The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  “When my kids were little,” said Laura, a mother of three, “we tended to read the same picture books over and over. So it was fun when they could ‘read’ them back to me. Of course, they weren’t really reading but had memorized the text, page by page, and enjoyed being the ‘readers.’”

  A man named Jonah told me that his son, who has learning difficulties, loved to follow along in his own copy of whatever book his dad was reading. “My son has always been a very small-picture guy, focused on detail, not summary,” the father said.

  He has always lacked the sort of reasoning it takes to see the big picture: the theme, the connections, all the things that are supposed to be the purpose of literature. But he takes joy in learning and remembering the most minute details.

  When he was about eight, we began reading the Harry Potter series together at bedtime. At his prompting, we bought a British and an American edition each time. I would read the American text out loud, and he would follow carefully along in his British edition until that exciting moment every few pages when “truck” would be “lorry” for him, and he would shout it out. We went through the first few books like that.

  My kids never sit still. How am I supposed to read to them?

  This is tricky, and there’s not a short answer. Some children may seem to signal boredom and indifference when in fact they are wide awake and paying attention. That was the case with Gabe Rommely, who has autism. Other kids find it hard to focus, or dislike being confined on a lap. They may wrest themselves away from a restraining arm. These children may only be able to enjoy the reading experience if they’re given space to move. For a grown-up this can feel like rejection, which is unfortunate.

  So it’s worth remembering that there is no “correct” way to read aloud. Given the amazing benefits, we need to make accommodations for all kinds of personalities. Children are people too, as someone said. They vary in the kinds of stories they enjoy, in their desire to be held or touched, and in the amount of landscape description they can tolerate (Molly, Paris, and Violet loved every word of C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian, and sat riveted beside me through every chapter, whereas the minute we got to a windy passage about rivers or cliffs or gorges, Phoebe would trundle off to play with toys on the floor).

  A more delicate decision arises when a child seems to prefer the screen to any other company or entertainment. Families have to make their own decisions, but I side with the developmental psychologists who argue that children who spend the bulk of their time with machines aer the ones who probably most need a regular whiff of that neurochemical bouquet.

  I feel bad. We used to read together. I don’t know why we stopped. And my kids are still pretty young . . .

  Never mind. You can reclaim it! One mother, Amelia DePaola, read aloud to her daughter until the girl was eight and able to read well independently. Several years on, the girl wasn’t reading much, and the mother-daughter relationship had become fraught. There was a lot of arguing. The two of them seemed trapped in a cycle of never-ending clashes. When someone sent DePaola a newspaper article (mine, as it happens) about the joy of reading aloud, she was reminded, with a jolt, of how happy those times had been. She proposed to her daughter that they start reading again in the evenings, and to her delight, the girl agreed.

  “I ask myself, why did I stop reading aloud?” DePaola told me, when we met for coffee. “Now that I’m reading to her, she’s walking around with a book again and I can’t believe it, it’s like a miracle!”

  There was a pause. DePaola’s face crumpled, and she had to blot her eyes.

  “When I started reading to her aloud again, I felt like I could rewind time. She and I had been”—she made fists and knocked them together, to show how they had been fighting—“and I felt like, what else can I do, for us to find a happy ground and not be like this all day?

  “It really has helped us. At least we have those moments, those magical bonding moments, mother-daughter love. We’re in that story together, you know?”

  Recapturing the old magic may not always be possible. Lauri Hornik, who had stopped reading when her daughter was ten, tried again when Ruby was thirteen. Hornik described the conversation to me: “I said to her, ‘I was thinking, maybe I could start reading to you again and that would be a just nice winding-down-the-evening time for the two of us. What do you think?’ And she”—Hornik broke off, laughing—“well, she rejected it entirely.”

  The moral of the story would seem to be: Once you start, keep going. In a quaint volume from 1907, Fingerposts to Children’s Reading, Walter Taylor Field has a definitive answer to the question of when parents should stop reading aloud: “At no point whatever.”

  That’s bonkers.

  No, no! His point is that we should let children decide when to bring the experience to an end, not call it off ourselves. When children were interviewed for Scholastic’s 2016 survey of family reading habits, the vast majority said that what they liked best about being read to was that it was “a special time with their parents.” As long as they want us to keep reading, why wouldn’t we want to keep the emotional connection?

  In psychology, there’s a concept of human motivation known as self-determination theory. According to this idea, people need to satisfy three intrinsic needs to feel happy and fulfilled. Sebastian Junger summarizes it in his short and excellent book about alienation and connection, Tribe. Human beings, he writes, “need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others.”

  That passage helped me to understand why reading aloud is such a force for good in family life. The listener gets a great deal out of the experience, as we have seen, but so does the person holding the book. Sociable reading at home helps to satisfy those three intrinsic needs. The more we read aloud, the better we get at it: that’s competence. Being present in the moment and giving the people we love our full and openhearted attention: that’s authenticity. Building a shared imaginative library of stories, characters, words, and funny lines with children, spouses, or parents: that’s connection.

