Educators urge parents to read to their children. There are numerous documented benefits. Reading to children helps them develop active listening skills, expands their vocabulary, enhances their knowledge of the world and even helps them develop empathy as they emotionally connect with the characters in the stories. It also instills a love of reading and creates readers for life. When a parent reads to a child a stronger relationship develops between them. When I was growing up, there were no screens to distract us, and the evening bedtime story was a way of closing out the day and a preface to going to sleep.
Each evening my mother would gather my brother and younger sisters and read to us. We usually sat up in our beds and listened as mother seated in a nearby chair read us a story. As a family we had several beautiful books with Arthur Rackham’s illustrations as well as other classic children’s books. There were Kipling’s Just So Stories about how the leopard got his spots and the camel his hump. Aesop’s fables kept us amused. The Wizard of Oz books provided many evenings of entertainment. Not all the selections were light and entertaining. Mother had a fondness for the dark fairy tales of Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Some of these are quite frightening. Mother thought they were good for us to listen to and learn what could befall us if we misbehaved. Mother also read us Peter Pan and Robinson Crusoe a chapter at a time. Each night we would whine and wheedle trying to get her to read us more, but my mother was strict. You had to wait for the story to continue the next night. Once I could read on my own, I did not have to stop reading when the chapter ended. It was a small freedom gained by becoming a proficient reader.
Mother stopped reading to us when we became old enough to read on our own. One of my most exciting presents I received as a six-year-old was my very own bed light. It was ivory-colored plastic with a bullet, almost torpedo shape. It clamped onto the bed’s headboard. There was a lens in the front that focused and intensified the light of a 25-watt bulb. Like many lamps in the 1950s, it had beaded pull chain to turn it on and off. I learned how to carefully pull the chain so that it would make as little noise as possible so that no one could hear when I turned it on or off. I often read well past my bedtime and did not want to get caught still awake and reading. Even as an adult, I find it almost impossible to fall asleep without reading in bed before I turn off the light.
When I was ill and confined to my bed, I read and read and read some more. The nights were frightening since when I would lie flat, I had difficulty breathing. I slept propped up in a semi-upright position. If I slumped, I would sometimes be awakened struggling to catch my breath. As a result, I slept fitfully and would silently turn on my light and read. I am still many years later a serious night owl often awake very late.
As an ill child, my companions were a veritable menagerie of stuffed animals and a few dolls. I have always had “stuffies.” They were very important during my most formative years. A sick child is a lonely child. I had my stuffies to keep me company. Before I shut off the light, I would array them in a semi-circle near me on the bed and read to them. As I grew older, I would tell them stories, my own versions of the Just So Stories crafted for each of them. I considered them my pals so why not create their own literature. My time being read to, then reading on my own and creating my stuffie stories ignited my interest in reading and writing. The habits learned in childhood follow us all the days of our lives.
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