The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  We know, Steiner-Adair writes, that “babies are often distressed when they look to their parent for a reassuring connection and discover the parent is distracted or uninterested. Studies show that they are especially perturbed by a mother’s ‘flat’ or emotionless expression, something we might once have associated with a depressive caregiver but which now is eerily similar to the expressionless face we adopt when we stare down to text, stare away as we talk on our phones, or stare into a screen as we go online.”

  As parents in the distracted digital age, we’re in an awkward spot. Like the fox in William Steig’s picture book The Amazing Bone, we may be justified in feeling a little defensive: “Why should I be ashamed? I can’t help being the way I am. I didn’t make the world.”

  That makes sense to Dr. Perri Klass, who teaches journalism at New York University, practices pediatrics at Bellevue Hospital, and, as national medical director for the charity Reach Out and Read, helped to write the American Academy of Pediatrics report that encouraged pediatricians to recommend reading aloud. She’s sympathetic to the tech predicament parents are in and hopeful that we can find an equilibrium. “All very successful technologies end up being introduced as uncontrolled experiments,” she told me,

  and they change our lives and we look back and there’s always a certain amount of panic about them.

  These technological changes, everybody walking around with the phones, have potential to push people in all kinds of directions but I don’t believe it’s evil. The dangers for children between birth and the age of three is that all learning happens in a social context. All learning happens through relationships, and the younger you are the truer this is.

  The biggest worry, I think, with the technology is that it makes it easier and easier with younger and younger children to replace that interaction time, which is absolutely critical for all the different kinds of child development, for language, for social-emotional, the development of empathy, and learning how to read people’s emotions and faces, and the development of theory of mind—all the different domains come together.

  Theory of mind is the understanding that other people have thoughts, feelings, and motives just as we do, but that their thoughts, feelings, and motives may not be the same as our own. Children don’t start out with a grasp of this; it’s something they learn. Most will progress in a natural way from the sweet obliviousness of believing themselves the center of the galaxy (although, let’s be honest, we all know adults who haven’t gotten past this yet) to the gradual understanding, at about the age of two, that other people also have wants and needs. This perception deepens and becomes more sophisticated over time, and by the age of five, children tend to be able to understand that their actions may cause others to experience emotions. Theory of mind, empathy, being able to pick up on facial and tonal cues—all these qualities help children to become socially competent.

  The personalities and conflicts that children encounter in storybooks can intensify their emotional awareness with amazing rapidity. A 2015 program in the north of England sent trained readers into nurseries that cared for two-year-olds in impoverished areas in and around the city of Liverpool. Over the course of just fifteen weeks, teachers and project workers involved in the scheme reported improvements in the children’s language abilities and increased responsiveness to books and storytelling. They also saw, among the parents of these kids, greater enthusiasm and confidence about shared reading.

  In the toddlers, contact with the characters in picture books seemed to stir new depths of empathy. As one observer reported: “I was reading Solomon Crocodile [by Catherine Rayner] and as the story goes, Solomon annoys all the animals in the river so that they shout ‘Go away!’ at him. When I got to the page with the hippo and his wide-open mouth, as he roars ‘GO AWAY’ at Solomon, two-year-old Finn made a pushing action with his hands towards the book and shouted, ‘Go away, go away!’ at the hippo.” Little Finn had taken Solomon Crocodile’s side and, in a surge of fellow feeling, wanted to defend him against the rude and shouting hippo.

  As Dilys Evans writes in Show and Tell, a book about illustration for young readers, picture books “are often the first place children discover poetry and art, honor and loyalty, right and wrong, sadness and hope.” And it’s true: a child sitting on a lap at home or in the friendly security of circle time at school or at the library has a chance to witness the emotions of others and experiment with his own without consequence. He can try out big ideas, find consolation for his secret worries, and risk a glimpse at what scares him.

  I had a dramatic demonstration of this with my daughter Flora when she was four. She was absolutely terrified by Donna Diamond’s wordless picture book The Shadow, yet at the same time found it utterly mesmerizing. Whenever she brought the book to me, she would hold it away from her body with her fingertips, as if it were a great flat spider.

