The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids

by Sarah Mackenzie

But the world is a bit short on good fairies these days. So who is to take their place? Who is to make sure that our children’s sense of wonder grows indestructible with the years? We are. You and I.

No one will ever say, no matter how good a parent he or she was, “I think I spent too much time with my children when they were young.”

(Fifteen years and five babies later, I wish I could tell my younger self to relax and trust my instincts!

the primary goal of reading to children—and of teaching them to read—is not so they can eventually learn to read on their own. Trelease’s book is chock-full of statistics and data that prove reading aloud connects and bonds families and helps kids grow to be successful in just about every area of life, especially in school. In the book, he asserts that read-alouds are the foundation for the close bonds between parents and kids,

I realized my relationship with this child was the most important thing in my life. Nothing else could compare to the bond between this tiny human being and myself.

Kids are not recipes, and just because we prepare them or raise them in a particular way doesn’t mean they’ll turn out how we hope they will. I’ve known plenty of loving, all-in parents whose grown children always seem to be running a gamut of mistakes and missteps. Kids are human, and humanity is messy.

All the time and effort it would take to raise her would be worth it—not because it guaranteed good results, but because loving and connecting with her would always be worth my time and effort. Because she was mine. Because she was made by God. Because this was the great task I’d been called to.

I’m acutely aware of how easy it is to slip into the habit of just surviving the day, focusing on getting through. I want to make a meaningful and lasting bond with each of my kids before it’s too late.

Watching one’s small humans age and grow up packs a serious punch. It’s like being stuck in a dream unable to speak, like being a ghost that can see but not touch, like standing on a huge grate while a storm rains oiled diamonds, like collecting feathers in a storm. Parents in love with their children are all amnesiacs, trying to remember, trying to cherish moments, ghosts trying to hold the world.”

Beyond wanting to do a good job at this parenting thing, I want to enjoy raising my children. I don’t want to look back twenty years from now and realize that those active parenting years went by so fast I didn’t relish them. I’m terrified I’ll wish I had been less distracted and more attentive. I’m afraid I’ll come to the realization, when it’s too late, that I should have been more present. I’m afraid I’ll wish I had enjoyed it more.

the best way to help children grow to be good communicators was to read aloud to them as much as possible and to have them memorize poetry.

We aren’t going all-in for our kids because we are promised excellent results. We’re doing it because they mean more to us than anything in the world.

I still find myself waiting for those big, splashy, take-my-breath-away moments. I’m waiting for the walrus. And as I do, I’m missing every other miracle.

success in parenting my kids means showing up and giving my best to what matters most right now. Which means, of course, that I have to know what matters most right now.

In our house, whenever anyone says the word fascinating, someone else will interject (in the nerdiest voice they can muster), “Fascinating! Simply fascinating!” This comes from Kate DiCamillo’s hilarious Mercy Watson series, and every time it happens, it catches us a little off guard and makes everyone laugh.

when one of my young children hollers from their bed, needing one more drink of water or one more snuggle, I quietly recite a page from Anna Dewdney’s Llama Llama Red Pajama: “Little Llama don’t you know Mama Llama loves you so? Mama Llama’s always near, even if she’s not right here.” And they remember, without my saying it, that when they have a hard time falling asleep, everything is just fine—even in the dark.

Teens reading books like the youth adaptation of The Boys in the Boat or Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place will discover true accounts of tremendous heroism. Younger children—even the very youngest hearing fairy tales and fables—face odds and overcome struggles right alongside their favorite characters. Fiction and nonfiction stories provide children of all ages an opportunity to experience what it feels like to be overwhelmed, struggle, fight, overcome, and emerge a hero.

“To be brave in whatever situations you encounter—to be someone who can be kind . . . you’ve lived those hard decisions in your imagination, which is really almost as good as experiencing it yourself,”

“As the character’s struggles become our own,” Jamie Martin writes in Give Your Child the World, “we root for good to win, and we grasp more deeply the story we are writing with our own lives. A powerful story quickens the hero’s heartbeat within us. Well-chosen words touch and transform our souls—making us want to become better than we are right now.”

As parents, there is so much we need to teach our children. There are lessons to impart—wisdom and insight to offer before our kids launch into the world on their own. But a didactic lesson or reprimand from Mom or Dad will only go so far. There is simply no substitute for story. When it comes to imparting truth to our kids, nagging lectures from an adult simply can’t compare with a story whose time has come.

I can write a definition of the word courage on the board, illustrating that the word comes from the Latin root cor which means “heart,” and therefore means to take heart and behave with spirit and pluck when the odds are against you. I can brainstorm with my children ways to demonstrate courage in everyday life. I can suggest they introduce themselves to the new family down the street or stand up for a kid at the park who is getting picked on.

That takes courage of some sort, but not the kind that quickens the hero’s heartbeat within me—and I’m absolutely certain it wouldn’t quicken the hero’s heartbeat within my kids.

Andrew Peterson, author of the Wingfeather Saga say, “If you want a child to know the truth, tell him the truth. If you want a child to love the truth, tell him a story.”

We want them to have witnessed so many heroes living with integrity and fighting against their own weaknesses that they trust in the sureness of doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. We want them to stand up like warriors. Forget asking, “Do I have what it takes?” We want them to ask, “What kind of hero will I become?”

