When I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, a neighbor gave me a book called Let Me Hold You Longer by Karen Kingsbury.
And it was the saddest book I ever read. The book begins like this:
Long ago you came to me,
a miracle of firsts:
First smiles and teeth and baby steps,
a sunbeam on the burst.
But one day you will move away
and leave to me your past,
And I will be left thinking of
a lifetime of your lasts . . .
As happy as I am for my children, all of whom are growing up so fast before my very eyes, there’s a piece of me that wants to keep them little.
I look ahead and dream of days
that haven’t come to pass.
But as I do, I sometimes miss
today’s sweet, precious lasts . . .
I’m not crying.
You’re crying.
I’ve watched you grow and barely noticed
seasons as they pass.
f I could freeze the hands of time,
I’d hold on to your lasts.
And so while I let them choose their own bedtimes, drive away in the car, meet friends, and bring home first paychecks, I have retained this one thing, this one small thing that we usually do with very young children. I am doing this thing with my last, almost-grown child.
We READ ALOUD every night.
Why the read-aloud?
In early 2019, I read a book called The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction. By that time, my youngest daughter, 11 years old, could read very well on her own. She didn’t need to choose a book off the shelf anymore and drink a cup of milk while I read to her. That wasn’t the point.
The book lauded the benefits of reading aloud to children. Without a phone, TV, or music playing, we simply spend 30-45 minutes reading aloud every night before bed. This precious time cannot be underestimated, and I’m not saying that my daughter loves every book I choose or even loves that I call her down to read every night at 8:30, but she does it faithfully and without complaining, and I’m praying that one day she will understand that all those words we shared together were a good thing.
Reading aloud to children is like planting a seed that will grow and flourish over time. It may not bear fruit right away, but with patience and persistence, it can yield a rich harvest of knowledge, imagination, and understanding.—Meghan Cox Gurdon
I love that my kids are independent, deep thinkers. All of them tend to choose creativity over conformity, a choice that sometimes brings more pain than pleasure. We do need to let go. But we don’t have to let everything go.
“The single biggest predictor of high academic achievement is reading to children. Not flash cards, not workbooks, not fancy preschools, not blinking toys or computers, but mom or dad taking the time every day or nigh (orboth!) to sit and read them wonderful books.” (teachergoals on Instagram)
But hey—it’s all about choices, really. How do I want to spend my time? What can I do to get the biggest return on my investment? You can always make more money, but nobody has yet figured out how to make more time. Once you exchange that time for something, it is gone forever. And I know how I feel after 10 minutes of doom-scrolling versus 10 minutes of reading.
No contest.
Nobody is telling you you have to read a whole book or even read for an hour straight. You can read a couple of paragraphs and call it a day. Progress is progress, after all.
According to Meme creator, Tank Sinatra, (when he was a guest on the podcast 3Books), “reading is the number one thing you can do to have a better life.”
I don’t know about that…but WHAT IF???
HOW BOOKS SAVED DEMOCRACY
There’s a book by Molly Guptill Manning called When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II. In the early 1940s, books helped soldiers understand the cultural values they were fighting for. They faced an enemy that had banned and burned over 100 million books. Here, on the front lines, they squirreled away books from home in their pockets and backpacks and found solace, inspiration, and entertainment between the pages of beloved classics like The Great Gatsby and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
It’s hard to imagine a world where soldiers clamored for books rather than video games. Reading has fallen out of favor in recent years, as digital entertainment has increased in popularity. But if you were a civilian in the 1940s, you would have clamored to donate your gently used books to the men serving our country.
These books had enormous value because they held the ideas and ideals that made democracy worth the fight.
Hitler worked to strengthen Fascism by destroying the written word. But the American Library Association fought back. They had no intention in allowing Hitler to succeed with his war of ideas. They urged all Americans to…READ MORE.