  No man is a hero to his valet, the English say. There is a corollary for parents that we may only rarely wish to admit: our children look up to us when they are small and do not suspect what we know to be true about ourselves; that even as we may strive to be fair and wise and conscientious, we blow it sometimes. We are flawed and fallible and not always perfect in temper. When children are approaching adolescence, they start to notice this, and it can be an uncomfortable transition for everyone involved.

  I might seem to be straying from the subject at hand, but for me it all ties together. Reading every day with children can’t guarantee perfect outcomes for any family—not in grades, not in happiness, not in relationships. But it is as close to a miracle product as we can buy, and it doesn’t cost a nickel. As a flawed, fallible person with an imperfect temper, I know that reading every night is not just the nicest thing I’ve done with my children but represents, without question, the best I have been able to give them as their mother.

  If we do what you recommend, and read to our kids every day, how soon will we see a difference? The vocabulary growth, the enhanced attention spans, all the rest. How long does it take?

  Results may vary, as disclaimers say, but I hope we can draw some conclusions from what happened in the Rashid household during the three-month trial. I suspect the outcome will impress you. I’m a true believer, and I was amazed.

  * * *

  THE BIG-SCREEN TV was off when I rang the front-door bell at the end of the summer. When Julie Rashid let me in, there was a subtle change in the atmosphere. The family was just as cheerful as when I’d visited the last time, but now there was a noticeable feeling of calm. I entered the family room, greeted Alex, and found the place strewn with books, as it had been three months before—but this time it was because the children had spent the last half hour hunting around the house to retrieve the books I’d loaned them.

  What a
change! The baby, now two, was no longer stomping around, sliding on books and crushing their spines. Having come to the door when I arrived, he trotted after me into the family room, stood for a moment in the middle of the array, and then squatted down by a board-book edition of Go, Dog. Go! and began turning its pages.

  “Wow,” I said, looking at his parents for confirmation.

  “Ethan used to chew on books,” said Julie, “but in the past two months he’s started to flip through them instead.”

  “I wonder why,” I said, and we all laughed.

  “It’s amazing how the children changed,” Julie said. “He turned from chewing to flipping,” she said, pointing to the baby,

  and with Joseph, all of a sudden vocabulary words were there! Eva just adored reading, and actually took over the reading role at one point.

  It was something we’d look forward to. We even invited an aunt to join us, we invited my mother to read—we made it an activity. We’d just decide: what time did we want to read, not if we wanted to read. Sometimes it was 9:00 a.m., sometimes it was 4:00 p.m. A lot of decisions depended on what the baby had done during the day. Did he get up at 5:30? Did he nap? So a lot of our reading-time decisions depended on Ethan.

  And we liked it during the day, it was fun—if it was a rainy day or a hot day, it was nice to settle down at two o’clock and read. And I would say we averaged forty-five minutes to an hour every time.

  Reading in the bath had been a huge success. “It was fabulous,” Julie said. “They’re contained, they’re listening. I would get through at least six books while they played. If I started skipping, because I wanted to get through, because the baby was done with the bath or something, I’d get, you know, ‘You missed that line, you have to go back!’”

  Joseph wriggled with pride on the leather sofa. On the floor, his diaper peeping out, Ethan remained engrossed in P. D. Eastman’s pictures of a dog party.

  “Joseph has memorized a number of books, like Brush of the Gods—”

  “And Finding Winnie,” Eva put in.

  “And The Bear Ate Your Sandwich,” said Julie.

  “—Demolition, and King Arthur’s Very Great Grandson—”

  “I’d say after the first month everyone had their requests,” Julie said. “We’d read a new story, but there were always at least two or three please-Mommy-could-we-read-again books.”

  Still crouched on the floor, Ethan had moved on to Good Night, Gorilla and was slowly paging through the color-saturated pictures of animals slipping one by one out of their cages and forming a silent train behind the oblivious zookeeper. Julie noticed me looking at him. “This never happened three months ago,” she said.

  Eva spoke up: “We didn’t read a lot of chapter books, but most of the picture books we read, I’d say we read about a hundred times.”

  “And he got the most out of it, he’s much better in the mornings,” said Alex, indicating Joseph, who was now absorbed in the pages of My Father’s Dragon. “It was good seeing him even at nighttime being able to sit down and focus, and listen, and ask questions.”

  Alex laughed. “It was cool, it was what we all need—especially now, there’s too much screen time in this house. And that’s something that I can’t avoid myself. I’m probably the worst at it, because I’m constantly researching on the Internet. Yeah, you’re reading but you’re still in front of the screen, which isn’t the best role model for the three of them.”

  He picked up a paperback of Mordecai Richler’s Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang and shook it for emphasis. “It’s so different, the touch and feel of books.”

  In the end, Alex had not been a big participant in the reading time, but he loved the effects. “I see a lot of benefits for both the boys,” he said, “a tremendous amount.”