  “Why do you want me to read it, if you’re not even going to look at the pictures?” I asked her as we settled on the sofa together. Flora’s response was to screw her eyes shut and press her face into my shoulder. Her body was rigid with dread.

  “Plus,” I protested, “there aren’t any words. You need to look to see the story.” Flora said something I couldn’t hear, and with a desperate hand gestured for me to read the thing, please, for pity’s sake, and get it over with.

  So I opened the front cover and told her about the hyperrealistic, dreamlike illustrations, which show a little girl coming home in the late afternoon. As she goes upstairs to her room, we see that she casts a shadow with a mind of its own. The shadow skulks and leers behind the child until, with a shock, she notices. Dropping her pencil and paper, she takes refuge behind a chair. The hunched shadow gets bigger, looming over the girl with horrid crooked fingers and flaming orange jack-o’-lantern eyes. Just as the shadow is about to get her, we see the child collect herself. Arms crossed, she stares it down. Instantly the shadow shrinks and cringes. The child points an indignant finger, and though there’s no text to say so, it is clear that she’s shouting something along the lines of “You stop scaring me, right now!” When the girl turns on a light, the shadow disappears. “Ta-da!” she seems to say, raising her arms in triumph. All terrors banished, she shows off her pencil drawings to her dolls. It’s only at the very end, when the girl is fast asleep with her dolls held close, that we see . . . under her bed . . .

  “Don’t say it!” cried Flora, still hiding. “It’s too scary!”

  There was a pause as she mastered herself. Then:

  “Please will you read it again?”

  * * *

  IN 2011 WRITER Adam Mansbach gave profane voice to frustrated parents everywhere with his not-for-the-kiddies picture book, Go the F**k to Sleep. Illustrated by Richard Cortes and written in the style of a gentle bedtime story, the book gave a generation of mothers and fathers gleeful permission to admit their exasperation with the nightly routine.

  The wind whispers soft through the grass, hon. / The field mice, they make not a peep. / It’s been thirty-eight minutes already. / Jesus Christ, what the f**k? Go to sleep.

  The book got an ecstatic reception. People found it hilarious and naughty. What looked like an attack on the final redoubt of cultural innocence, the tender bedtime ritual, was of course also a sly critique of ineffectual modern parenting. The narrator is doing what he’s “supposed” to do, reading the kid a story, but the kid isn’t buying it. He can tell that the narrator’s heart isn’t in it.

  There is no question that some children are turbulent and hard to cajole. But persisting with “Goodnight Moon time,” night after night, has cumulative benefits even beyond ultimately making it possible for parents to have a little time alone, like the exhausted, thwarted couple in Go the F**k to Sleep. Setting aside a substantial wedge of time before bed to read and talk helps to give shape and order to chaotic days. If children have been using screens it’s especially important to create a calm hiatus between wakefulness and slumber. Their eyes and brains need t
ime to power down. “Repetition and structure help children feel safe,” advises psychiatrist Marie Hartwell-Walker; “bedtime declares that the day is over.” In establishing a loving, predictable routine, she adds, “You are building your children’s confidence in their world.”

  Routine is a gift for parents, especially first-timers who face a staggering learning curve. Proceeding from one preordained step to the next at bedtime according to a practical template—feeding, bathing, diapering, reading aloud—allows new parents to adapt to the shocking change in their circumstances. One great advantage of a newborn is that he has no idea of the uproar he is causing. While snoozing and feeding and snoozing and feeding, he gives his family members time to get adjusted to their new roles as his support staff (for a hilarious portrait of this plunge in status, see His Royal Highness, King Baby, by Sally Lloyd-Jones).

  First-time adoptive parents may not get a grace period. If the child is already a few years old, they have to adapt without delay. Such was the case with Walter Olson and Steve Pippin when they brought their adopted son home to New York from an orphanage in Russia. Tim was three and spoke only Russian. It was a matter of urgency to get him settled, start him off with English, and forge those all-important emotional bonds. To achieve all three of these goals, Olson and Pippin put books and stories at the heart of an elaborate evening ritual.

