The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  The results were breathtaking. Dr. Hutton walked me through a chart displaying the team’s preliminary conclusions. Rectangles in red showed the greatest activity of statistical significance, those in pink indicated somewhat less, and those in pale and dark blue showed the degree to which brain networks had faded or appeared idle.

  We looked first at the data showing what happened when children were listening to a story without seeing anything. There was one red rectangle. “You’re getting a little bit cooking, a few networks are up,” Dr. Hutton said, “but really the one that stands out is the connection between the introspective areas, how does this relate to my life and understanding. There’s not much in the visualization yet.” This makes sense: young children have limited experience of the world and haven’t built a large library of images, feelings, or memories to draw on.

  He slid his finger over to the second column in the chart, the one showing neural activation as children looked at pictures while listening to a story.

  “Bam!” he said. “All these networks are really firing and connecting with one another.”

  You didn’t need a medical degree to see meaning in the serried stack of bright red boxes. When the children were listening to the story while looking at pictures, their brain networks were helping each other, reinforcing neural connections and strengthening their intellectual architecture, the delicate filaments of that floating sea creature.

  Dr. Hutton was still pointing to the graph. “But then if you compare that with the video, everything kind of drops off,” he said.

  We sat in silence for a moment, looking at the third portion of the graph. All the red had turned blue.

  “It’s like the brain stops doing anything,” I said.

  “Except for the visual perception,” he replied. “They’re seeing the story and watching it, but nothing else is going on in terms of these higher-order brain networks that are involved with learning. What seems to be happening is the decoupling of vision, imagery, and language. The child is seeing the story and watching it, but not integrating this with other higher-order brain networks. The brain just doesn’t have to do any work. In particular, imagination—supported by the default mode and imagery networks—falls off of a cliff.”

  “What are the implications of this?”

  “In the behavior literature, it’s clear that kids who have too much screen time can have deficits in different areas, like language, imagination, and attention,” Dr. Hutton replied, his expression grave. “The years from three to five represent a formative stage of development. Too much screen time is a setup for atrophy, or underdevelopment of these higher-order brain networks. If what we know about brain plasticity is true, it will be harder for kids who grow up with underdeveloped networks to learn, to come up with their own ideas, to imagine what’s going on in stories and connect it with their own lives, and they’ll be much more dependent on stuff being fed to them, passively. I think it’s a huge problem, and getting more complicated as screens become more portable. There is no natural barrier to use.”

  I looked back at the chart, which now seemed brutal in the comparisons it showed. “It’s like all the color was stripped away,” I said, “as if nothing is happening in their heads when they’re watching the video.”

  “The lights are on,” said Dr. Hutton, “but nobody’s home.”

  There is a crucial reality to keep in mind here. The brains that seemed to flatline when their young owners were watching a video are the same brains that appeared to sparkle when presented with images and the sound of Robert Munsch reading his picture book. The Cincinnati Children’s researchers have given this phenomenon a name: the Goldilocks effect. Like the bowls of porridge belonging to the three bears, one, audio, is “too cold” to get young children’s brain networks engaging and integrating at optimal levels. Another, animation, is “too hot.” Reading aloud from picture books seems “just right.” Children have to do a bit of work to decode what they’re hearing and seeing, which not only makes the experience engaging and fun but also helps reinforce the brain connections that will enable them to process harder and more complex stories as they get older.

  What children don’t get from one type of storytelling, in other words, they can get from another. But if the hours that children spend on screens do little or nothing to bolster their neurological development, as the research would seem to show, then it is all the more important that they spend time every day with an activity that does.

  That is where the elixir of reading aloud comes in—and the sooner, the better. Children are only young for a little while, so this is not a matter for tomorrow, or sometime, or maybe never. It is something they need without delay. Reading aloud is not just a pleasant way to enjoy a story. It is a powerful counterweight to the pull of cultural and industrial forces that with stunning rapidity are reshaping infancy and childhood.

  There’s moral urgency, too.

  * * *

  IN 2015 A British political philosopher named Adam Swift infuriated parents across the English-speaking world by suggesting that people who read aloud to their children ought to reflect on the way they are “unfairly disadvantaging” other people’s children. It was a puckish way of framing an uncomfortable truth, and, the Internet being what it is, irate correspondents deluged the University of Warwick professor with hate mail. Most of Swift’s critics didn’t take the trouble to read his original interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, so they missed his most extraordinary assertion.

  “The evidence shows,” Swift had said, “that the difference between [children] who get bedtime stories and those who don’t, the difference in their life chances, is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t.” (Emphasis mine.)

  Swift was using the phrase “bedtime stories” the way that others use “Goodnight Moon time,” as academic shorthand for myriad informal behaviors that include reading aloud, such as “the talk at table, the family culture, the parenting styles, the inculcation of attitudes and values,” as he put it.

  Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam makes a similar case, calling “Goodnight Moon time” one of the most significant indicators of a child’s academic prospects. In his book Our Kids, Putnam cites the work of Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook when he writes that “differences in parenting—especially maternal sensitivity and nurturing, but also provision of books, library visits, and the like—is the single most important factor explaining differences in school readiness between rich kids and poor kids, as measured by literacy, mathematics, and language test scores at age four.”

  Human development is cumulative. Each experience and each skill a person acquires informs the next. When it comes to reading aloud in childhood, the repercussions don’t stop when kids get to school, or even when they reach adolescence. The ripples spread outward and onward into adulthood. This is true in a positive way when children are read to, and it’s true in a lamentable one when they go without. A 2012 study found that children who enter kindergarten having had little or no “Goodnight Moon time” tend to lag other children by twelve to fourteen months in their language and prereading skills. Once at school, these children are just as likely as their peers to relish the fun and stimulation of story time, with the rhymes and humor and adventures and illustrations and all the rest of it. Yet in their innocence, they stand separated by the unforgiving math of a phenomenon called the word gap. A landmark study in the early 1990s uncovered stark differences in the number of words that children hear, or do not hear, depending on how they’re raised: a gap of thirty million words by the age of three. (A 2017 study put the number at four million words by age of four; less of a gap, perhaps, but a chasm nonetheless.)

  The implications matter—not just for individual children, but for our wider society—because early language and the cognitive and social skills associated with it are so closely linked with academic success. Recent inquiry has laid bare what might seem a counterintuitive
link between the skills that children need to do well in English and the skills they need to do well in math. These two classroom subjects might seem on the surface to have little in common, but they have crucial, hidden points of connection.

  When children struggle with math in middle school and the early high-school years, it turns out that the difficulty often lies less with numbers and numeracy than with words and reading. According to Dr. Candace Kendle, president and cofounder of Read Aloud 15 MINUTES, a national campaign to persuade parents to read daily to their children, “If you can’t do fifth-grade reading problems, which are the first really analytical math problems that you encounter, if you can’t process complex sentences, it is very hard to progress even into equation math and formula math, because you’ve missed this whole analytical process in the fifth grade.

  “So when you think of how many kids aren’t proficient or reading-ready in the fourth grade, it means that as a country we have immediately lost almost half of our potential science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce. It’s frightening.”

  As CEO of a clinical research organization, Kendle experienced firsthand the difficulty in finding qualified young graduates to conduct lab work. “It’s like forty-five percent of kids are not proficient,” she said. “They may be able to read, but they’re not proficient enough to do sophisticated analytical reading.”

  The numbers may be worse than Kendle thinks: a 2015 report found that 64 percent of US fourth-graders didn’t meet the standards for proficient reading. If a fourth-grader can’t read well today, it means that he wasn’t up to snuff last year, either, nor probably the year before, when he was in second grade. The line of data and reasoning snakes backward through the elementary-school grades, back through kindergarten and nursery school, back to a child’s earliest years. That precious early time is the starting place for academic deficits that may not become an obvious problem until high school.

  Something like 20 percent—a fifth—of American teenagers leave high school functionally illiterate, meaning that they do not read and write well enough to navigate the working world. It is an awful way to start adult life. Eighty-five percent of kids who get into trouble with the law have poor literacy skills. Seventy percent of prisoners in state and federal institutions are in the same predicament, as are 43 percent of people living in poverty.

  It’s grim stuff. In this context, reading aloud to children becomes much more than a source of emotional and intellectual nourishment—though it is—more, even, than a developmental issue. Imagine how the world would look if every child had stories read aloud every night. As the picture-book creator and read-aloud advocate Rosemary Wells says, “We could narrow the achievement gap without spending another dime.”

  * * *

  SO WHERE DO things stand? How many children are getting stories, and how many are not? We can find some answers in surveys of family reading habits that the publisher Scholastic runs every other year. In Scholastic’s 2017 reading report, 56 percent of families reported that their babies had stories read aloud to them most days. The rates were higher for three-to-five-year-olds, with 62 percent of respondents saying their kids got the experience between five and seven times a week. Those numbers have been ticking up over time, which is great.

  Flip the figures, though, and you will see a bleaker reality: 44 percent of US babies and toddlers and 38 percent of three-to-five-year-olds are not having stories read aloud to them often, or at all. In Great Britain, the numbers are actually dropping. A recent survey there found that the proportion of preschoolers getting a daily read-aloud has plummeted by almost 20 percent in the last five years, to just over half. (Nielsen Book Research, which conducted the survey, noted with alarm what appears to be an exact corresponding rise of 20 percent in the proportion of toddlers who watch videos online every day.) In short, millions of babies and young children are growing up, right now, at a disadvantage. Through no fault of their own, they are missing out on the emotional and intellectual nutrients that other kids get every day.

  In a busy, distracted age, time and attention are in short supply. Finding a spare hour or even just a quiet fifteen minutes to read out loud can seem like an insuperable task. Even if parents aren’t working long hours, or doing multiple jobs, it can be hard to summon the energy. And of course not every household conduces to moments of calm togetherness. Yet almost all parents have the chance to interact with their children at some point in the day. With a bit of ingenuity, that can become the moment to read together.

