people you love the most and reading.

Fuel the imagination

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. . . . Imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution,” Albert Einstein wrote.

Unlike television or video games, reading forces us to paint pictures in our minds. Kids are naturally imaginative and creative, and they’re masters of make-believe.

But a lot of adults are so swamped with the details of daily life that we don’t have time for creativity. Nearly everything around us is the result of someone’s imagination – desks, computers, houses, skyscrapers, sewing machines, novels, clothes, etc. An active imagination is perhaps the most powerful tool we have as humans. Reading every day is a great way to exercise our imagination muscles.

Encourage relaxation and restful sleep

In just six minutes, reading can reduce stress levels by 68 percent, according to one study. It’s more relaxing than listening to music or drinking a cup of tea.

Some sleep experts warn that using any electronic device before bed can rob us of a good night’s sleep because the light from the screen halts production of sleep-producing melatonin. They recommend shutting TVs, laptops, PDAs, and cell phones off an hour before bed. Reading together by lamplight is a perfect, relaxing, sleep-friendly pre-bedtime activity.

Allow parents to reread favorites and explore new titles

It’s been fun to revisit many of my favorite children’s books with my kids and to discover new titles. Our kids explore the world through books, so we’re especially excited to read more diverse books.

Here are some popular kids’ book series to read aloud as a family:

Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and its sequels by Judy Blume
Henry Huggins or Ramona Quimby series by Beverly Cleary
The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R Tolkein
The Mysterious Benedict Society trilogy by Trenton Lee Stewart
Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull
Magic series by Edgar Eager

And here are some diverse, contemporary middle-grade books to read aloud as a family:

George by Alex Nino
Front Desk by Kelly Yang
Marcus Vega Doesn’t Speak Spanish by Pablo Cartaya
Charlie and Frog: A Mystery by Karen Kane
Ana Maria Reyes Does Not Live in a Castle by Hilda Eunice Burgos
Zoe in Wonderland by Brenda Woods
Lily and Dunkin by Donna Gephart
Eagle Song by Joseph Bruchac
Wonder by R.J. Palacio
The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher by Dana Alison Levy

Tips for creating a family reading tradition

Get comfortable. Pull out the pillows, drop into your sofa, or stretch out on your porch swing or Adirondack chairs. Make some snacks and cuddle. Family reading time shouldn’t be a chore. It should be a fun, relaxing leisure activity that everyone in the family looks forward to.
Choose fun books with engaging story lines. Don’t feel like you need to plow through the classics. If you’re struggling to find a good book, go talk to your local children’s librarians. They read a lot, and they have loads of resources to help you find the perfect book. They can help you discover new authors who write like your favorite authors, find books in a particular genre, and access lists of award-winning books.
Be dramatic – Create voices, read expressively, and practice your pacing. Show your kids that books can be even more entertaining than TV. If you need some inspiration, pick up some audio books at your local library and learn from experts at reading aloud.
Give everyone a turn reading. When kids are old enough, let them take turns running the show.
Get creative. Incorporate crafts, drama, or puppetry into what you’re reading. When I was in third grade, my dad read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey aloud to my sister and me. Those may sound like ambitious books for elementary school kids. But we followed along and loved every second of it, partly because he encouraged us to make costumes and act out scenes. For the Iliad, I played Hector and my sister played Achilles, and we spent weeks making swords and armor for the big battle scene. (I wish someone had told me how that ended before I chose to be Hector.) I still have an intimate connection with those two books. Years later, I aced the grueling exam on the Iliad in my freshman college literature class.
Entertain younger kids. One of the challenges of reading as a family is appealing to different age groups. Pick a book that engages most of the family, and provide special toys for younger kids to play with just during reading time. Babies and younger kids benefit from seeing and hearing parents and siblings having fun reading, even if the story line eludes them. (Of course, they’ll need some additional one-on-one time to read books at their own level too.)
Read together because it’s fun, not because it’s good for you. Resist the temptation to make everything into a lesson for your kids. Talk about what you read, but don’t drill them with questions.
You don’t need kids to have fun reading aloud. My husband and I read aloud to each other long before we had a baby. Some couples read books on marriage or tackle religious texts. We stuck mostly to short stories and novels. Reading aloud is an entertaining way to spend time with anyone you love.

