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

by Sarah Mackenzie

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.

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.

reading aloud with our kids is indeed the best use of our time and energy as parents. It’s more important than just about anything else we can do.

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. When it comes right down to it, we want our children to live out the fullness of God’s vision for their lives, and we’re willing to do just about anything it takes to stack the odds in favor of that happening.

In other words, we have to figure out how to notice those ants on the sidewalk—the tiny, miraculous moments we tend to step right over in search of the walrus.

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.

The stories we read together act as a bridge when we can’t seem to find another way to connect. They are our currency, our language, our family culture. The words and stories we share become a part of our family identity.

Stories are comfort food. Stories are inside jokes. Stories are ant moments. They bond us together even when life is hard.

Their children may not remember the exact stories, plot lines, or characters of the books they shared during these times. Whether they remember the titles of the books they read together doesn’t even really matter. But I am certain of one thing: they will not forget that their mama read to them.

Reading aloud, as simple and quiet and insignificant as it may seem, is a way for us to pause, enjoy, and delight in these kids, in this day, in this ant skittering across this path. These moments will live on in our children’s hearts even when our kids no longer live in our homes.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather it is the boldness to act rightly even in the face of fear.

“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.”

Truth, whether it be factual or not, always points us back to Christ.

We are inspired by what is worth fighting for and what is worth dying for. We see evil for what it is; we cling to what is good. We enter into magical lands and see the body of Aslan lying dead on the cold stone table. And we feel deep within us the bold and plain truth: laying down one’s life for another is the most sincere act of love. And in the end—the very, very end—good does indeed always, always win. Happily ever after is hardly a myth for those who believe in the promise of eternal joy in heaven.

This quest for truth is tucked into every story, and when we read such stories to our children, they can’t help but hear it.

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.

I get to encourage their wildest daydreams and give them every advantage—just like my own dad did with that surprise birthday lunch with my childhood hero—to help them bloom into the people God created them to be. What an honor! And what a responsibility!

“Parents often ask me if they should play Mozart to their babies, or buy them expensive teaching toys, or prohibit television, or get them started early on a computer,” Trelease writes. But the answer is much simpler: “Read to your children.”

That’s exactly what happens when we read with our kids. They take grammatically correct and sophisticated vocabulary in through the ear . . . and it comes flying back out of their mouths when we least expect it.

Even more important than teaching our kids the actual skill of reading is to cultivate a deep love of stories.

Story makes us fall a little more in love with the world we live in and the people God made to live here with us.

Raising our children isn’t just about getting them ready for adulthood. It isn’t just about preparation for a career. It’s about transforming and shaping their hearts and minds. It’s about nourishing their souls, building relationships, and forging connections. It’s about nurturing within them care and compassion for whomever they encounter.

What better education can we offer our children than the shaping of their hearts to love others as we have been loved by God ourselves?

A good education, then, is not one that results in high test scores, elite college acceptances, or the ability to read Virgil in Latin or War and Peace without CliffsNotes. A good education teaches us—and our children—to love fully and to love well.

A good education, then, is an education of the heart.

We read with our children because it gives both them and us an education of the heart and mind. Of intellect and empathy. We read together and learn because stories teach us how to love.

A book can’t change the world on its own. But a book can change readers. And readers? They can change the world.

Either we create a space where reading is something that is done for the joy of it, where the imagination is cultivated and allowed to wander and stretch and grow, or we deaden our children’s natural love for the written word.

Home is where we fall in love with books. Home is the only place in which our children have a fighting chance of falling in love with books.

A good story gives shape to the human experience and touches us in our innermost places. It picks us up right where we are and leaves us somewhere else—changed, transformed, more awake and alive and aware.

Your own attitude about books and reading can shift to allow every member of the family more time and space for reading at whim, more reading for the sheer pleasure of it.

Why no treats? Why no snacks? Why not throw a big picnic blanket on the grass in the backyard and let everyone dig into a ginormous bowl of popcorn and sip Capri Suns? Why not set the table with china and pass around tea and scones? Why not pull out a package of store-bought cookies and paper plates and gather everyone at the table for a few moments of rest and reading?

Food is comfort, and comfort is a wonderful thing to associate with read-aloud time.

Do we have the courage to admit that the main purpose of reading may in fact be for joy, for the sake of itself?

Affection is of great importance when it comes to making connections with our kids through books.

A child will likely have great self-esteem if she believes her parents like her and want to spend time with her. A better alternative, then, is to spend time enjoying our children and communicating that enjoyment clearly,

Next time you catch yourself thinking that you don’t have enough time to read aloud with your kids, stop and tell yourself the truth.

Somewhere along the line, we’ve convinced ourselves that audiobooks don’t count as real reading. The magic of a read-aloud is achieved when we share stories together. It’s the shared experience itself that makes the biggest impact, whether the voice doing the actual reading is your own, your spouse’s, or a professional actor’s via an audiobook.

There is so much to be gained by a family enjoying audiobooks together or by a child who can listen to audiobooks on his or her own.

What we feed our bodies matters, and what we feed our souls matters, too. This is true for us, but even more so for our kids, who are discovering who they are—and Whose they are—as they grow.

the kids matter more than the books. The books themselves are important, but only insofar as they nurture the image bearer before us.

Studies show that for many children, actively engaging in something with their hands helps them listen better. For many kids, the propensity to move while engaging in focused brainwork is best facilitated, not quashed. Give them something to do with their hands, and their brains are suddenly free to focus and learn.

Your kids don’t need to sit still to get the most out of your read-aloud time. In fact, they may get more out of it if you let them fidget or doodle while you read.

Even when it’s noisy, messy, and more chaotic than you’d like it to be, it works. Even when kids are grumbling, complaining, and don’t seem to be listening, it works. When we read aloud to our kids in spite of the fact that it looks much different from our initial vision, we’re stepping out in faith. If I can tell you one thing in this entire chapter, it is this: keep stepping out.

a read-aloud lifestyle isn’t going to happen in our homes by accident.

Plunk a few read-aloud books on your kitchen counter in the morning, and see if that doesn’t inspire you to read a little more often than if the books were tucked away, alphabetized on the bookshelves, or stored neatly in a basket under the table in the living room. Put your books front and center. Keep them handy. Then you don’t have to go out of your way when it’s time to read aloud, because the books are right there.

Peg a short reading session to something that already happens regularly in your family’s life, and you’ll find that it’s much easier to fit in read-aloud time, even on your busiest days.

It reminds me that small things matter, that ten minutes a day add up over time to hours and years—a lifetime spent doing the most important thing.

Research indicates that kids who live in homes where books are plentiful benefit from the mere presence of books.

We send a clear message to our kids when we spend a portion of our family budget on books and when we give books a priority place in our home. We say that they matter, that they are a part of who we are, and that they are a part of our family culture.