The Enchanted Hour Quotes

“The act of reading together secures people to one another, creating order and connection, as if we were quilt squares tacked together with threads made of stories. That's not just another metaphor, as a team of neuroscientists at Princeton has discovered. Even as reader and listener are enjoying their bouquet of neurochemicals ... their brain activity is synchronizing, creating literal order and connection in a process known as neural coupling.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“Reading every day with children can't guarantee perfect outcomes for any family—not in grades, not in happiness, not in relationships. But it is as close to a miracle product as we can buy, and it doesn't cost a nickel. As a flawed, fallible person with an imperfect temper, I know that reading every night is not just the nicest thing I've done with my children but represents, without question, the best I have been able to give them as their mother.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“What we look at determines what we see, and what we see, really see, becomes part of an inner museum of pictures and references, a mental collection that for most of us is not so much curated as acquired in a haphazard way. There is an opportunity with children to show them art and illustration that will furnish their minds with beauty and mystery, symmetry and wonder. The simplest mechanism for this is the selection of picture books that we share with them.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“By setting aside time every day, we can leave the pixelated wilds and rest at least for a little while in a place of unplugged, authentic human connection.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts. To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.” - Warsaw ghetto survivor Helen Fagin”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the eye itself can be coaxed, informed, and persuaded.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“No child is an island. They come from families. They are the newest braids in that cord of humanity, and it is right and beautiful that they should know something of what their parents and grandparents value, while at the same time having access to the classic works of human imagination that we all own in common. Contemporary culture will take care of itself. It's lively and loud and most children's lives are full of it. When parents read long-beloved classics with them and share stories that convey what we want them to know about the world, we can help them discover powerful narratives and pictures they will never find on PBS Kids or Instagram.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“Wherever young people are growing up, they deserve to know what went into the making of their world. They have a right to be free to enjoy the richness that history and culture have bequeathed them.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“Here is a reader, a book, a listener. The sound of the voice exists for a moment and then it vanishes. Like birdsong, it’s gone—it is over. Yet it leaves traces of its passage in the imagination and memory of those who listen. There is incredible power in this fugitive exchange.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“In psychology, there’s a concept of human motivation known as self-determination theory. According to this idea, people need to satisfy three intrinsic needs to feel happy and fulfilled. Sebastian Junger summarizes it in his short and excellent book about alienation and connection, Tribe. Human beings, he writes, “need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“We do children no service in cutting them off from transcendent works of the imagination, even if it means introducing them to troublesome ideas and assumptions, and to characters we would rather they not admire. Like life itself, literature is unruly. It raises moral, cultural, and philosophical questions. Well, where better to talk about these things than at home? The human story is messy and imperfect. It is full of color and peril, creation and destruction—of cruelty and villainy, prejudice and hatred, love and comedy, sacrifice and virtue. We needn’t be afraid of it. It’s foolish to cover it up and pretend history never happened. It is far better to talk about what we think of these matters with our children, using books as a starting point for the conversation.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“Everyone loves a good story. As the folklorist Sybil Marshall observed, “It seems that mankind is born with an avid appetite for details of other lives beside the one his own small span of corporeal existence grants to him; it is as though he seizes from his earliest years upon this way of enlarging the bounds of his own life.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“Words are beautiful things. They hold meaning, they reveal meaning, and they give us the power to express meaning. Words are also keys that unlock the world. Every time we read a book to a child, we are holding out a new box of interesting and useful keys for them to collect: a tumble of shapes and colors in which they may discover vintage keys, copper-colored pin-tumblers, tubular keys, double-sided keys, grand brass lever-lock keys. The variety of the keys they find, by its very existence, hints at the wideness of possibility in the world.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“As Dilys Evans writes in Show and Tell, a book about illustration for young readers, picture books “are often the first place children discover poetry and art, honor and loyalty, right and wrong, sadness and hope.” And it’s true: a child sitting on a lap at home or in the friendly security of circle time at school or at the library has a chance to witness the emotions of others and experiment with his own without consequence. He can try out big ideas, find consolation for his secret worries, and risk a glimpse at what scares him. I”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“It turns out that getting young children to interact with texts, and talking with them about the pictures and stories as you go, hugely intensifies the benefits they get from the time you spend reading together. We’ll”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“For children, contemplating the illustrations in picture books quietly and at length helps to inculcate the grammar of visual art in a way that really can’t happen when the pictures are animated or morphing or jumping around.