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

by Sarah Mackenzie

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.