Could it have been the reading? In those long weeks of dangerous fragility, as he lay in his mother’s arms, was her voice awakening his brain in ways that helped to compensate for his precipitate arrival? It’s impossible to tell in the case of one child. There’s no way to know how a boy’s intellect would have developed in the absence of his mother’s reading. No test now could show that it made a difference then, nor is there a way to separate the good her reading might have done from the healing analgesic of holding him close. We can’t prove a negative, but the research at Georgetown suggests that we can anticipate a positive.
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WHEN A NEW baby listens to an adult reading, he may be getting a therapeutic boost, but he’s not getting much, shall we say, literary benefit. The hours that the Nolans spent reading J. K. Rowling to their sons in the NICU will be consigned to that inaccessible vault that holds everyone’s first experiences. There’s no retrieving those files.
But as babies grow into toddlers and then into children and then, incredibly, into adolescents, the picture books and novels they share with their parents and siblings produce a special kind of adhesive. It builds the family, helping to create that secret society Mem Fox talked about, with its common store of words, scenes, and characters.
As members of that society, parents benefit, too. The time we spend reading to our children can feel like a return journey to destinations we visited long ago and never thought we would see again. We may find ourselves soaring, with Sinbad the Sailor, through the skies, lashed to the claw of a giant roc; or resting in the shade of the cork trees with Ferdinand the bull (and noticing Munro Leaf’s message of pacifism in a way we didn’t when we were little); or perhaps tiptoeing with Bluebeard’s bride down a dreadful corridor of locked doors (thinking, Yikes, this would make a terrifying movie).
In Bruce Handy’s book, Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature as an Adult, he writes, “One of the unexpected joys of parenthood, for me, was reencountering books from my childhood that I had loved and that, much to my relief, I found I still loved.
“Aside from the immediate pleasure of sharing great stories and art with my children,” Handy goes on, “these nightly readings gave me a chance to reconnect with books I had loved as a boy and to discover the great wealth of children’s literature published in the decades since I had moved on to more ‘mature’ works.”
As the poet William Wordsworth observed: “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.” It’s a nice encapsulation of what can happen when parents read with their children. The enchanted hour might be a father’s best opportunity to get out his paperback of Rip Van Winkle and share his love of Washington Irving. It might be a chance for parents to sell their children on the “real” William Steig, whose writing in Dominic and Abel’s Island, and the peerless Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, is so much wiser and funnier than they might guess from the “Shrek” movie franchise inspired by one of his picture books. For a mother with a fondness for nonfiction or science fiction, for nonsense verse or fairy tales, for Christian hagiography or the Bhagavad Gita, reading any of these to her children creates invisible threads that will connect them to her, and her to them, and all of them back to the texts in a way that is unique to that family.
When parents and children know the same secret-society books and comic lines, it has a wonderful way of reinforcing a sense of intimacy. I know this from experience. Not long ago I was hiking with my three younger daughters, and idly tapped my leg for a little as I walked along. “Pippi beat time with her false arm,” Flora narrated softly. It was a line we all knew from Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Goes on Board, and it made us all laugh.
When Paris was home from college recently, ravenous as usual, I had to break the news that dinner wasn’t ready. He sighed dramatically: “Things are not very good around here.” Out of context, the remark would have sounded rude, but we both knew he was quoting Russell Hoban, from the picture book A Baby Sister for Frances, so I knew to supply the next line: “No raisins for the oatmeal . . .”
Every read-aloud family has an anecdote. One woman told me how she’d loved her father’s flamboyant accents when he read to her. He would deliver Louise Fatio’s The Happy Lion, which as anyone can see is set in a pretty French town, with a John Wayne–style drawl. Another father would squeeze himself and his kids into the lower half of a set of bunk beds to approximate the feeling of being “belowdecks” when he was reading Mutiny on the Bounty. A dear family friend, a young lady named Beatrice, looked forward to her mother’s readings of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because whenever the word chocolate appeared in the text, her mother would pop a morsel of Hershey’s into her mouth. “She also had a box of Turkish delight for when the white witch offers it to Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Beatrice told me. “I loved it, but my brother and sister thought it tasted like soap.”
At our house, we’ve tended to return to particular classics in a rotation of our own peculiarity. Every two or three years for the last twenty or so we’ve reread the Chronicles of Narnia (except The Last Battle, which my children have banned on account of its being too sad) and all the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Some years ago I sobbed repeatedly through the Oscar Wilde stories “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant.” We have drifted every few years in a sampan with little Tien Pao behind Japanese lines in Meindert DeJong’s The House of Sixty Fathers, and rejoiced over the description of “a box of chocolates about a foot square by six inches deep, swathed around with violet ribbons” in Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is our literal desert island novel, the one book everyone could want if we were shipwrecked (Kidnapped, with its confusing Jacobite politics, comes around a bit less often). We have cycled through The Secret Garden and A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” and My Father’s Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett. Every few years we’ve dipped into Greek mythology via D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths and into Homer, in the last few years, through Gillian Cross’s superb children’s adaptations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, both illustrated by Neil Packer.