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“listening to stories while looking at pictures stimulates children’s deep brain networks, fostering their optimal cognitive development. Further, the companionable experience of shared reading cultivates empathy, dramatically accelerates young children’s language acquisition, and vaults them ahead of their peers when they get to school. The rewards of early reading are astonishingly meaningful: toddlers who have lots of stories read to them turn into children who are more likely to enjoy strong relationships, sharper focus, and greater emotional resilience and self-mastery. The evidence has become so overwhelming that social scientists now consider read-aloud time one of the most important indicators of a child’s prospects in life. It would be a mistake, though, to relegate reading aloud solely to the realm of childhood.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“It’s important to keep in mind that art and literature belong to the last generation and to future generations as much they do to ours. We have no more right to edit or expurgate the classics to suit our tastes than the Victorians would have had to invade the Uffizi Gallery and paint a frock over Botticelli’s Venus.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“As we shall see, listening to stories while looking at pictures stimulates children’s deep brain networks, fostering their optimal cognitive development.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“The baby girl who lifted the flaps of Rod Campbell's Dear Zoo becomes the toddler charmed by Ludwig Behmelman's Madeline who turns into the sixth grader listening open-mouthed to Mark Halperin's A Kingdom Far and Clear who grows up to be the young woman swept away by Leo Tolstoy and the beautiful, ill-fated heroine of Anna Karenina. Each book makes straight the path for the next, opening out into sunlit literary meadows where, over time, young people will encounter beautiful writing and characters and scenes that may have been known, loved, and remembered by generations long since past. For the child, or teenager, or anyone else for that matter, getting these tickets to arcadia is a matter of simplicity. All they have to do is listen.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“Since 2012, with the widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets, Twenge and her colleagues have recorded a plunge in young people’s emotional well-being.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“We found that teens who spent more time seeing their friends in person, exercising, playing sports, attending religious services, reading or even doing homework were happier,” Twenge has written. “However, teens who spent more time on the internet, playing computer games, on social media, texting, using video chat or watching TV were less happy. In other words, every activity that didn’t involve a screen was linked to more happiness, and every activity that involved a screen was linked to less happiness.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“At its best and most uplifting, the experience becomes a piece of art that the reader pulls from thin air and gives as a gift to the hearer.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“The first mother wheels her shopping cart down the produce aisle, where her kindergartner spots an eggplant and asks what it is. The mother shushes her child, ignoring the question. A second mother, faced with the same question, responds curtly, “Oh, that’s an eggplant, but we don’t eat it.” The third mother coos, “Oh, that’s an eggplant. It’s one of the few purple vegetables.” She picks it up, hands it to her son, and encourages him to put it on the scale. “Oh, look, it’s about two pounds!” she says. “And it’s $1.99 a pound, so that would cost just about $4. That’s a bit pricey, but you like veal parmesan, and eggplant parmesan is delicious too. You’ll love it. Let’s buy one, take it home, cut it open. We’ll make a dish together.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“three mothers and an eggplant.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“One of the reasons kids don’t learn from media, from technology, is that there’s not contingency,” the spontaneous, fluid adaptation to what a child seems to be understanding or failing to understand.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“That love of reading gets passed down. Time spent reading together creates a special, magical place. And it’s irreplaceable.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“Yet if illiteracy is a barrier to economic advancement, it has never been an obstacle to the enjoyment of storytelling,”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“The evidence shows,” Swift had said, “that the difference between [children] who get bedtime stories and those who don’t, the difference in their life chances, is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“The team discovered that the brains of young children whose parents read aloud to them often, and who had access to more children’s books, had more robust activation than their peers. In other words, the brains of well-read-to preschoolers seemed more agile and receptive to narrative, suggesting that they had a greater capacity to process more of what they were hearing, and at faster speeds.”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds