The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  “Can you locate the two timepieces?” I might say. A small finger would shoot out to touch one clock on the mantelpiece and another on the rabbit’s bedside table.

  “What about the . . . andirons?”

  That was a tricky one. I remember a long pause. At last I pointed to the mysterious objects (in the fireplace, holding up the burning logs), and tried something else.

  “Who can identify the second moon?”

  Out went another finger, pointing to a tiny crescent in the picture of the cow jumping through the night sky. At the time, I had no idea that our game was anything but a bit of fun, but we had, in fact, stumbled unknowing into the foothills of a mountain of pedagogical evidence. It turns out that getting young children to interact with texts, and talking with them about the pictures and stories as you go, hugely intensifies the benefits they get from the time you spend reading together. We’ll look at this phenomenon in detail a bit later.

  Our fondness for Goodnight Moon feels very particular to our family, in the way of the things we love in our own and our children’s early years, but of course our attachment to it is just a tiny expression of its wider cultural significance. In the seven decades since the book was first published, its words and pictures have suffused childhood to such a degree that social scientists have come to use the phrase “Goodnight Moon time” to describe cozy parent-child time in the evenings—pajamas and tooth-brushing, reading out loud and tucking-in, and the general imparting of security and love before lights-out.

  And why not? Goodnight Moon is perfect for the purpose. It is soothing. It is lulling. Millions of parents have turned to it at bedtime, not least, we can assume, because it helps to settle their children’s minds into a state of placidity.

  Well, appearances can deceive. A child listening to a storybook while looking at the pictures may seem placid, but beneath that tranquility, as we shall see, lies an incredible dynamism.

  * * *

  IF YOU WERE looking for the polar opposite of the great green room, you would not go wrong in identifying a certain chilled enclosure located deep in a research building attached to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, on a hilltop in southwest Ohio. Having traveled along a gleaming hallway past an enormous cobalt wall fitted with video screens, and having passed through a series of blond wooden doors, you would come to an antechamber and two chambers divided by a plate-glass window. Let’s call it the bland beige room.

  Here there are no jolly pictures of a cow jumping over the moon, no fireplace, and no table lamp casting a pretty glow. Flashing lights and warning signs at the doorway hint at the seriousness of purpose of the place. In the first chamber, a desk stretches the width of the window, giving the technicians who operate its many monitors a good view of what’s happening on the other side. Opposite, in the second chamber, is a kind of bed that is not the comfy sort occupied by the little rabbit in Margaret Wise Brown’s story. This bed is narrow and designed so that its young occupant can be secured in position. Before a child lies down, he gets fitted with soft yellow earplugs and a set of headphones, and then is fastened in place with a strap. Once recumbent, his body is slid into the circular aperture of a resonance imaging machine, or MRI. There, on his back, surrounded by the racketing sounds of vibrating magnetic coils, he responds in the deepest portions of his brain to the sounds he hears through the headphones, and to the things his eyes see projected on a little mirror fixed above his face.

  With a view of the child’s small blanketed legs emerging from the machine, doctors—neurologists, radiologists, pediatricians, and researchers—can capture on their computers every flash of his thoughts, every evanescent streak that travels from one part of the brain to another.

  These studies at the Cincinnati Children’s Reading and Literacy Discovery Center are generating sensational insights into the effects of reading aloud on the developing brain. Among other discoveries, it seems that the thing we enthusiasts have long suspected is true: reading aloud really is a kind of magic elixir.

  * * *

  HALF A DOZEN miles away, rain was falling on the Cincinnati neighborhood of Oakley as babies, toddlers, and their caretakers pushed (and were pushed) into the warm, colorful interior of a children’s bookstore. In contrast to the antiseptic hospital chamber, the walls here were covered with signed doodles and drawings left by visiting authors. The pictures didn’t distract the rushing children, whose object was to get to a central area that had been cleared of its armchairs and sofas to accommodate a weekly combination of dance party and picture-book read-aloud.

  “Look, there she is!” one mother said, directing her daughter’s gaze to a purple-carpeted dais where manager and “story time lady” Sarah Jones was waiting with a guitar. Youthful and expressive, with her brown hair pulled back into a bun, “Miss Sarah” strummed a chord and beamed at the arriving hordes. A stunned-looking toddler in bib and striped pants stood beside her, face tipped up in guileless amazement. The child’s older sister stood a short distance away in the same pose. Elsewhere toddlers knelt, squatted on their heels, or climbed onto grown-up laps as Jones began shifting chords to signal that the event was about to begin.

  “Welcome, welcome every one,” she sang, to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Adult voices chimed in, and some of the children started to dance as Jones continued, “Now we’re here to have some fun.”

  Fun was their purpose. Mine was observation. With my youngest child having hit double digits, it had been a while since I was immersed in the world of toddlers. I wanted to refresh my understanding of the ways they respond to stories in a group setting, and this was an ideal place to do it. Like me, the owner of the bookstore, Dr. John Hutton, has been reading aloud to his children for more than two decades. A pediatrician, he’s also an assistant professor at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and member of a triumvirate there using functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the effects of reading aloud on children’s cognitive development. The scene spread out before us was like a year’s worth of esoteric fMRI research brought to jumping, shouting life.

