Starting Them Young

Almost everyone wants a child with a love of reading. So how does one manage that?

I'm not going to lie -- I still have no idea. I think we're on the right track, but Kieran isn't even two yet and doesn't speak much outside of "mama" and "up," so what the heck do I know? It's not like he can tell me yet.

From the moment I found out I was pregnant I knew that my child would grow up positively steeped in literature. How could they not with a father in film and a mother who writes? And like any mom-to-be in today's techy age I signed up for every information email out there and loaded up on pregnancy books, so I knew exactly when my baby had developed ears and could hear us talking. The day I knew our little nugget could hear us, we started reading to him (though we didn't know he was a him yet). So, if all those textbooks are right, the first book Kieran ever heard was The Magician's Nephew, by C. S. Lewis. And we kept going through the entire chronicle -- it took the entirety of my remaining pregnancy to finish, with mere days to spare. And we've kept reading to him every day. Okay, maybe not every day. We do try but, let's face it, between Trent always working and me still wading through homework, sometimes reading time hits the back burner.

Image by Teller of Tales Photography

But I do think, or rather, I hope, that Kieran will grow up loving books. He seems very fond of them most days, despite having destroyed one or two board books. More and more he seems to pull them out off his shelf and sit down to "read," or he'll bring one over so I can read it to him. Maybe it's a developmental phase (who can keep track?), or maybe he really does have a love of books already. Only time will tell and, like with most things parenting related, all we can really do is keep offering them and keep involving him in our own reading.

It goes without saying that more often than not I feel we may have made a mistake. I've always found children's books infuriatingly basic and thought that they underestimate the intelligence of children and set them up for poor grammar, so we've always read full books to Kieran in hopes that the more words he's exposed to in general the more he'll love words and want to speak and so on, but he's taking a little while longer than "normal" to get the whole talking thing down. There are so many factors to that outside of reading kids books to him, although we're doing that a little more now, but we're always going to doubt. Seriously, check any parenting forum and I bet you'll find someone asking "shouldn't my child be talking by now?" We're all just doing the best we can, and that's all we can do. So we'll keep reading to him, and giving him books, and everything we've done so far. And just hope he'll love to read as much as we do

#reading #youngreaders #startthemyoung