D.E.A.R. Children

Today is National D.E.A.R. Day – Drop Everything And Read Day - a day to encourage families to make reading together on a daily basis a family priority. (April 12 is also the birthday of prolific children's author Beverly Cleary (Ramona the Pest, Henry Huggins), and probably the reason this day was chosen to celebrate family reading.)

I was read to as a child and continued the tradition with my own children. I could tell you it was because the behavior had been modeled for me. (It had.) I could say it was because I had been trained as a reading specialist and had taught special reading and knew all the academic reasons why reading to children is important. (All true.) I could even say I did it because I loved my children and was a good mother. (Also true, I hope...). But the real reason I read to my children is because I, myself, love books. I read to my children for all of the above reasons, but also because I got to reread to them books I had loved myself or read great books that were new to all of us.

Like many mothers, I started reading to my oldest daughter when she was a toddler, picture books and simple age-appropriate story books. The reading teacher in me knew that a child's listening comprehension is higher than her reading comprehension by several years, so by the time my daughter was in kindergarten, she was able to sit through extended reading sessions of “chapter books” with few, if any illustrations. My son was three at the time, so I was faced with the challenge of reading to two kids of different ages and interests. I enforced two reading “rules” for our story times that provided some structure and sanity. Rule One was that you could play quietly while Mom read. My daughter could draw, my son could play on the floor with cars and trucks (as long as there were no sound effects). Rule Two was that all questions had to remain unasked until the end of the chapter (end of a page or two for the longer “chapter” books). Then they could ask away without interrupting the flow of the story. It was with these rules in place that I found myself reading C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia to a six-year old and a three-year old. My daughter was interested enough in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to sit beside me without drawing, asking questions at the end of each chapter. My son quietly played at our feet with his trucks, occasionally coming up to look at an illustration we would point out to him. He had no questions.

It was a few months later when I realized just how much young children are able to listen and comprehend when read to under such conditions. The local PBS station was showing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and we sat down to watch it as a family. As the show progressed, my son started to make comments about what he was seeing on television, comparing the show to the story - “It didn't happen that way in the book...”, “Oh, the good part is coming up. I really like this next part.” “It's going to get scary now, isn't it?” That little boy occupied with his trucks had absorbed far more from being read to than I had imagined. By the time my third child came along, she probably was cheated out of her fair share of picture books, having become the listener playing on the floor as I read books such as Little Women, Little Men and Jo's Boys to the older two.

I continued to read to my children, together, and individually, until my youngest entered high school. I read them a wide variety of contemporary children's literature, classic literature that would be considered adult books and many biographies and books with historical storylines. My daughters and son are all adults now, and I recently asked them each independently to tell me which books I had read to them that stood out in their memories. Among the books they mentioned, two of them remembered a biography of St. Patrick that I had read to them when they were quite small, a book I myself had read when I was in third grade. All three mentioned another book from my own reading past, Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice. I had read this book to them when my oldest daughter was in middle school. A story about economic development in the outback of Australia, it's thinly disguised as a historical romance, and includes the brutal forced march of women and children prisoners in Malaya during World War II. What was I thinking at the time? But all three kids remember it fondly...

The two girls were, and still are, avid readers. My oldest always has a wealth of reading suggestions for me. My youngest daughter survived the dearth of picture books in her formative years without much damage, though some people might question it. She's read both Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Dicken's Bleak House in the past year...for fun. My son, who did not voluntarily read a book on his own until eighth grade, has made up for lost time since, reading incessantly, buying books, perusing the discard sections of libraries and has even admitted to dumpster diving for old textbooks in recycling centers.

O.K., now I'll confess – I never heard about National D.E.A.R. Day until I stumbled upon a reference to it a few weeks back. But I did drop a lot of things to read to my kids when they were growing up – laundry, dishes, dusting, mopping. I regret none of it. And the thought of dropping everything and reading still sounds like a really good idea to me. The unfolded laundry can wait. I've still got a hundred pages to go in The Pillars of the Earth...

Richer than I you can never be

 I had a mother who read to me

- Strickland Gillilan

Tomorrow:

D.E.A.R. Me