  For some families, reading at breakfast while the baby is strapped into a high chair might be the best opportunity. It might be forty minutes with a toddler on the sofa before naptime, or ten minutes while father and daughter are waiting in a doctor’s office. Reading might happen when young children are in the bath, or when everyone’s taking the subway, or even over the phone to a child far away. It might mean converting a tedious half hour in an airport departure lounge to an enriching half hour of reading, or opening a book at the table while children are having an early supper of macaroni and cheese. It might be a full luxurious hour with the whole family every evening before bed. “Any time, any place,” goes the read-aloud slogan of a literacy nonprofit in upstate New York, and that’s exactly right.

  As for what to read, books are obviously the ideal but in a pinch almost anything will do: a newspaper, a magazine, the laminated guide to emergency aircraft evacuation in the seat pocket in front of you. The British poet Roger McGough recalled semi-facetiously how his resourceful mother came up with reading materials during World War II: “Though books were scarce in those early years, mother made sure that I listened to a bedtime story every night. By the light of a burning factory or a crashed Messerschmitt she would read anything that came to hand: sauce bottle labels, the sides of cornflake packets. All tucked up warm and cozy, my favorite story was a tin of Ovaltine. How well I remember her voice even now: ‘Sprinkle two or three heaped teaspoons of . . .’”

  In that amusing recollection, you can hear the sense of enchantment, the ineffable magic in the mingling of a voice, a narrative, loving attention, and physical closeness. As the Cincinnati research suggests, and as we shall see in the chapters to come, the data show that wonderful things happen when we read aloud. Why this is so, exactly, is harder to say. At one level, it’s a simple question of inputs: of language and consolation, of mutual attention and the pleasure of stories.

  Yet there’s a powerful quality of transcendence that raises reading aloud from the quotidian to the sublime. The experience is more than the sum of its parts. We can take it to pieces to see its beautiful and fascinating components—that’s the work of this book—and yet at the same time, at its heart, we encounter a mystery. Like a biologist who has dissected the body of a songbird, we can see the pieces and how they fit together. We can identify wings and feet, beak and feathers. But we cannot see or hold the thing that made the bird so lovely to us: the grace of its flight and its warbling, fluting melody.

  So it goes with reading aloud. Here is a reader, a book, a listener. The sound of the voice exists for a moment and then it vanishes. Like birdsong, it’s gone—it is over. Yet it leaves traces of its passage in the imagination and memory of those who listen. There is incredible power in this fugitive exchange.

  The story of humankind is the story of the human voice, telling stories. In reading aloud, we draw from an ancient wellspring of happiness that predates the written word. Oral storytelling has sustained and refreshed humankind since the far-off days of the distant past. So that’s where we’re going next.

  Chapter 2

  Where It All Began

  Once Upon a Time in the Ancient World

  Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

  of that man skilled in all ways of contending,

  the wanderer, harried for years on end,

  after he plundered the stronghold

  on the proud height of Troy.

  —opening lines of Homer’s
Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald

  At the British Museum in London, down a long string of galleries filled with Greek antiquities, there is a glass case that contains a glossy black-and-ocher amphora, resembling a jug or vase. The object was made by a craftsman in Athens sometime early in the Golden Age, around 490–480 BC, and it’s decorated with a figure on either side. The first is a musician in long skirts and a checkered tunic shown in full-length profile. We seem to have caught him just as he blows into a reed instrument.

  On the other side, a man in pleated robes stands in a position of relaxed command, with one arm thrust out and resting on a tall wooden staff. The man’s mouth is open, and if you look closely, you can see a tiny arc of text springing from his lips. Translated, the words read: “Once upon a time in Tiryns . . .”

  This figure is a rhapsode, or “stitcher of songs,” and a kind of living prefiguration of the act of reading aloud. In ancient Greece, a rhapsode did not read from a book, however. He was the book. His memory held, among other works, the two great epics of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. He would pull them from the shelf and read them aloud, so to speak, when he recited them.

  The Homeric tales, loved to this day, are terrific creations. They brim with action, drama, stealth, deceit (and with manifestations of honor and dishonor so distinct from our own as to seem bizarre). The Iliad encompasses the ten years of the Trojan War, when the massed armies of the Greek kingdoms besieged the walled city of Troy. In its verses we meet sulky, ferocious Achilles, noble Prince Hector, handsome Paris, and lovely Helen. The second great Homeric tale, The Odyssey, follows Odysseus, wiliest of the Greeks, over the ten years it takes him after the conquest of Troy to reach his home island of Ithaca and his clever, long-suffering wife, Penelope. During his travels, Odysseus contends with mutinous crewmen, the erotic temptations of Circe and Calypso, and monsters such as the man-eating cyclops Polyphemus and the homicidal Sirens. At one point, Odysseus also has to wrest his men free of the addictive, obliterating pleasures of the lotus flower.