On Reading to Children
By Leonard Wibberley
First printed in The New York Times in 1961
2/20/18
I suppose that there is as much nonsense written on the subject of reading aloud to children as there is on any other aspect of the relationship between parents and their offspring. It is possible that in the following article I will add to the nonsense, but I will try not to do so by setting down only what I have learned from my own experience with a family of six, of whom three are of an age to be read to.
It is commonly held that reading aloud to children is good for them, and many people of intelligence approach the subject with this reprehensible purpose in mind. Any healthy child has a strong and natural resistance to what is “good” for him in adult terms and for myself, my biggest obstacle to education lay in all the adults who insisted that going to school was good for me. To this day, I have an abhorrence for anything that is held to be good for me and have found in fifty years of living, that what is thought good for me is usually only good for those who advise it. I myself obtain little benefit.
It is possible that, as an unsought bonus, reading aloud to children does them good. But that is almost beside the point. The main thing about it is that it’s fun.It’s enormous fun for the person who does the reading. And I know of a number of children who enjoy being read to. In fact, I’ve been reading aloud to my children, and my wife, and anyone else I can get to listen to me, for many years. But I never do this for their good. I do it entirely for my own pleasure, for there is no pleasure quite as enchanting and transporting as reading aloud.
Once I read the Agincourt scene of Shakespeare’s “Henry V” to a Los Angeles taxi driver who confessed to me that he had never read a line of Shakespeare. He was delighted with my diction and deeply touched at the noble passage describing the deaths of the Dukes of Suffolk and York. It was only when I got to the end of Act Four that I discovered the wretch had left the meter running.
The greatest fun in reading aloud lies in the adventure of the thing—the sense of taking a child on an exploration of a fascinating territory into which you alone have penetrated. Since you know the excitements and pleasures that lie ahead, there is a tingle of anticipation as you read through page after page of the book, and you look up at some passage that has pleased you tremendously and see on the face of the child the same delight you yourself experienced on first reading. In that moment, you and the child are one. In that moment, you are also born again and the world comes freshly to you and is full of wonder.
My father never read aloud to me. He was far too busy setting the world to rights, and a sad thing it is that the world did not listen to him, for if it had it would not be in its present pickle.
The first person I recall reading to me was a nun—Big Sister Elizabeth we called her. She wasn’t just reading to me but to a class of perhaps forty children and she didn’t pick books that were good for our wretched little souls. She picked Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I can see her now standing on the bare boards of the classroom floor, with her coif around her head like a starched cloud, describing how Billy Bones told Jim Hawkins to keep a weather eye open “for a sea-faring man with one leg.” She was capable of wonderful modulations of her voice. When blind Pew came tapping with his stick down the frosty road to the Admiral Benbow Inn, with his band of cutthroats about him, I could hear the sharp rap of his stick on the frozen surface, and feel the terror of his approach; all the more terrifying since he was blind. And when it came to that wicked old chorus of:
Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Big Sister Elizabeth gave it out with such gusto that one would have thought, as Stevenson put it, her voice had been “tuned and broken at the capstan bars.” (Big Sister Elizabeth died in the African missions, and I haven’t a doubt but that she is now in Heaven with forty of the smaller sort of angels seated before her, their eyes wide and their lips dry with excitement, while she reads to them how Black Dog slipped Billy Bones the black spot on that terrible day at the lonely Admiral Benbow Inn.)
As a result of this experience I was delighted when, seventeen years ago, my wife presented me with my first son. Here was someone to whom I could now read Treasure Island, Kevin and I could board the Hispaniola off the dock in Bristol together, smelling the tar and the rotted seaweed and getting a whiff of the rum from the sailor’s grogshops. We would go to the island with the magnificently named hills—Foremast, Spyglass and Mizzenmast—and meet poor old Ben Gunn and have a soft spot in our hearts for that plausible rascal Long John Silver.
I was, however, in too much of a hurry.
I tried reading Treasure Island to Kevin when he was three, when he was five and when he was seven but he remained unimpressed, and I came to the reluctant conclusion that I had sired an idiot. When he was eight-going-on-nine, if I remember correctly, he saw the Walt Disney production of the book and loved it. I decided to try again. And not only Kevin but his sister Patricia also sat enthralled through chapter after chapter as we went off to Treasure Island together.
It is important in reading aloud to anyone, and particularly to children, to choose only books you yourself have enjoyed immensely. There is a huge dross of books written, published, and sold for children on the premise that they are educational. These books deal with how a post office works or how trains get from one place to another or how the streets of a city are lighted. Nothing can be done about the miscreants who write such books, publish them or sell them, because this is a free country. But you can guard your children against them by refusing to read to them any book in which you are not deeply interested yourself. It is important to protect your children from these “educational” sorts of books for otherwise they will get the idea that reading is very dull.
I have never set a schedule for reading to my children. What usually happens is that I remember a book I enjoyed very much and I look it through again. If I still take delight in it, I call the children together and tell them that tonight I will read them a chapter of a new book. The time for reading is set for after dinner when they are in their pajamas—which spurs them into getting the dishes off the table and into the dishwasher with more than their usual efficiency. Then they sit on the floor or couch or chairs and I announce the title and the author and say firmly “Chapter One.” That’s important because children like a tidy beginning.
There are a few rules about listening. Toes may be examined and scratches on legs and hands also if this may be quietly contrived. Wiggling in moderation is in order. They can look at the pictures and comment on them after the chapter has been read. But playing with toy trucks or shooting Apaches who have managed to secret themselves behind the piano or flying imaginary spaceships to the farther side of Jupiter are not tolerated. The offender is warned and if he persists, is sent to bed.
In this manner, I have read to my three elder children (their ages by the way are now seventeen, fifteen and fourteen) such books as The Wind in the Willows, Journey to the Center of the Earth, the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (unexpurgated), The Crock of Gold, lots of poetry like “The Traveller” and “The Highwayman” and “Abu Ben Adam” and a host of other books including several of my own whose titles modesty forbids me to mention. These three children are too old to be read to now. But I have three younger children who are just approaching the right age. When they are too old, I fancy I can look forward to grandchildren, for my sons give promise of being men, and my daughters women.
There are only a few rules governing reading to children—all of them obvious. Match the book to the child’s age. Read only the books you yourself have enjoyed. Read only one chapter a night. In short, approach the matter as if you and the child were one. You will find, to your pleasure, that you are.
Sign up for Leonard's newsletter at:
http://bit.ly/LeonardNews and never miss one of his columns.
To read older columns, click here.
