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

by Sarah Mackenzie

I want my children to know this: 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.”

Patricia Polacco, beloved children’s book author and illustrator, and recipient of many prestigious awards, told me once about her Babushka, who used to tell young Patricia and her brother all manner of tales. Brother and sister would lean forward after a story was done and whisper hopefully, “Babushka . . . is it true?” to which Babushka would exclaim with gusto, “Well, of course it’s true!” and then, with a slight smile and a wink, “But it might not have happened exactly like that . . .”

Newbery award-winning author Katherine Paterson wrote in a collection of essays. “Fiction allows us to do something that nothing else quite does. It allows us to enter fully into the lives of human beings.”5

“Fairy tales say that apples are golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found out they were green,” G. K. Chesterton wrote. “They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”6

What the best stories do—and tales of fantasy do it better than anything else—is strip away the familiar in order to reveal a more prevailing, universal truth. They help us notice the breathtaking world we otherwise take for granted. They give us dragons, monsters, and witches, and then they inspire within us a knight courageous enough to slay the dragon, a hero brave enough to stand up to the monster, a heroine coy enough to sneak past the witch.

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?

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 making their destiny not brighter but darker.”7

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.

It’s tempting to idolize certain aspects of education. We value good grades, high test scores, elite college degrees, and lucrative careers. But our obsession keeps us from remembering what education is for. Education is for love.

“Look,” Rea said, “we don’t want to create intellectual geniuses who don’t have humanity, compassion, and empathy. Intellectual genius without heart is a dangerous, dangerous thing.” 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.

The act of picking up a book and reading it for no other reason than enjoyment can open the door for significant impact.

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

We already know what happens to kids whose parents don’t see pleasure and enjoyment as the main reason to read, whose parents think the primary purpose of reading is for academic success. Those kids simply don’t read.

A child will likely have great self-esteem if she believes her parents like her and want to spend time with her.

Fact: If you find yourself waiting until you have thirty free minutes to read with your kids, there is a good chance you won’t read to them very often (or maybe at all). So many distractions are vying for our attention each day, keeping us from our most important work.

Every day. Those two words alone fill me with anxiety. How can I add anything to my docket every day? And now I need to carve out time to read aloud every day, too? Actually, no. And for the record, I’ll say it as clearly as I can: You do not need to read aloud to your children every day.

You do not need to read aloud to your children every day.

Don’t have thirty minutes to read with your kids? You don’t need it. Try ten. You can arrive ten minutes early to soccer practice and read aloud in the car while you wait, or stay at the dinner table ten minutes longer so you can read a bit of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Heidi. Put the kids to bed a few minutes later, or wake them up for school a few minutes earlier. 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. You can find ten minutes, and that’s all it takes. If you want reading aloud to make a difference, you don’t need to do a ton of it. You just need to do a little bit of it over a long stretch of time. It all adds up.

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. Children still benefit from correct and sophisticated language patterns coming in through the ear, and they’re inspired to become heroes of their own stories.

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. My own son, a late reader, listened to dozens of audiobooks in his seventh and eighth years during our afternoon Quiet Reading Hour. While his older sisters read alone, he played audiobooks from the Redwall series in his room on an old CD player while also building LEGO creations. Just imagine how many more books he was able to “read” that way.

I wanted more. I was hungry. I suddenly had an insatiable thirst for books and for the ideas and stories inside them. This is a pivotal moment for each of us, and it usually happens when we read something light, delightful, and completely enjoyable—not when we’re slogging through text that’s difficult to read or hard to understand.

Of course, saying that light reading matters and that it has a place doesn’t devalue more difficult reading. Classics—those old, wonderful books that have stood the test of time—are among the greatest literature ever written. Far be it from me to minimize the impact such books have on us as individuals and as a culture. 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.

Sometimes, however, we find ourselves valuing classics and rich literature to the point of excluding other, lighter fare. If we cringe when our kids devour series books or gravitate toward the lighter, fluffier books that are so prolific in our local libraries and bookshops, we’re missing something important. Lighter books have their own special part to play in the growth and development of young readers.

Most of us would do well to realize that any time we spend reading with our kids is time well spent, regardless of whether the books are on particular booklists or meet a certain literary standard. Sometimes we forget this very important truth: the kids matter more than the books. The books themselves are important, but only insofar as they nurture the image bearer before us. We’ll get into how to choose excellent books in chapter 9. For now, it’s helpful to be aware that you don’t have to limit your kids to certain books. Light books count. Hard books count. Current bestsellers count. Classics count. They all have their place in the tapestry of a child’s reading life.