  “The first couple of weeks, bedtime was just terrible. He didn’t want to go to bed at all, he fought it tooth and nail,” Pippin told me when I visited the family in their current home in a small Maryland town. Sunshine filtered through chintz in the front windows, which admitted onto a narrow roadway that was once the gateway to the West.

  “In the orphanage, it was like a barracks,” Olson said, “and each kid’s bed would be a few inches from the next bed over. There was one attendant who wanted to read her book, so was not interested in interactions with the kids.”

  When Tim arrived in the United States, his adoptive parents bombarded him with language. At first Olson and Pippin read aloud from Russian nursery books, having learned enough Russian to pronounce the words. Soon they switched to English. “Within two months, he was speaking half-English and half-Russian, and within six months he was really down to a countable number of Russian words, all the rest being English,” Olson said.

  “There were hold-on words,” Pippin put in, “like malaka for milk, that stayed for months afterward. Kasha for cereal stayed for a long time, baka for dog stayed a long time, but there was a pattern where it would disappear from the vocabulary for a couple of days, and I don’t know if that was just by accident or there was some kind of change going on, and then it would reappear in English and the Russian would be more or less forgotten.”

  The men devoted a solid hour to reading every night. Tim loved to hear the old-fashioned animal stories of Thornton Burgess, the early-twentieth-century newspaper columnist who wrote Old Mother West Wind and other books about characters with quaint names: Reddy Fox, Jerry Muskrat, and Jimmy Skunk. Tim’s choice of books changed with time, but the nightly reading went on until he was about thirteen, Pippin said, “because he just liked it so much. It was a quiet time, it was communicating. You know, all of our bedtime rituals were basically ways of saying, ‘Everything is fine, everything is the same as it was last night,’ and the reading just put the cap on it.”

  As a toddler, Tim had been dropped into a new household in a foreign country with a strange language. He started learning English three years later than the American children in his classes at school. Yet soon he tested ahead of his peers in vocabulary. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Hearing stories read for an hour each night had given Tim invaluable exposure to language forms and the pronunciation of English words. What worked for him, coming from Russia, can work for any child, from anywhere. Tim’s experience validates the parental sacrifice that’s required to create a regular bedtime ritual. It also demonstrates the power of an environment filled with language. Surround young children with lots of lovely words, it seems, and all manner of good things happen.

  Chapter 5

  The Rich Rewards of a Vast Vocabulary

  Babar is riding happily on his mother’s back when a wicked hunter, hidden behind some bushes, shoots at them. The hunter has killed Babar’s mother! The monkey hides, the birds fly away, Babar cries.

  —Jean de Brunhoff, The Story of Babar

  The most traumatic scene in a classic picture book had its origins in the sweet tranquility of bedtime. In 1930, in a house outside Paris, a young mother named Cécile de Brunhoff made up a story while she was putting her two little sons to bed. The boys were entranced by her impromptu tale of an elephant calf who is orphaned by “a wicked hunter.” They urged their father, who was an artist, to expand and illustrate their mother’s tale. Jean de Brunhoff obliged them. He put pencil to paper, experimented with shapes and composition, and sketched out scenes. Then, using ink, watercolor, and cursive lettering, he turned his wife’s story into a picture book that would become a global cultural phenomenon: L’Histoire de Babar, le petit eléphant.

  Published a year later, the book we know in English as The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant was followed by six sequels by Jean de Brunhoff, and a whopping forty-five or so more by his son Laurent, who was one of the little listeners on the night Cécile made up the original story.

  In recent years, a certain amount of low-level controversy has attached to the Babar series. Some critics object to the first book’s colonial aesthetic, with its implication that a wild elephant would prefer to be civilized, to wear a hat and suit, and to stand on his hind legs like a Frenchman. In one of the sequels, The Travels of Babar, de Brunhoff’s depiction of cannibals strikes the contemporary eye as retrograde to the point of appalling. Then there is the famous shooting of Babar’s mother, a scene so distressing that some children hide until the page is turned. The first Babar book is a bit weird, in truth, but there is no disputing its popularity. Translated into seventeen languages, the little elephant’s adventures have sold many millions of copies.