Of course, what thrills in one family may bomb in another. Not long ago, Flora and I decided that we really ought to try J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. Having read The Hobbit a couple of times over the years, we had only scratched at the topsoil of Middle Earth, and I felt remiss in not having dug deeper. Tolkien had meant a lot to people on my mother’s side of the family, I knew. So, spurred by a mingled sense of duty and curiosity, I got us a copy of the first book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and off we went.
I am sorry to say that it was hard for us to catch the rhythm of the story. I found it a struggle to bring life to the text. There’s one passage, quite early on, in which Tolkien describes the possessions that the old hobbit Bilbo Baggins has bequeathed to his friends and relations after he disappears with a flash of the magic ring. Those six paragraphs seemed to us to go on for six pages. I noticed that Flora was fidgeting. We kept reading, but the enterprise was losing steam when a name in the text gave me a sudden shock. The hobbit Frodo and his companions are trying to reach an important destination. To my amazement, the name was a precious and familiar one: Rivendell.
That was the name my South African grandparents had given to the tiny cottage in Ireland to which they had moved when I was a girl. On the wall of my office today hangs a framed black-and-white aerial photograph of their Rivendell, alone on a scrubby hill facing the Atlantic Ocean; the “last homely house east of the sea,” in Tolkien’s words.
Somehow my mother, who moved abroad in her late teens, had missed the Middle Earth mania that swept her household. She’d never read Tolkien herself, so she hadn’t thought to read him to me. It felt strange and sad to make the connection too late to discuss it with my grandparents. I felt guilty, too; how could I not love this book they had loved, that
, indeed, the whole world seems to love? Yet here we were, Flora and I, picking up The Fellowship of the Ring with more reluctance every night. Two hundred pages in, we neither of us felt invested in the story. At the same time, we were ashamed to abandon it. How shallow were we, that we could give up on a tale that has delighted generations? Shallow enough, I guess: we bailed.
I tell this story in the context of reading aloud being a means of building relationships—or of missing the chance. Flora and I will always be able to laugh in private about an excess of Misty Mountains. But I cannot shake the feeling that I lost a potential point of connection with my grandparents. I had spent long, happy times with them at Rivendell with no idea that the name meant anything special. Now I’d come to it too late. The spell of the book on my family, at least, was broken. Flora certainly won’t be passing it on.
(Still, I am sorry, Gran.)
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IT’S ONE THING to have missed out on a point of connection with grandparents who have passed away. It is another and sadder thing when distance creeps into current relationships. Reading together may have a lovely capacity to fortify emotional bonds, but when family members are separated—by divorce, illness, deployment, incarceration, business travel—it may be impossible for people to sit down together to share a story. Fortunately, there are ways around that. Reading aloud with technology may be less than ideal, given the risk of technoference, but reading aloud through technology is an phenomenal backup when the real thing can’t happen.
In the spring of 2017, Marine Corps commandant Robert Neller stood before an audience in Washington, DC, and talked about the domestic sacrifices of military families. “We miss sporting events, recitals, graduations,” he said of the men and women in uniform. “And while our children miss us with the big stuff, they also miss the everyday stuff: family dinners, homework, kids waking up on the weekend and jumping into the bed, and always the stories. Our kids are the ones that face the anxiety and stress that comes with their parents being deployed. I mean, we’re focused on the mission, so we’re absorbed in the mission, and that’s what your time is, but your children don’t know that. They just know that you’re not there.”
Millions of American children have a parent serving in the armed forces, and a typical deployment runs between four to eighteen months. Between 2001 and 2010, some two million service members served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Just over half were married at the time, and about 44 percent had at least one child. For the people in charge, it was important to know how families were coping with deployments. In 2016, investigators with the Rand Corporation released a report detailing the results of a three-year study that was the first to track children and teens in military families before, during, and after parental deployments. The researchers then compared those youngsters with children whose parents did not deploy.
It is a fact of military life that children face “unique stressors,” as the Rand authors put it, in the form of “periodic, extended separation from one of their parents,” which can produce “adverse child emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes.” Past research has linked parental deployments to anxiety, depression, and aggression in children, along with attention and school difficulties and conflict within families. Military kids are not alone in this, it should be said, but nonetheless, it’s what they’re up against.
“Jack, my youngest, who’s now seven, had terrible separation anxiety,” Alice Kirke told me. Her husband, Kevin, a major in the marines, had deployed to Afghanistan when Jack was eighteen months old but had spent the previous six months at a distant duty station. In other words, Jack was a year old when his father disappeared from his day-to-day life, and it would be another year before he saw his father again in person. Jack did see Kevin on a screen. Under the auspices of a military charity dedicated to keeping kids and parents connected through read-alouds, Kevin recorded himself reading a handful of picture books for his little son, as he had for his daughter in earlier years. Alice made sure that Jack watched the videos while his dad was away.