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[Editor’s note: This is a revamped and updated version of a post originally published on July 21, 2009.]

Does your family have a reading tradition? When and what do you like to read aloud together?

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Home Grown Books

By Abby Quillen

Home Grown Books sent me their new Adventuring Set to review. My boys were thrilled when the box set of seven small paperback books arrived in the mail, and we immediately read all of them several times.

From a mom’s perspective, they are simple, beautiful books, and it’s obvious the writer, artist, and publisher put great care into every detail. Home Grown Books is a small, green company in Brooklyn started by Kyla Ryman, a mom and early reading specialist, and it’s exactly the kind of company I like to support with my dollars.

From their web site:

We are committed to keeping our eco-footprint as small as possible for your family and for the planet we share. Our entire printing process is green. We use wind power, recycled paper, and no-VOC vegetable inks to make our books. You can take comfort in knowing that our products are always safe for your family and never harmful to the environment.”

Every Home Grown Books product is crafted by skilled artisans who are active in building sustainable, diverse communites. We strive to keep our production process as community oriented as possible through working with small, local businesses in the United States and fair trade collectives abroad.

I thought the set may appeal more to two-year-old Ira than five-year-old Ezra, because they are short and the language is simple – one book has just one word per page. But Ezra is crazy about maps and mazes, and he couldn’t get enough of the map and game books. Plus, I imagine they will be perfect soon when he starts sounding out words and reading on his own. It can be challenging to find books, toys, or games that engage both boys at the same time at this point, and these did the trick.

Even better, I found them interesting and engaging. The books may be short and simple, but many of them are also almost deceptively intelligent. For instance “Submarine” challenges you to look at things from different perspectives, by showing the same scene from different creatures’ points of view, and “What Comes Next” makes you think about perspective by scanning out further and further from a scene.

I recently read Before Happiness by Shawn Achor, where he suggests that studying paintings can teach adults to look at things from different vantage points and even improve performance in a variety of fields (including medicine). Since then, I’ve been taking more time to study the illustrations in the many picture books I read to the boys. And I particularly enjoyed the unusual, whimsical watercolor paintings by Case Jernigan, as well as his artist’s notes at the end of each book. (You can see a short video featuring him and some of his art here.)

The set retails for $29.95, which seems like a fair price for a set of seven books made with such care from a responsible company. I think they’d make a great gift for a three to six year old, especially one who loves maps and mazes. Home Grown Books has three other sets on city and country, the environment, and play. If you have or know a young reader, it’s definitely worth taking a look at their catalog.

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The Most Powerful Thing in the World

By Abby Quillen

It’s March, and as I write this, it couldn’t be lovelier here. (March does have a way of surprising us, doesn’t it?) In these parts it came in with sunshine, daffodils, and birdsong.

Last week I received my copy of the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine, which includes my review of Janisse Ray’s The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food. Ray’s book is about seed saving, and it’s part memoir, part poetic manifesto, and part how-to.

Ray presents a bleak scenario about seeds. Ninety-four percent of vintage, open-pollinated seed varieties have been lost forever since the turn of the 20th Century. “Goodbye, cool seeds,” she writes. “Goodbye, history of civilization. Goodbye, food.”

Nonetheless, The Seed Underground is an upbeat read. Ray calls seeds “the most hopeful thing in the world,” and she profiles a handful of “quiet, under-the-radar revolutionaries” who are collecting and exchanging seeds in a quest to preserve our food heritage against enormous odds.

The Seed Underground inspired me to learn more about seed saving and got me excited about experimenting more in my garden this spring. I hope you’ll check out my review if you see a copy of YES! Magazine. I’ll be sure to post it here once it’s available online.

In other news, we survived our long stretch of sniffly, sneezy, fevered February days inside, helped greatly by … a pack of construction paper. Valentines. Glider planes. Homemade kites. Crowns. Cards. Envelopes. Shapes. Handcrafted books. Oh yes, we are making the most of this $5 pack of colored paper. What a fantastic reminder that kids don’t really need expensive toys to have a great time. And often the most basic supplies inspire the most creativity.

