The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  * * *

  THREE MONTHS LATER. . . .

  No, wait.

  Let’s leave the Rashid family to get on with their experiment for the moment. In the meantime, we can talk about how to create an enchanted hour, or even just a magical twenty minutes, at home.

  Where do we start?

  Start small. Start where you are. Start today! There is no need be heroic and commit to an endless future of reading aloud, or to a three-month trial period, or even to a full sixty minutes. Just begin. Pick up a book, or a magazine, or a cereal box, and try reading it out loud to someone you love.

  No, really, what should I do first?

  Okay, fine. First, power down your technology. Silence your phones and, if you can, put them far enough away that you won’t see them or hear if they buzz. Give everyone the psychic space to engage with the words and story, and with each other. Devices mess with our ability to be present in the moment, as we know; they also disrupt the development of joint attention and emotional connectedness.

  A 2017 study, “Learning on Hold,” gives an unsettling glimpse of the degree to which cell phones, in particular, tend to sidetrack parent-child interactions. Moms participating in the study were given the task of teaching their two-year-old children two words, one at a time. The women all had their cell phones with them, and the clinicians made a point of interrupting half of the teaching sessions with a phone call.

  “It rings. The mother picks it up. And she’s been engaged with the kid, and it’s like she’s breaking the set with the kid,” said the University of Delaware’s Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, a coinvestigator on the study. “And you know how you are when you answer the phone, your face goes flat? So her face goes flat, she looks away from the kid, and then the kid doesn’t want to come back. Even though she gets off the phone and she repeats and repeats, and tries and tries, and the kid won’t learn the word.” When the mothers and children were interrupted, the children did not learn the words. When the pairs were left to themselves, without the interrupting call, the toddlers learned the new words.

  For reading aloud to work its full magic, it’s best not to have competition from technology. So, yes, please, turn it off.

  Are you saying I can’t read aloud to my children from my tablet?

  You can, but it’s problematic. As with cell phones, tablets represent whole worlds of potential interruption, investigation, and short-term stimulus. You know that diversion is just a finger swipe away, and so does your child. Distraction is simmering there, just under the surface of the e-book, and it can mitigate against full immersion in the reading experience.

  “Even with technology in our lives,” as Dr. Perri Klass points out, “there has to be some time when we put it aside. And the more stressed the family is, or the harder your child is, which is a very real issue, the greater the temptation to take refuge in the screens.”

  Reading from a tablet presents no difficulty in a setting where one adult is reading to another, but when there are children involved—assuming that you want to maximize the social, emotional, and language benefits—it’s best to skip the screen. Just go with a book.

  What if he hasn’t even been born?

  Wonderful! Then you have the chance to get comfortable with reading aloud and get yourself into the habit before he arrives. The sound of your voice may have a salutary effect on his brain before birth—though as Georgetown Hospital’s Dr. Abubakar says, we don’t know exactly what influence it may have. Once he has arrived, though, we know that his brain networks will activate when you start talking.

  What if my “baby” is already in the fourth grade? Or sixth? Is it too late?

  Never. While it’s probably too late to read baby books together, it is not too late to take baby steps toward a goal. Find ten minutes on either side of dinner, say, or at bedtime, or at any point in the day when you and your child will naturally be in each other’s company. Again, start small. You could try reading a poem, or a news story, or maybe something your child has been assigned (or has already read) at school. Do the same thing at roughly the same time for ten minutes the next day, and build from there. If you never progress beyond ten minutes, so be it. But you’ll still have built a lovely point of engagement into each day. Even worldly sixth-graders like to have warm, positive attention from their parents.

  “There are few things that feel to a person like they are more cherished or taken care of,” says LeVar Burton, the longtime host of the PBS show Reading Rainbow. “I mean, there’s being fed, and then there’s someone reading to you.”

  That’s beautiful. But I am not LeVar Burton. I don’t have the voice of a trained actor. How am I going to get my kids to pay attention?

  Try to enjoy yourself. The more you enter into the reading, the more persuasive your example. It helps to have a great book, of course (you’ll find lots of them listed at the end), but if I’ve convinced you of anything, I hope it’s that reading aloud is a complex and bountiful experience. The story you select is only one of the ingredients. You are another, and then there’s your child, with his mind lit up and his senses engaged in listening, and perhaps looking at the illustrations. (Or he may be across the room playing with Lego or drawing with markers while you read—that’s fine, too.)

  Entering into storytelling mode has a mesmeric power of its own. The sight of a parent or teacher sitting down with a book attracts young children like iron filings to a magnet. I once saw the same thing happen with a much older crowd in the improbable, fever-dream setting of a Florida theme park. Late-afternoon throngs were moving through the faux streets of Diagon Alley, which is part of the Harry Potter–themed portions of the Universal Studios enclosure, when a woman stepped out onto a low landing and called out, “Gather ’round!” The storyteller was wearing drab robes, so there was a small element of pageantry, but what was really striking was the speed with which people responded to her appeal. In a nanosecond, she had drawn a large and attentive audience. For the next twenty minutes, no one moved while the woman and several other performers recounted J. K. Rowling’s story “The Three Brothers.” When the final applause died away, it was clear from people’s faces that they were going away refreshed.