The book becomes a set of supercharged binoculars, helping us to see beyond our normal capacity—inviting us to take part in something beyond ourselves. A story does this on its own without our having to say a word about it. Forget the whiteboard. Forget the didactic lesson. Forget the teaching points or the comprehension worksheets. When we’re telling our children the story of Jesus healing Jairus’s daughter, of curing the lepers, of raising Lazarus from the dead, we don’t need to wrap up the story with a trite explanation about how God is powerful, good, or merciful. We don’t have to add anything at all, because there it is—truth bubbling up out of the story. It is the story.

When God pours down manna from the heavens, a child doesn’t need to be told that he will provide what we need right when we need it and not a moment before. We simply read the story, and our children feel the truth of it in their bones.

“Fiction allows us to do something that nothing else quite does. It allows us to enter fully into the lives of human beings.”5

And which is more powerful, do you think? To have an exact accounting of events in the particular order they unfolded in history, or to possess the ability to see God in every person, in every situation, in every place? To know he is omnipotent and madly in love with the world?

Happily ever after is hardly a myth for those who believe in the promise of eternal joy in heaven.

It is said that a person who reads lives a thousand lives, but a person who never reads lives only one.

What better opportunity can we give our children than to live a thousand lives before they leave home? What better way to prepare them for anything they may encounter than to let them slay a thousand dragons, die a thousand deaths, live as a thousand heroes?

A childhood filled with stories that inspire and nurture the heartbeat of a hero within us is one of the simplest ways we can love and prepare our children. By doing so, we help them understand that the call to be a hero is a call to fully live God’s vision for their life.

We read in the hope that our children will feel the heartbeat of a hero thrumming within them and look to the heavens and ask, What great thing have I been created to accomplish?

C. S. Lewis says it best: “Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are ...

By reading aloud with them, we help our kids understand that life will be difficult, perhaps more difficult than they can yet imagine, but that they—just like the heroes in the tales from their childhood—are capable of facing unimaginable hardship with heroic virtue. Story by story, they slowly realize that inside each of us dwells a hero.

The least expensive thing we can give a child outside of a hug turns out to be the most valuable: words.

It wasn’t until my mid-thirties, however—after I had launched the Read-Aloud Revival podcast and even sometime after it had acquired its first million downloads—that I realized I had become what I’d always wanted to be, after all. I didn’t broadcast on radio. I never went to school for journalism or communications. The word podcast didn’t even exist back on that birthday when I sat chatting with my hero over cherry Cokes and a basket of bottomless fries. All the same, I now had a job talking on a podcast that aired for families all over the world. If I could have told my seventh grade self that, it would have made me downright giddy.

Forbes magazine estimates that the average adult changes careers fifteen to twenty times over a lifetime.1 What that means is we can’t really know for sure what our kids will need down the road.

Parenting is a giant act of faith for all of us. I can run myself ragged trying to give my children everything they might possibly need in their future. There are a million good experiences I can give my kids, a million worthwhile books, classes, and opportunities that could be of some benefit to their future. But the sky is never the limit when it comes to people, is it? We are all limited by time, resources, and energy.

It makes sense, then, to consider what we can do as parents to set our kids up for academic success in general, rather than just success within a particular subject or field. There’s a way to do just that, and it’s easier than you might think.

“Reading literature does this thing to your brain, to the way you think about information, which is inherently superior to mastering recipes of skills,” Catherine said. “I was able to take a set of skills which I had not formerly applied to science and scientific inquiry, and succeed much more easily than my peers, who had only spent their high school years mastering scientific content.”2

reading to our kids teaches them to think, make connections, and communicate.

His research demonstrates that one extra day per week of parent-child read-aloud sessions during the first ten years of a child’s life increases standardized test scores by half a standard deviation. That’s as many as 15–30 percentile points—a tremendous gain.3

“The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”

the more children are read to, the higher their test scores are—sometimes by as much as a half a year’s schooling. This was true regardless of a family’s income. He goes on to say that reading aloud has proven to be so powerful in increasing a child’s academic success that it is more effective than expensive tutoring or even private education.

Hearing words that don’t ordinarily come up in a round of conversation expands a child’s vocabulary faster and better than anything else. Kids hear words in context and can often deduce their meanings without any further explanation.

If a child doesn’t have a large storehouse of grammatically correct and sophisticated language patterns (and a wellspring of ideas) to draw from, he said, when it’s time for their own turn at communicating—writing the research paper, the lab report, the presentation, or the college admissions essay—they won’t have anything of value to draw from. But fill up that storehouse, and you’ll be amazed at what lives inside them.

As a reading adult, I still prefer to get both my Dickens and my Shakespeare through audiobooks. The nuances in dialogue and meaning are so much more obvious to me when I hear a skilled narrator read them aloud.

Build your kids’ lives on a story-solid foundation and you’ll give them . . . a reservoir of compassion that spills over into a lifetime of love in action.

A book can reach us where a news report cannot. It’s not when we hear a summary on the news of what’s happening in the Middle East that our heart catches fire. It’s when we hear the story of one person—one man, one woman, one child. It’s when we dig out the thorn in Nya’s foot, journey with her for hours in the stifling African sun, experience her loneliness and her fear. It is then that we feel the human-to-human connection. That’s when our empathy is stirred. That’s when we feel fully human.