I hope you’re also enjoying some good weather, or some creative afternoons inside, or some combination of those, as we are.

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Learning Outside the Lines

By Abby Quillen

Recently I heard an interview with the herbalist Cascade Anderson Geller. She shared a story about a teacher and healer she met in the remote Choco region of Northern Ecuador, where she went to learn about the local plants and healing methods.

Geller had been suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome and had consulted scads of doctors and bodywork practitioners in the United States. She didn’t tell the healer about the carpal tunnel, but he immediately went to work on her wrists. The next morning, she woke without the nagging tingling and pain she’d been coping with for months.

Later the healer saw her consulting a book about the plants in the region and approached her. He sniffed the book and ran his hands over it, then asked if he could borrow it.

When he returned it, he said, “You know, you can’t really learn anything about the plants except from the plants themselves.”

He asked her what the book was made of. She told him, and he explained that the reason the book must help her was because it was made from trees, and the trees were speaking to her.

“It was profound,” Geller says. “But of course, I still like books, because that’s what I was trained with. Whatever we were trained with as a child, that’s what we relate to and what we go back to. … With our training in academics, it’s a stretch to trust any other source.”

Geller’s experience reminds me of my journey through pregnancy and birth several years ago.

I grew up in a house filled with books. I always loved school, and books were a huge part of my childhood and my life. My love of words and research have served me well in many areas. They helped me excel in college. They’ve helped me get jobs. They help me write for publication and understand many things about the world and about people. No one can deny that words have power and that books can change us, heal us, teach us.

But several years ago, like Geller, I realized that books also have limits. I was nearing the end of my pregnancy, and like so many expectant mothers, I’d read towers of books and endless magazine articles and websites about pregnancy and birth – about what to expect during labor, about how to handle contractions, about breathing and positions and the various “methods” of coping.

I felt like I was lost in a wilderness of techniques – Bradley, Birthing From Within, Hypnobabies, with their various colloquialisms filling my mind. Which one would help me tackle this Herculean thing I had to do sooner and sooner with each passing minute?

With just weeks left in my pregnancy, I had an epiphany. I didn’t need to cram for birth like I was taking the LSAT. I didn’t need to manage it like I was putting on a benefit concert. I just needed to show up and experience this thing, whatever it was going to be – the pain, the emotions, the exhaustion, the joy. I just had to live it.

It was such an incredible relief.

I would tell you more about the actual birth, but I don’t remember it well. I do know that the experience changed me more profoundly than any book I’ve ever read. And afterward came a truly Herculean task that would make all my preparation for birth seem absurd and hilarious – parenting. Just weeks after my son was born, as I paced the halls with him, I knew that birth would be the easiest part of our journey together.

Who would I turn to for advice? Dr. Spock? Dr. Sears? Penelope Leach? The Baby Whisperer? The Smartest Baby on the Block? How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk? Love and Logic? I read them all, and many more.

Then my son turned one, his personality started to emerge, and the parenting books began gathering dust. I’m sure it helped me in some way to read them, especially the ones that emphasize kindness, listening, compassion, warmth, and connection. Those are good reminders for all walks of life.

But parenting books can also get in the way. Recently I was talking to a writer friend and mentioned a how-to-write-fiction-book that I love, and he replied, “I can’t read any more how-to books. They just make me a worse writer, because I stop listening to myself.” I think the same can be true of parenting books.

I used to run into another mom at the park occasionally. She had a new baby and a five-year-old, and she was training to become a parenting educator. She loved to talk about parenting books. Her favorite was How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. She had charts in her bedroom, with scripts to help her remember what to say when dealing with behavior problems. If her five-year-old was acting out at the breakfast table, she would excuse herself for a moment to consult the dialogues.

She is a smart person and a loving and patient mother. But I noticed something strange about her interactions with her kids. They were stilted, scripted, and unreal. She wasn’t being herself.

That’s when I decided that being ourselves with our kids is the most important thing we can do, more important than handling every behavior issue perfectly, more important than having a baby who sleeps all night or a toddler who eats vegetables.