  You might think a theme park would be the last place on earth that the unadorned voice could twang a chord in the human heart. Yet the crowd’s heartfelt response was a good reminder of the power of the spoken word and people’s natural love for stories. Both work in your favor, when you read at home. You do not have to be LeVar Burton. There is no absolute need for theatrics. All you have to do is let the words unspool. Sentence by sentence, they will cast the spell.

  Having said that, it is also true that the more invested you are as a reader, the more persuasive the experience will be for everyone. Silly voices and comic accents can add a lot to the pleasure. If you’re reading nursery rhymes, or comic verses such as Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat or the Oompa-Loompa choruses from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you might like to sing the words rather than read them.

  No. I don’t want to sing.

  No worries! It’s up to you. Small children do love singing, though, and when the reader is playful with the text, and with them, it opens the way for them to be playful, too.

  “My daughter once caught her twin two-year-olds creeping away from their daddy’s lap as he struggled to read to them,” one grandmother confided to me.

  And, so you know, their daddy is a partner in an immensely demanding law firm. He’s hugely literate and the son of professors.

  She said, “Sweetheart, you are reading The Gruffalo as if it were a legal brief! Get into it. Don’t recite! Entertain them!”

  It hadn’t occurred to him.

  Reading can take on an element of adventure by changing the location. Earlier I mentioned a father’s technique of reading seafaring books while he and his kids were crammed in “belowdecks” on the bottom tier of a bunk bed. One mother dropped everything to take a picnic, an almost-due library book, and her da
ughters to a grassy hillside near their house. In the fresh air and sunshine, they read out loud in turns until the book was done. “This memory made my family realize how much it is the little things, like taking time to read together on a sunny hillside, that will be remembered and treasured for years to come,” one of the daughters told me years later.

  There must be something about reading aloud that is not, I don’t know, perfect and idyllic . . .

  There is. It can be incredibly difficult to make the time. There’s no getting around that.

  “I think it is great. I love every minute I am reading to them, I really do. I love the coziness of it, the stories,” a woman named Carolyn Siciliano told me, after she and her husband introduced reading aloud into their cheerfully chaotic household. “But I do sometimes feel guilty. Everything takes a long time, and they are kids that need sleep. So there are times when I feel frustrated and disappointed. They’ll be like, we don’t get to read? I’ll be like, ugh, but we can only read for twenty minutes. For us, it’s really tough to fit it in.”

  Some parents have a hard time staying awake. “I never do not fall asleep,” one mother said. Another confessed: “I loved the Beverly Cleary books, and I was so excited to read them to my kids, and—I don’t know, but every time it’s like taking a sleeping pill.”

  Yet another mother sent me a photograph of her youngest daughter, who had been waiting so long one night for someone to come read to her that she’d crashed out underneath a stack of picture books. There the child lay in bed, her little mouth open. Zzzz.

  My son, Paris, told me that he was glad we’d read together for as long as we had, but that when he was a grouchy preteen, story time had sometimes felt like an obligation. “When I got older and thought back about it, it was a good memory that stuck with me, it was one thing I could always count on, reading in the evenings,” he said. “It was never a bad memory, except—”

  Well, there was that one time that I was reading Pinocchio to him and the girls from a beautiful edition illustrated by Roberto Innocenti. One of the final pictures comes as a shock. When you turn the page, you’re confronted by a terrifying red, toothy maw.

  “The girls were scared of the picture of the shark at the end,” Paris went on, “And I was like, ‘Wah!’ and I pushed the book at them, and you sent me to my room.

  “Then I drew a cool pirate’s map on my door, and you were mad because I did it with a Sharpie.”

  I guess we’ll try to read aloud, then.

  “Do. Or do not. There is no try,” as Yoda says. If you want you and your family to accrue the riches that reading aloud offers, I’m afraid you will have to make it happen. Does that sound daunting? Are you thinking: I have enough to manage and balance without adding another responsibility?

  I promise: it can become a habit faster than you would believe. In Adam Alter’s book about tech addiction, Irresistible, he describes a subtle technique that helps people change their routines. It involves adjusting the language of self-determination. “I’m trying to stay off social media” may be a true statement, but the “trying to” leaves a lot of unspoken wiggle room. According to Alter, it is more effective to close off your own avenues of escape by saying “I don’t use social media” or “I don’t go on social media.” I see no reason why this strategy would not work for reading aloud. Instead of saying, “Well, we’re trying to get around to start reading aloud,” try “We read aloud every day,” or “I never miss an evening of reading with my kids.”

  Is it best to read in the evenings?

  You should read whenever it feels right. If you’re at home all day when your children are small, there may be lots of odd, fugitive moments when you could pick up a book. If you’re working outside the home, it may be easier in the early years to piggyback reading onto other hands-on activities, such as during breakfast or at bath time. (“I used to read to my son when he was in the high chair,” one mom told me, miming the act of holding a book in one hand and spooning food with the other.)