  Whatever you may think of the storytelling, there is also no denying the suggestive brilliance of de Brunhoff’s illustrations. His pictures in The Story of Babar are crammed with detail and specificity, with action and objects and creatures. Every page brims with possibilities for conversation, for quizzes and questions, and for the chatty, dialogic give-and-take that can add so much to a child’s bank of knowledge.

  Consider the first page: “In the great forest a little elephant is born.” There is Babar’s mother, rocking her son to sleep in a hammock with the prehensile tip of her trunk. Mother and son are surrounded by green and yellow grasses dotted with red flowers. Tropical trees stand vigil, and two birds and a scarlet butterfly flit nearby. A single undulating line above the horizon marks a distant range of mountains. It is not a complicated picture, and yet it contains an amazing number of elements: a mother, a baby, a hammock, a trunk, a tusk, a butterfly, flowers, palm trees, birds, mountains, and the colors green, red, gray, and yellow.

  For the baby or toddler on a parent’s lap, any one of these objects might be new and captivating. (“Ah, so that is a “tusk,” and, oh, those are “palm trees”!) Babar is full of depictions of commonplace things, such as cars and dogs and trees and birds. Yet it also abounds with illustrations of memorable oddities. Looking through the pictures, children will make the acquaintance, in a manner of speaking, with an opera house, a chandelier, a department-store floorwalker (wearing pince-nez!), shoes with spats, a pelican, a rhinoceros—even our old friend the andiron, peeking out from behind Babar’s dapper form as he spins an after-dinner tale of his life “in the great forest” before he came to live in town with the wealthy and benevolent Old Lady.

  Midway through the book, two pages show Babar motoring through the countryside in his shiny red convertible. The picture is a riot of dialogic possibility: in the distance, a tugboat puffs along with barge in tow, an angler reels in a fish on his line, a train chuffs ov
er the arches of a distant bridge. There are cows, furrowed fields, blossoming trees, dragonflies and birds and insects and barnyard fowl; there’s a hot air balloon and a church spire and a riverside restaurant and an airplane (with a propeller) overhead; there’s a girl with her hair in a long single braid down her back, a goat with a bell hanging from a green collar around its neck, and a mile marker that resembles a small white tombstone beside the road. All this, in just two pages.

  Elsewhere, more tantalizing tableaux: the Old Lady serves Babar soup from a tureen at her circular dining table. The two friends do their morning calisthenics (vocab word!), which Merle S. Haas, who turned de Brunhoff’s French into English, charmingly translates as “setting-up exercises.” Babar and his cousins Arthur and Celeste eat pretty pink cakes at a pastry shop, and the King of the Elephants tastes a bad mushroom, which causes him to turn green and die, an event that opens Babar’s path to the throne. There is a merry dance after Babar marries Celeste, the couple’s coronation as the new king and queen, and a final scene of the newlyweds beneath a serene and starry sky.

  Everything I have just described appears in the pictures. Add the text, and the listening child will hear all sorts of other interesting and unusual words: fond, satisfied, elegant, learned (as an adjective), becoming (ditto), progress, marabou bird, scold, promises, calamity, funeral, quavering, proposal, splendid, dromedary, au revoir, honeymoon, and, “a gorgeous yellow balloon.”

  It takes just under seven minutes to read the forty-six pages of The Story of Babar out loud, if you don’t linger for quizzes. In that time, a child will have vicarious emotional experiences. He will see tenderness and catastrophe, fear and comfort, pride and anger, death, marriage, sorrow, and joy. Such a profusion of image and word and concept, and if you’ve set aside an hour for reading you still have fifty-three minutes left. Think of the language riches a child will acquire if this happens every day, starting when he is tiny. His mind will become a hoard of glimmering, glinting, gem-studded things.