  Julie broke in: “And you could tell the difference, which was amazing.”

  “I mean, his vocabulary,” Alex said, tipping his head toward Joseph again.

  “The vocabulary that came out of his mouth!” Julie agreed. “And I would remember it was from a certain story! It was amazing to me. He’d use a word properly in the context and I’d say, ‘Where did he hear that word?’ and I’d be like, ‘Oh, it was that book . . .’”

  And I thought: Bingo.

  Afterword

  In The Little Prince, a desert fox confides a secret to the small visitor from Asteroid B-612, which he in turn tells the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It has become the most famous quotation from that famous book: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

  Walking in the bleak, beautiful desert with the little prince, Saint-Exupéry is “astonished by a sudden understanding.” He tells us:

  When I was a little boy I lived in an old house, and legend told us that a treasure was buried there. To be sure, no one had ever known how to find it; perhaps no one had even looked for it. But it cast an enchantment over that house. My home was hiding a secret in the depths of its heart. . . .

  “Yes,” I said to the little prince. “The house, the stars, the desert—what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible!”

  What is essential is invisible to the eye.

  It seems to me that the promise and treasure of reading aloud is a lot like that. As spectacle, it is dull. There is a grown-up sitting with a child or two, or perhaps with a half-dozen other grown-ups at two round tables. There is a book, or a stack of them, or a sheaf of photocopied poems. There is a clock, and a bit of time. There is the human voice, reading; there are human ears, listening.

  What makes the experience beautiful, and essential—the richness of the emotional exchange, the kindling of the mind, the voyaging in imagination, the sharing of culture and pathos and humor—is invisible to the eye.

  Yet its effects can be seen. And they are lovely.

  We live in a time of immense complexity, dizzying and dazzling sophistication that would seem to make a mockery of simpler ways and things. Yet there is magic in simplicity. Flour and water and yeast make bread. Pen and paper and imagination make a portrait, a landscape, a novel. Two people and a book together make an experience of force and significance out of all proportion to the time it takes.

  When the writer and illustrator Anna Dewdney knew that brain cancer was taking her early from this world, she asked that, in lieu of a funeral or memorial service, her friends and the people who loved her books would read to a child. She knew what was essential. In a piece for the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog, she wrote: “When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language. We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful, and it is something that we are losing as a culture: by reading with a child, we are teaching that child to be human.”

  Reading aloud is a small thing, yet profound. To read to someone you love is the simplest of gifts, and one of the greatest. All that is required for a long, happy string of enchanted hours is for someone to take the trouble to make it happen.

  Surely that is something we can aspire to do. With love.

  Author’s Note

  THIS BOOK HAD its origins in an article I wrote for the Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2015, “The Great Gift of Reading Aloud,” which itself emerged from two decades of nightly reading to my children, and my dozen-plus years as the paper’s children’s book critic. A few lines from that piece and others for the WSJ survive in these pages, as do adapted excerpts from humorous family sketches that I wrote in the early 2000s.

  All my source materials are listed in the notes at the end, and in the acknowledgments I name the people who generously shared with me their time and expertise. Any infelicities of data or interpretation will be mine, not theirs. The individuals who appear in these pages are all real, and I have faithfully recorded their words (sometimes eliding or tidying for clarity), but to protect privacy I’ve changed many of their names. Lines of dialogue are as close to the truth as memory, digit
al recordings, and contemporaneous notes permit. For simplicity, I often use the word parent to describe any given adult who reads to a child and trust that all the aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, teachers, babysitters, and lovely next-door neighbors who read to children will understand that of course I mean them, too. Similarly, in the spirit of tradition (not to mention ease of reading) I use the pronoun he to describe any theoretical child.

  When a book mixes memoir and advocacy with science, history, art, and literature, as this one does, some ideas, thinkers, and events are bound to go unremarked and uncelebrated. I hope the reader will forgive these inescapable omissions. The same goes for the books that I discuss and, especially, the lists of additional suggested titles at the end. These are not clinical, impartial, or complete guides to “correct” stories for reading aloud, but personal favorites of mine and my children. Other families will prefer other books, and why not? We don’t live on Camazotz, the dark planet in A Wrinkle in Time, where everyone has to conform. We can read what appeals to us and skip what doesn’t, and that’s as it should be. The important thing is to read—out loud.

  Acknowledgments

  Isaac Newton usually gets credit for coining an expression that captures the cumulative nature of knowledge. In a 1676 letter, the father of modern physics wrote: “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.” In fact, he wasn’t the first to use the phrase. True to the metaphor, he got it by climbing onto the shoulders of earlier thinkers who had said much the same thing.

  It is encouraging to have at least one thing in common with Isaac Newton! To write this book I have, like him, clambered around on the shoulders of giants, jumping from one to another to see vistas that would never have been available to me had I stayed on the ground, locked in the single perspective of my own eyes.