Read It …AGAIN
I think it’s interesting how the same book can affect us differently depending on what’s happening in our own life. For example, I first read The Diary of Anne Frank as a thirteen year old, the same age Anne was when she and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam. I understood her curiosity about her changing body and the tumultuous relationship she had with her mother. While waves of grief still wash over me when I think about Anne Frank, my heart aches in a new way for Anne’s mother, Ethel. She was a highly educated Jewish woman plunged into the fathomless loneliness of the Annex. Ethel endured a complicated relationship with her daughter, and Anne’s emotional writings evolve and fluctuate throughout the months in the Annex. We don’t have Ethel’s diary, but now I wonder if silent tears poured down her face on nights when Anne rebuffed her. I imagine the connection she craved with her daughters. Did she ever hold them and tell them she wished she could give them more?
My older son often blames school for killing his love of reading—and that is a tragedy. As parents, during read-aloud time, we have a unique opportunity to share with our kids the books that shaped our own lives. We get to introduce them to the books we loved, and then pray a thousand prayers that they’ll love them too!
(Even now when I go into an antique bookstore, I drink deeply of the lignin and vanilla eeking from the pages of old books. The old Margaret Mitchell Library in the hometown where I grew up had that smell. There, I ran my fingers along the spines on Saturday mornings with my dad. I read Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, and John Steinbeck.)
Those books changed my life.
The Million Word Gap
Research suggests that “young children whose parents read them five books a day enter kindergarten having heard about 1.4 million more words than kids whose parents never read to them.”
That’s a lot of words!
Words that teach children about the world and help them think more deeply about causes that matter.
Of course, we all understand how important it is to read to kids. It’s why programs like Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library exist. Other states have followed suit. The program provides free books to children from birth to age five, with the goal of promoting early childhood literacy and fostering a love of reading.
Public libraries host summer reading programs, and all across the United States “little free libraries” have popped up in public parks, town squares, and neighborhood street corners.
Iceland has a wonderful Christmas tradition in which people give books to one another on Christmas Eve It’s called Jolabokaflod, and people spend the night reading and eating chocolate. To its credit, Iceland is the first country in the world to be recognized for having achieved "full literacy."
Congratulations, Iceland!
Iceland’s close neighbor, Finland, publishes more books per capita than any other country in the world. And Finns purchase more books per capita, too!
How I’d love to visit one of their independent bookstores!
It’s no surprise that the Bible is the most published book of all time. According to the Guiness Book of World Records, the Bible has been printed more than five billion times. Every time you open it, you’ll discover something new within its pages.
There’s lots of books, in fact, that I’ve read more than once. And every single time I learn something new.
I think my favorite thing about books are the conversations they inspire. Even fiction challenges my thinking around hot topics. Race and politics, transgender relationships, work and values, science and religion—I could go on and on—
If you’ve ever longed to write a book, I pray you’ll do it, not because it might sell millions of copies and make you very rich (although I hope it does), or because you might become famous and be asked to speak on stages all over the world (although I hope you do) but because the act of writing and the act of reading are one of the the few things that have the ability to deeply connect people who may never meet in person. A book transcends time and space. It’s why people get so upset and want to censor what we’re allowed to read. People who can think for themselves are the scariest people in the world.
Because they have the ability to change the world.
And isn’t that what we’re all doing here anyway?
My time with my children is fleeting. As much as I’d love to take them on expensive trips and give them the kind of experiences they’ll never forget, I know that the biggest bang for the buck is within the pages of a book. (This, of course, is coming from a person who loved it when the teacher said, “Please read quietly at your desk for the rest of the class.” Also the person who actually bought books at the book fair. Also the person who stayed up late at night with a flashlight under the covers reading books.) 😉
As for all those lasts, the “last time we cuddle with a book” is still many moons away. :) I don’t plan on giving that up anytime soon!
Want More Good Stuff?
Need some ideas for your own read-aloud time?
My favorite read-aloud is the Harry Potter series performed by Jim Dale on Audible.
I also love ALL the David Sedaris books, memoirs read by the author himself. Laugh-out-loud funny!