Light books count. Hard books count. Current bestsellers count. Classics count. They all have their place in the tapestry of a child’s reading life.

Anyone with a wiggly child knows that expecting him to sit still while you read aloud is something of a lost cause. It boggles my mind that my son—the one who is now engaging a set of army guys in battle, now standing on his head in the corner, now drawing a picture, now wrestling a little brother, now getting a drink of water—will remember what we’ve read aloud better than just about anyone else in the room. 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.

You may be amazed at how much better your kids listen, how much longer they stay focused during read-aloud time, and how much more peaceful the experience is for you, the reader, when you free up your kids to move around during reading time.

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.

The families I know who read aloud most consistently (and therefore who get the most benefits) tell me that reading aloud doesn’t look perfect in their homes either; it rarely (if ever) looks like they originally imagined it would. Kids fight over couch cushions. Someone complains that the preschooler is making too much noise. The toddler runs off and starts shoving Hot Wheels down the toilet before you even notice he’s gone. A kid jumps up every couple of minutes to sharpen one of his colored pencils, or another one wanders away right at the most climactic scene in the book. There are endless interruptions and constant rounds of bickering. When read-aloud time doesn’t look like we originally hoped, we begin to doubt that it’s giving us any of those wonderful benefits we discussed in part 1. But here’s the thing: it still works. 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.

When idealistic visions pop into your head, when you find yourself thinking about that Instagram post by the mom whose kids all appear perfectly content to listen to her read a classic for hours, stop yourself. Shut down the idealistic visions, because when you’re reading aloud, even when it looks imperfect, you are going all-in. And you’ll never regret it. You won’t say, twenty years from now, “Dang, if I could do the parenting thing over again, I’d read less to my kids.” It’s worth it even when it looks nothing like a gorgeous magazine photo op. It’s worth it, perhaps, because it looks nothing like a gorgeous magazine photo op. It looks like living and loving and going all-in. After all, that’s exactly what it is.

You won’t say, twenty years from now, “Dang, if I could do the parenting thing over again,...

To be at home with books, children need book-loving homes. Elizabeth Wilson, Books Children Love

In the last chapter, we dismantled the myth that read-aloud time should look like it does in our imaginations. The reality is that it just doesn’t, at least not most of the time. But it can be more peaceful—or at least less chaotic than the experience I just described—if we set ourselves up for success. Here’s what I know: a read-aloud lifestyle isn’t going to happen in our homes by accident. You and me—parents in a busy, fast-paced world crammed full of distractions—have to be intentional about making reading aloud a regular part of family life.

You and me—parents in a busy, fast-paced world crammed full of distractions—have to be intentional about making reading aloud a regular part of family life.

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

The fourth myth we busted in the previous chapter was this: kids need to sit still while we read to them. The fact is, they don’t. Many children actually listen better when they fidget or move while doing focused brainwork. I’ll bet you know right off the bat which of your kids will benefit most from keeping their hands busy while you read aloud. In my home, all my kids tend to do something else while I read aloud. Some need it more than others, but it’s a regular practice at our house to fiddle and doodle while listening. But just having a mental list of things your kids can do while you read aloud isn’t enough. Remember my experience with the popsicles and the big kids who were taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r to come to read-aloud time? It helps to keep your read-aloud activities in a convenient, easy-to-grab spot. It’s frustrating to look at the clock, notice I have just about twenty minutes to squeeze in some reading aloud before we need to run off to the orthodontist or start dinner prep, and then spend half of that time waiting for my kids to finally join me. It makes for a short, harried, and frustrating read-aloud experience. My solution for this is a read-aloud shelf. It can also be a drawer, cupboard, or basket, depending on the amount of space you have. On my read-aloud shelf, I keep a set of stackable trays (the kind used in an office) as well as magazine holders. Each child has a stackable tray in which to keep works-in-progress. If they are in the middle of drawing, wat...

Audiobooks, you may remember from chapter 7, count. The car is an excellent time to play audiobooks. We get a lot of reading aloud in during our thirty-five-minute drive to and from homeschool co-op every week, and we find that road trips are far more enjoyable when we listen to an audiobook together. When I hear the Little House audiobooks read by Cherry Jones (a favorite in our family), I immediately think of long drives across I-90 in Washington State during the year we moved from one side of the state to the other. The endless Washington wheat fields are married, in my mind, to Pa’s fiddle and Laura’s harrowing descriptions of The Long Winter and the town spelling bee. I’ll always think of Laura when I’m crossing I-90. I hope my kids will, too. In the car, your kids are basically a captive audience. If yours (like mine) tend to squabble on road trips, you’ll find audiobooks a welcome reprieve. Either way, you’ll get more read-alouds in if you use time you’re already spending in the car to enjoy a book together.

