According to Kids and Family Reading Report, a new survey from children’s publisher Scholastic, 83% of children aged between six and 17 said that they “loved” or “liked” being read to at bedtime. The report also reveals that although only 37% of six- to eight-year-olds are read to, falling to one in five for children aged 9-11, 31% of the children whose parents no longer read aloud to them wanted them to carry on.
I stopped reading to our children about 15 years ago, by which time our son and daughter were around 12 and 10 respectively. But for the whole of their lives hitherto, originally alternating each night between bath and reading duties, my wife and I trudged through the gamut of bedtime stories, from the classics to some of the worst books I’ve ever come across.
To be honest, as new parents we started reading because we thought that was what we should do. From my own early childhood I can only remember my own father reading the London Evening Standard’s Billy the Bee and Modesty Blaise comic strips to me, so maybe I had a mission to overcompensate. Either way, after we got beyond the bedtime song stage, we entered in earnest on our regime of nightly reading. This started, bizarrely enough, after our son, aged about two, insisted each night on being shown the visitors’ guide to Whipsnade Zoo, where we’d recently spent a day that memorably featured him being terrified into inconsolable screams by the grunt of an Indian rhino, post-wee.
This was, perhaps, a strange gateway to literacy, but thereafter the demand was as much from him as from our sense of parental duty. Sometimes, to be sure, things got out of hand. There was a pop-up book about a white mouse called Maisy he loved so much that he pleaded, one night, to be allowed to have it with him in his cot. By the next morning, inevitably, the book was torn to pieces, an early lesson in how we’re fated to kill the thing we love.
His sister, 20 months younger, was soon along for the ride too. Mostly at this stage we still inhabited the realm of picture books. This was the way I discovered the oeuvre of truly great artists and illustrators such as Shirley Hughes and Tony Ross, who’d emerged, unbeknown to me, since my own childhood.
Thus the bedtime sessions became a joy for all of us. Though naturally there were some complete stinkers in the ever growing mix. This wasn’t a problem if we’d borrowed the book from the library –after a week, with luck, you’d never have to see the bloody thing ever again – but other books arrived as gifts, presumably to be treasured forever. Hence several failed attempts to throw away a thin volume about a challenged pig called Pog, whose adventures consisted of him hiding behind his hands to become invisible or standing in a hole. Each time the wails of dismay forced me to repent and retrieve the book from the bin. Our daughter thought this was hilariously funny; although in retrospect I think she found my loathing for the book even funnier: that’s how the bonds of family life and love, in all their mesmeric contrariness, are created.
Over the coming years we got through the lot, with one or two omissions. My wife, having once worked for British Rail, wouldn’t tolerate Thomas the Tank Engine because of its technological obscurantism and reinforcement of the patriarchy. I simply can’t stand Enid Blyton, and neither of us rated Roald Dahl, though we caved in and read him to our children because mostly we were catholic in our collective taste: so we did Paddington, George MacDonald, all of Narnia except for The Last Battle (I read ahead and drew the line at CS Lewis’s “they’ve all been dead the whole time” cop-out at the end). And we loved and reread forgotten classics from my wife’s childhood library, like Enid Bagnold’s Alice and Thomas and Jane.
If this all sounds rather precious, at the same time we had no compunction at recruiting the telly as a friendly nanny, poisoning our children’s minds from an early age with breathtakingly violent Bugs Bunny cartoons on top of hours and hours of utter trash. But the books, crucially, were the ritual. After over a decade, by which time our children were also hooked on computer games, we reached the climax when I took a year to read them the whole of The Lord of the Rings.
I’d never previously read the thing myself, and couldn’t be bothered to read ahead, so often had do some real-time editing to skip the lengthier verse genealogies. I also, to amuse myself more than our children, adopted different accents for each of the races of Middle Earth: so the hobbits were Mummerset, the elves Welsh, the dwarves Birmingham, while the orcs spoke in thick Afrikaans through my own utterly childish giggling. Even so, when Gandalf gets scoffed by the Balrog, our son, then 10, burst into tears.
After that, we moved on to TH White’s Arthurian books, but halfway through the second volume it all sort of just petered out. By now they were reading Harry Potter themselves, and also entering an age suited to solitary vice. Remember, 300 years ago – the blink of an eye in the history of human literacy – decent people were horrified by the emergence of The Novel, written to be read, not aloud, but in your head alongside all that other uncontrollable, unknowable, internal filth.
And I’ve no idea whether those 10 years reading aloud did our children good or ill, as neither of us were rigorous enough to use our son or daughter as an unread-to control. But I do know that both of them, now in their mid-20s, fall about laughing whenever they do a South African accent.
