day fifty-seven: read aloud to your teen and tween children

“Because what you read when you are a child stays with you like no other reading you do in your life.” from You’ve Got Mail

Even die hard read-alouders have a tendency to stop reading aloud after their children turn a certain age. While the child at age twelve can read for himself. And while he might not be available to snuggle and read like he was when he was six. Reading aloud can be a life-long family affair!

We still read aloud to our grown children at Christmastime! We have certain Christmas stories that are endeared to all of us that we enjoy every year during tree trimming night and our family’s Christmas Eve. We listen to audio books with our teens and young adults when we travel together. And I still read aloud to our teens most mornings.

We have two different regular reading times with our teens now—Bible/character (devotional type materials; followed by our current chapter book read aloud) and history (for our homeschool). (I also have story time with Jakie, who is eleven, but the two other boys are usually working on order filling or doing their own assignments.) Since our kids do not leave the house each day for school, we have more time to just sit down and read before they start on their independent subjects or meet with me for subjects. However, even busy families with children who leave for school each day can fit in some special read aloud time—if it is a priority.

Additionally, we are almost always in the middle of an audio book together with the three boys, Mom, and Dad or a chapter book that we do together. It might take a while for us to get through an entire chapter book, but it’s always there for us to pick up and share together.

Tomorrow I will post a dozen tips for reading aloud to tweens and teens, but for now I have to leave you with a sweet, sweet story that just recently happened—related to our family reading. Not long ago my twenty-seven year old married son and I got home from teaching our classes, and as he was waiting for his wife to pick him up on her way by, he spotted the Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Story that I read to Jakie lying on my table. (I used to read this five-volume series of character stories to our older kids every single day for at least ten years—and we carried one in the van with us for “those extra reading moments” we might encounter.)

Anyway, he picked it up and started leafing through it, commenting on the pictures and stories: “Every time I hear about an English constable, I think of this picture right here.” “Did you know that no matter how many scenes from movies, pictures from magazines, and descriptions I hear of crocodiles, when I think of a crocodile, I automatically think of “Swami and the Crocodile” and remember how he didn’t get eaten because the crocodile spat him out to save for later?” On and on and on he went, with me barely able to hold back the tears. He suddenly left the room and went to the bookcase and got the other four volumes and brought them back to the room and for an hour just pored over these books, telling me his favorites, what he remembered most about each story, etc. etc. for an hour. And this from a literature buff—whose favorite book is fifteen hundred pages long! Yet, he still loves Uncle Arthur. I think Meg Ryan was on to something in You’ve Got Mail when she said, “Because what you read when you are a child stays with you like no other reading you do in your life.”