  As children get older, bedtime is usually best for corralling purposes. That’s what worked for my family. After the chaos of dinner and the maelstrom of getting children bathed, brushed, and into pajamas, to reach the story hour did feel, as I said at the beginning, like crawling onto a life raft. The seas were rocking, everyone was still a bit damp and windblown, but we were safe and there was a heavenly feeling of rescue and recovery.

  But my kids are years apart in age. Are they supposed to listen to me read the same books at the same time?

  Why not? Maybe. It depends. You may need to experiment to find what suits your particular basket of personalities. Whether you read to everyone at once, or to each in turn, also may evolve with time. Over the years, I’ve catered to all sorts of age configurations. There were jolly times when everyone piled in together and we’d read a stack of picture books and then a chapter or two of a longer story for an hour before bed. Everyone got what they needed: the familiarity, reassurance, and visual pleasure of picture books (which older children like, too), along with the vocabulary- and imagination-stretching of chapter books that required the children to create scenes in their own heads.

  We had one intense span of time, lasting maybe two years, when I’d spend forty-five minutes reading picture books to my younger children, and then go downstairs to read Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to the older two for another forty-five minutes.

  I guess you didn’t have much of a social life.

  No, it was fine! If I had to work after dinner, or if my husband and I had plans, I’d read while the children ate an early supper. But it does take sacrifice, there’s no getting around it. Considering the good that comes of reading aloud, I’d say it’s cheap at the price. Naturally there were times when we only read a couple of picture books, or I punted until breakfast, or it was so late that I turned off the lights, saying, “The movie was your story tonight.”

  I may be a zealot, but I’m no saint.

  You keep saying “I.” Didn’t your husband ever read?

  He did, but rarely. He worked long hours when our children were young, and seldom got home before they were in bed. Also, because I like to read aloud, I enjoyed the job. He would join us when he could, though, to listen.

  Does it matter who reads aloud? Does it make a difference for kids whether a man or a woman is reading to them?

  No and yes. The great thing is for children to have reading time, and the more voices, the merrier. Usually the person who likes reading aloud the most—the thwarted thespian, for instance (ahem), who has no other outlet for goofy voices—will take the lead. As a fellow enthusiast said, “Reading aloud to people, if they’ll let you do it, is just about the most fun you can have.”

  Academic research suggests that men and women tend to bring different qualities to read-aloud time, though I’m told that the variation between people as individuals is probably far greater and more meaningful than those between the sexes. Researchers at NYU have observed that fathers tend to talk more with children about math and numbers. When sharing picture books, for instance, they’re more inclined to ask a child to count the blocks or teddy bears. Mothers and fathers both give children lots of cognitive stimulation when they’re reading, but their emphases may differ.

  I heard a hilarious example of this. “We had a book called The Maggie B, by Irene Haas, about a girl who takes her little brother out on a cozy little boat,” a mother of six told me.

  She tidies the boat and makes it shipshape. She sings lovely sea chanteys to little James. She makes him a warm, delicious dinner and battens down the hatches when the weather gets bad. I’d read it together with the kids, all snug on someone’s bed, and we’d sing the chanteys, and we’d talk about the dinner, and we’d slowly turn the pages. I loved the story. The kids loved the story.

  My husband did not love the story. He thought it was nothing like what a sea story should be. So whenever the kids asked for The Maggie B from h
im, he transformed it into The Curse of the Maggie B. His version came complete with pirates, and howling gales, and burbling pots of sea stew, and a narrow escape from certain death. Of course, the kids like his version much better.

  Another father was so tired of reading the same picture book to his three children—a book they adored—that he rewrote the text. The whole family wound up memorizing his deeply subversive version. “Thomas the Tank engine wouldn’t stop horsing around,” recited this man’s wife. “He was always off the rails in junior high, ended up in and out of rehab, landed in jail for a brief stint, couldn’t hold on to a job, got into more than a little trouble in Vegas . . .”

  There’s another intriguing variation in reading styles that pertains to the smallest listeners. In research settings, clinicians have noticed that the adult who spends the most time with a young toddler tends to be more in tune with the child’s emerging language skills. When the child answers a question with indistinct or imperfect phrasing, that grown-up easily understands: “Yes, honey, that’s the elephant!” An adult who spends more time away may need clarification, and may have to ask, “What? What did you say?” This encourages children to try harder to speak clearly and make themselves understood. So having different family members read aloud will stretch both a child’s comprehension and his ability to express himself.

  Reading can also be the one time in a day that the busier parent has a chance to bond with the child, or children, in a quiet time set aside for themselves. What may start as an obligation can become the most treasured hour in the day.

  Do I need to show my young child the words as we go along?

  Why not? Looking at words can be part of the pleasure, and it can be educational, too That’s especially true with stories that rhyme. As your child is about to shout out the last word of a line of rhyme (“the cat in the—?”), by all means point to the word (“hat!”). But there’s no need to make an ordeal of it.