“But I was really nervous when Kevin came home,” she told me. “He had a two-week R&R period. Jack was two, and I was scared about how Jack would react to having Kevin in the house for more than just a weekend.”
What happened after dinner on the first night thrilled everyone. Alice had bathed Jack in the bathroom off the master bedroom and fitted him with a diaper. The minute she was done, she said, “he got up and ran out of the bathroom, through the bedroom, past Kevin, who was on the floor stretching, out of the bedroom, down the hallway and into his room.” Jack pulled Curious George out of his bookcase—it was the last book his father had “read” to him electronically—“then ran back to Kevin, turned around and backed into Kev’s lap, sat down, and handed him the book.”
Reading long-distance had worked. It had kept a connection between father and son. Kevin Kirke was away from his wife and children for the better part of a decade (including three of Jack’s first five years). Yet the family has experienced none of the reintegration problems catalogued in the Rand report, such as confusion, alienation, conflict, or depression. Both parents are convinced that it was the reading that protected them.
“Even though Kevin was reading on a screen, Jack wanted to be with him, physically, to have Curious George read,” Alice told me. “I always read to Jack physically, so he knew that this is how you must read when you are in the room. Reading became a safe activity, a comforting activity to do together.”
Books helped in a different way for the couple’s eleven-year-old daughter during the same deployment. A precocious reader, Madison wanted to tackle The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. “Kevin was able to read along with her, and there were a couple of chapters of the book that he recorded himself reading, and asking her questions about those things that he read, and furthering that conversation with her. So even though she didn’t need him to read aloud because she can read on her own, he still read and was able to engage in those ideas: this is what goes into military decisions and political decisions, and bring it down to her level. The book offered that more profound experience.”
The military charity that facilitated the family’s interactions, United Through Reading (UTR), was founded in 1989 by Betty Mohlenbrock, a mother whose daughter had not recognized her dad, a naval flight surgeon, when he returned from Vietnam. Mohlenbrock hoped to spare other military families the same pain, using books and reading as a kind of salve. Headquartered in San Diego, UTR has established recording locations on almost all navy ships, at most Marine Corps libraries, and in a wide network of army garrisons. Uniformed men and women can make recordings at seventy-five centers run by the United Service Organization—the military support nonprofit—as well as through roving USO caravans in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Taylor Monaco, UTR’s director of communications, told me about a small transition team on the border of Iraq and Syria. “Every time they got new books they would set up a tent and the camera equipment and the marines would shuck off their packs and sit down in this little tent, read a book and be recorded, and those DVDs were sent home via their supply chain,” she said. “Even in the middle of nowhere on this border, we were able to support that effort. They could sit down and be parents for five minutes.”
The program seems to have had a stunning effect. In 2017, UTR surveyed three thousand participants in the program. Ninety-eight percent of parents reported a decrease in their children’s anxiety about deployment; 99 percent said their kids felt more connected with the parent who was away; 97 percent of them said their own stress levels went down because of the reading; and 99 percent of the survey respondents said their children showed greater interest in reading and books.
“It’s the culture of shared stories,” Monaco told me. “That love of reading gets passed down. Time spent reading together creates a special, magical place. And it’s irreplaceable.”
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THE SAME MECHANISM that helps children and parents in military families als
o helps to sustain emotional connection for kids and parents who are kept apart by incarceration. Some 2.7 million American children have a parent in prison. Nonprofits active in Delaware, Minnesota, Illinois, California, Kentucky, Vermont, Oklahoma, Texas, New York, New Hampshire, and elsewhere (including in the UK) are making it possible for thousands of inmates to record themselves reading children’s books. In many cases, volunteers can send children not only the recording of a mother or father reading but also copies of the books.
The great-grandmother of the movement, in a manner of speaking, is Aunt Mary’s Storybook, a Christian prison ministry founded in 1993 at a women’s correctional facility in Cook County, Illinois. The group operates in sixteen jails and prisons in Illinois, and inspired the creation of similar programs in Kentucky and Texas.
“From the womb, the children know that voice, and this is just keeping them together in the best way we can until they can be together,” said Stuie Brown, a grandmother who’s been part of the outreach in Kentucky for two decades.
“These young mothers are incarcerated and something bad has happened,” she told me. “Now they are on video, they take such time to wash their hair and look as pretty as possible. They so desire for their children to see them.”
In a protocol that is typical of prison reading programs, Brown and her fellow volunteers are allowed to enter the Kentucky Correctional Institute for Women, outside Louisville, a few times every year. The volunteers have to undergo extensive training and vetting, and they are frisked and patted down before being admitted. The rules of engagement are strict, too. The volunteers and the inmates are allowed no more contact than a brief exchange at the start and finish of the recording session.
During each day-long visit, the volunteers record the readings of about twenty-five mothers. The women are allowed to introduce each book with a short remark. “This is Mommy. I chose this book and I love you and I miss you and I’ll see you soon,” Brown said, by way of example. “They’re allowed to read picture books all the way through, but with novels the moms usually just read the first chapter and encourage their children to keep going from there.”
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