This week the Book Trust has released research to launch its Time to Read campaign, showing that the frequency with which parents read to their children begins to tail off sharply at around the age of seven. While 86% of parents read to their five-year-old every night or every other night, by the time that child turns 11, the number has slipped to 38%.
Once a child is able to read confidently alone, once they are too old to climb on a lap, shared reading can seem a bit of an anachronism. By this age, the framework that supports a bedtime book – the comfort of physical intimacy, and even the sense that responsibility for a bedtime routine still lies with a parent – has begun to wobble. Reading to children who might prefer to read to themselves can seem presumptuous.
My children are six and nearly nine, and for months I have listened out for protests from the older one when I’ve corralled them to bed for the nightly story. I worry that reading in this way will soon become a parental imposition. They haven’t come yet – still after the chapter has ended they plead for “one more inch”. But will I know when? And if children say they have outgrown the ritual, should parents listen, or try to find new ways to engage them?
Over the last year, our bedtime story has evolved: we’ve upgraded to chapter books; we take it in turns to choose; we lean on shoulders rather than sit on laps. Sometimes we share out the characters and voices. Detective books are valued for their reward of vigilance. We seize on clues, sift the evidence. To read and feel the children’s attention wrapped in each word, to hear their breathing slow and their fidgeting quiet, is to know that in those moments the three of us share the same world, and live in it wholeheartedly. And none of us knows how it will end.
So when is too old for a bedtime story? I asked the kids and they both cried “Never!”. That will change, of course. But maybe when the bedtime story dies, there will be anytime stories. Or maybe we will start a family book club.