  Still strumming her guitar, Jones said, “All right, friends! I’m so happy to see all of you here this morning!” She gave the strings a flourish, put down the instrument, and picked up a small stack of books. Leaning forward, she told the children that she was going to read them stories about sleepy farm animals, sleepy babies, and a sleepy solar system.

  “Can you guess our theme today?” she asked.

  This question brought a din of cries and yelps, all cheerful, none very coherent. The room by this time had just shy of thirty small children, and about the same number of parents, grandparents, and babysitters.

  “First, we’re going to start with a book called Sleepy Solar System,” Jones said, displaying a front cover that showed three plump planets under a purple coverlet.

  “Nighty-night!” someone shouted. A grandmother jogged a baby on her lap. One boy was still dancing. A few other children continued to churn around, but almost every face was directed toward the reader.

  “‘It’s been a long, busy day in the starry Milky Way,’” Jones read aloud, stretching out the vowels. “‘Sleepy, setting Sun calls out, “Bedtime, everyone.”’” The whole scene, with children entranced, parents involved, rhyming songs, and picture-book stories, was a perfect feedback loop of emotional stimuli and literary nurturing.

  Jones broke away from the story for a moment.

  “Can you guys yawn along with the sleepy planets?”

  “Yeearrrgh!” yawned all the children.

  Dr. Hutton leaned over to me and said, sotto voce: “There are some days when Sarah is sick, or can’t come in, and some other poor soul has to try to entertain these kids. We’ve had tantrums: ‘I want Miss Sarah!’”

  I laughed and turned back to watch the fray. In the book, the sleepy planets had settled down to rest in their nightcaps and curlers.

  “Yay!” the audience cried, applauding.

  * * *
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  A HUMAN BRAIN was floating on the computer screen when I went to see Dr. Hutton later in his office at the hospital. It was the image of a child’s cerebral white matter, the nerve fibers of the brain that are sheathed in a protective material called myelin. The object on the screen was not shown as white, despite its name, but was rich with color. It resembled a glowing deepwater sea creature, a tangle of sensitive, delicate threads in psychedelic shades of azure, crimson, and lime green, all suspended in inky nothingness.

  “This is like a wiring diagram,” Dr. Hutton explained with a distinct lack of romance, pointing to the places where the threads crossed and converged. “Early experiences reinforce the connections and make the wiring stronger.

  “Most of these things are going to develop normally, because they are genetically programmed. But the strength of the connections, the myelination, the wrapping of the nerves, is very responsive to stimulation. There’s a maxim in neuroscience: ‘Nerves that fire together, wire together.’”

  With a click, Dr. Hutton removed the sea creature and pulled up gray slices of brains—it was less gory than it sounds—as seen from underneath. Deep in the core of each image I could see a small splash of scarlet, shaped something like a chili pepper. The red splashes varied in size from brain to brain. These images came from an exciting study that Dr. Hutton and his colleagues conducted a couple of years ago. They put a cohort of children between the ages of three and five through the scanner, one by one. (This is a lengthy process that starts with the patient preparation of each child to ensure that he will stay motionless inside the machine and can take up to forty-five minutes. “It’s play-based,” Dr. Hutton told me. “We say things like, ‘You’re going into a rocket ship now!’ Or, ‘You’ve got to sit really still and we’re going to play the statue game!’”) The researchers wanted to see what happened in the brains of these children when they heard age-appropriate stories read aloud. Which areas would be engaged? Would there be a difference in the neural response of children who had lots of experience being read to, compared with those who didn’t?

  The team discovered that the brains of young children whose parents read aloud to them often, and who had access to more children’s books, had more robust activation than their peers. In other words, the brains of well-read-to preschoolers seemed more agile and receptive to narrative, suggesting that they had a greater capacity to process more of what they were hearing, and at faster speeds. This was the first study to show that the early home reading environment—which is to say, a child’s access to books and frequency of shared reading with a grown-up—makes a quantifiable difference in brain function, and therefore, it stands to reason, in brain development. The researchers believe that because well-read-to children have greater experience with language and imagination during story time, they will enjoy a cognitive advantage over peers who have not. (A preschool teacher told me that she and her coworkers can always spot the well-read-to children: “They come in the morning and many of them will go straight to the books and say, ‘Will you read me this book?’ and they’re like, looking for a lap,” she said, at which point she stood up and waggled her bottom like a three-year-old trying to find a seat.)

  The scarlet chili peppers that I saw in the pictures of these children’s brains, indicating greater activation, were localized to the left posterior hemisphere of the brain, in a realm known as the parietal-temporal-occipital association cortex. This part of the brain is involved with processing multisensory information, in particular visual and auditory. This was the area that Dr. Hutton and his colleagues found to be more active in children who’d been read to the most. Strikingly, this particular study involved stories without pictures that children listened to through headphones, which suggested to the clinicians that activation in these visual processing areas represents imagination. Children with greater experience of being read to were, it seemed, better at summoning images in their mind’s eye than young children who hadn’t been exposed to lots of books and reading aloud.