As my son grows older, I’m learning to trust things that you can’t learn in books, namely my instincts and my relationship with him. I try to let them guide me in knowing what to do when he’s tired, stressed out, sad, or angry. I don’t always do the right thing. I’m not always patient; I’m not always kind; and I’m not always fair. Neither is my son. So I’ve also come to trust in the amazing power of the apology.

Mostly I trust that just as it was when I was growing up, family life will be messy. It won’t fit into scripts or how-tos. Books will never capture its insanity, or its joy.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Family life is messy. Books will never capture its insanity or joy. It must be lived. #parenting” quote=”Family life is messy. Books will never capture its insanity or joy. It must be lived.” theme=”style1″]

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What do you think? Are there things we have to learn outside the lines?

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Six Books That Could Change Your Outlook on Life

By Abby Quillen

My husband and I don’t collect many things, but our house is full of books. I love to read fiction, but I tend to collect more practical books, ones that I’ll look at hundreds of times – almanacs, reference books, plant-identification guides, cookbooks, and how-to guides. My husband’s into the decidedly unpractical – first edition novels.

I spent many years working in libraries and bookstores; I loved being surrounded by books and people who love books. At the last library I worked in, I sometimes wandered the shelves in the afternoons as the sun streamed through the stained glass windows and just gazed up at all the books. Each represents months, years, or decades of brainstorming, writing, revising, editing, and proofreading; it seemed that any of them could alter your life, shift your viewpoint … change everything.

Here are a few of the non-fiction books I’ve found particularly thought-provoking over the years:

1. Material World: A Global Family Portrait by Peter Metzel and Faith DeLusia

A team of photographers traveled the world, got to know 30 different families in 30 different countries, and asked each family to pile all of their possessions in their front yards for a giant photograph. The result is a surprising and unforgettable book. It’s 16 years old now, but I still pick it up all the time, study the photographs, scan the statistics, and read about the different families, and every time I learn something new.

2. Hungry Planet by Peter Metzel and Faith DeLusia

For this volume, Metzel and DeLusia photograph a week’s worth of food bought or grown by 30 different families in 24 different countries. The photographs are accompanied by a detailed listing of the food; a discussion of how the food is raised and used; a variety of family photos; and a treasured family recipe. Like Material World, this is a book I read over and over again.

3. No Contest: the Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn

Alfie Kohn argues that Americans have a difficult time seeing how competitive our society is, because we’re like fish trying to come to terms with being in water. Kohn cites more than 100 studies showing that competition is not inevitable, that it doesn’t make people perform at their best, that it undermines self-esteem, and that it damages relationships. He also offers ways that we might restructure our lives, classrooms, and society to encourage cooperation instead of competition. It made me take a critical look at the structured competitive activities in my life and my own inner competitiveness, and I came away feeling that both were often keeping me from reaching out, learning, and connecting with others.

4. Slow is Beautiful by Cecile Andrews

Andrews envisions that people can find more fulfilling lives through the “rediscovery of caring community, unhurried leisure, and life-affirming joie de vivre.” I read this book years ago, but I still think about it often. It reminds me to slow down and think of joy, itself, as an important and worthwhile goal.

5. Your Money or Your life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez

Dominguez and Robin encourage readers to think of money as something we trade life energy for. They lay out nine steps for readers to assess their finances and decide how much energy they need to spend earning money, with the goal of achieving financial independence. My family still has a long way to go toward financial independence, but this book and others helped me to think about earning and spending money in an intentional way.

6. Between Parent and Child by Haim G. Ginott

Ginott encourages parents to look at situations from their child’s viewpoint and help him or her vocalize emotions. The book, itself, is a bit repetitive, but I found Ginott’s advice incredibly helpful in communicating with my two-year-old. Tantrums and midnight wakings go infinitely better when I remember Ginott’s advice; it helps me to get to the root of why my son’s upset, help him vocalize his emotions, and reminds me to empathize with him. Ginott’s approach almost invariably calms him down instantly. Amazingly, the book also has helped me to communicate more effectively with my husband. I’ve read heaps of books on communicating and attended various workshops on the subject at past jobs, but this book is the first I’d describe as truly helpful.

What books have you found particularly thought-provoking? Has a book ever changed your outlook on life? I can’t wait to hear your suggestions.

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