Research indicates that kids who live in homes where books are plentiful benefit from the mere presence of books. The fact that books are there has a lasting positive effect on our kids—on the way they think about home, how they see themselves, and the role they see books playing in their lives. How a family chooses to spend money says a lot about who they are and what they value. If you want your family to be a reading family, consider letting books make it into your family budget. You can acquire books inexpensively at library book sales, garage sales, and used bookshops. You don’t need to fill your bookshelves right away. Owning just a few really wonderful books is better than collecting stacks and stacks of uninspiring, cheap books no one feels compelled to pick up. You can also make it a habit to buy your child a book for each holiday and birthday, making books a prominent part of the way your family celebrates.

A book allowance can help your children grow their own collection. Each month, my own kids are given a small bit of money to spend on books. They look forward to our trips to local bookshops and keep lists of titles they’d like to acquire. Allison loves the quality of Bloomsbury paperbacks, so when she finds another book in E. D. Baker’s Wide-Awake Princess series, she uses her book allowance to buy it (even if she’s read it before). Audrey has used her allowance to build a gorgeous Lucy Maud Montgomery collection. She’s always on the lookout for beautifully covered classics to add to her pretty shelves. Two of my kids literally count down the days every time Brandon Mull gets ready to release another fantasy novel. They don’t even try to borrow those books from the library—they know they’re going to want to have them on our home shelves, to read and reread over and over again. These books, purchased with their own money and lining their own bookshelves, become a part of their treasured collections. When they move out as adults, they will take formidable libraries with them—libraries that will help them remember who they are and where they came from, long after they leave home. 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.

I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. C. S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”

We want our kids to read because they love to, not just because they can.

We want our kids to read because they love to, not just because they can. We know they won’t read much in their free time unless they enjoy the act of reading itself, and so we hope they’ll develop a love of books out of sheer delight. That joy, of course, starts with the books themselves. In this chapter, we’ll set out with one goal in mind: how to become our own family’s literary matchmaker.

First, a good book appeals to the reader regardless of age. This is the most important thing you should know about good books written for children: they appeal equally to grown-ups. An adult can find herself lost in Narnia as well as any child. And when a parent thinks a book is dumb or trite, there is a good chance that the child hearing the story came to the same conclusion long before.

Second, a good book leaves you more grateful to be alive. You close the final pages of the book a little breathless, a little more in awe of the great and glorious world. The book may be tragic (Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson), moving (A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park), or goofy and nonsensical (The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber), yet it leaves you with a feeling you find difficult to express: amazement at the world, an awe for life, a gratitude for humanity and its quirkiness, its messiness, its vitality. A book that fails to leave the reader with hope has neglected its most important role: to help the reader see the world afresh. Funny books do it, sad books do it, heartrending or harrowing or lighthearted books do it. They leave us with new vision. They allow us to view the seemingly mundane world around us—and the people in it—with new eyes. A book should fill us with hope, even in the midst of bone-rattling thrill or heart-wrenching sorrow.

A book that fails to leave the reader with hope has neglected its most important role: to help the reader see the world afresh.

Bookish people, I’m sorry to say, have an unfortunate tendency toward elitism. I know this because I am a bookish person, and also because I hang out with other bookish sorts. In the name of helping our children love what is good, true, and beautiful—and in our zealous desire to put quality books into the hands of our children—we have the very unfortunate habit of disparaging books we’ve decided don’t pass muster. We want to cultivate good taste in literature, yes, but there is a marked difference between good taste and elitism. It’s tempting to tell our kids which books they should or shouldn’t like, but good taste is acquired over time. It also varies from person to person. God gave each of us unique taste buds, and because of that we can enjoy rich and varied culinary experiences. I’m convinced that he gave us unique literary taste buds for the same reason.

The best way to help our children develop good literary taste is to put lots and lots of quality books in their path. We fill our home with good books and make it nearly impossible for our kids to avoid them. When we read aloud, we choose books that appeal regardless of age and leave us with an overall sense of hope. We choose books with vivid imagery, rich language, and engaging plots. In this way, we give our families an excellent chance of acquiring good taste over time.