  Dr. Hutton’s group has since published two additional first-of-their-kind fMRI-based papers involving preschoolers and the effects of reading aloud. One of them found that children who express more interest in listening to stories have greater activation in their cerebellum, the part of the brain that helps orchestrate skill refinement.

  Well, you might ask, what of it? It’s logical that a brain accustomed to certain stimuli is going to develop a greater capacity to handle those stimuli. Why does it matter? What difference does it make?

  It matters because children’s early years are a time of such intense formation. The young brain is plastic, adaptable, and growing like mad. In the first twelve months, a baby’s brain doubles in size. By a child’s third birthday, his brain has completed 85 percent of all the growth it will have. The sensitive period when synapses are forming for language and many other higher cognitive functions peaks when a child is two. By the end of the first five years, a child has passed through all the most rapid stages of development involving language, emotional control, vision, hearing, and habitual ways of responding. Early experiences and the firing and wiring of neurons create the architecture of a small child’s mind, laying the pathways for future thought and reasoning.

  Reading storybooks turns out to be an extraordinarily efficient and productive way to cause messages to zing from one part of the brain to another, creating and reinforcing those important neural connections. Reading aloud is so constructive in this regard, in fact, that in 2014 the American Academy of Pediatrics advised its 62,000 member doctors to recommend daily reading aloud to the parents and children they see in their medical practices. “Reading regularly with young children,” the group’s policy paper read, “stimulates optimal patterns of brain development, and strengthens parent-child relationships at a critical time in child development, which, in turn, builds language, literacy, and social-emotional skills that last a lifetime.”

  Optimal patterns of brain development! Stronger parent-child relationships! Skills that last a lifetime! If reading aloud were a pill, every child in the country would get a prescription.

  Instead, we’re giving them screens.

  * * *

  IT IS NO longer possible to think about children and their welfare without considering the effects of technology. Today, screens have entered even the most private and once-protected spheres of childhood. The consequences, both good and bad, are manifesting at every economic level and in every kind of family. According to one recent study, almost half of young children now have an electronic tablet or device of their own. Children ages eight and under are spending an average of nearly two and a half hours every day on screens. Averages do not, of course, reflect individual lives. Lots of very young children are spending far more time online than that. Older children are even more absorbed, with teens spending an average of six and a half hours a day using screen media, with more than a quarter of them on screens for eight or more hours—most of their nonschool waking time. And this is all before virtual reality goes mainstream.

  When a child is watching a video story on a laptop or tablet, the act may appear indistinguishable from his looking at a story in a picture book while someone reads it to him. In each case, his eyes are taking in a series of illustrations, his ears are hearing the voice of a narrator, and his brain is making sense of what he sees and hears. But there is a powerful difference. These two means of receiving a story are in fact radically dissimilar, and given the ubiquity of screens and the amount of time kids spend on them, they diverge in ways that are profound, eloquent, and worrying.

  Another first-of-its-kind study that Dr. Hutton and his colleagues conducted in 2017 suggests how and why this is the case. The researchers’ goal this time was to expand their range of comparison by looking at brain activity when young children were listening to stories, when they were hearing stories while looking at illustrations—the classic picture-book experience—and finally when the same children were watching animated entertainment. We�
�ll talk later about the value of listening on its own, without pictures, as you or I might do with an audiobook, but for the moment I’d ask you to consider the contrast between a storybook and a story video.

  This time, the Cincinnati Children’s team put twenty-eight children between the ages of three and five through the scanner, one by one, each time conducting a three-stage investigation of their brain activity. Each stage lasted for five minutes. To establish a baseline, the researchers collected images of what was happening when children were resting in the scanner looking up at the projection of a smiley-face emoji. Next, the image was removed and the experiment began. One by one, separated by intervals of rest, the preschoolers lay in the dark listening through headphones to stories with varying levels of visual stimulus. First came The Sand Castle Contest by Robert Munsch, read by the author. The children heard the story, but they saw no pictures. For stage two, the young subjects listened to another Munsch story, Andrew’s Loose Tooth, also read by the author and accompanied this time by illustrations depicting scenes from the story. In the final phase, the children watched and listened to an animated version of Munsch’s The Fire Station.

  The objective was to see what happened in each circumstance in specific brain networks that support early literacy skills. The clinicians were looking at five areas: the cerebellum, the coral-shaped place at the base of the skull that is believed to support skill refinement; the default mode network, which is involved with internally directed processes such as introspection, creativity, and self-awareness; the visual imagery network, which involves higher-order visual and memory areas and is the brain’s means of seeing pictures in the mind’s eye; the semantic network, which is how the brain extracts the meaning of language; and the visual perception network, which supports the processing of visual stimuli. The clinicians measured the activation of these brain networks during each type of story, paying particular attention to how connected and synchronized they were.