By Laura Wheatman Hill
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Although I certainly read to my kids when they were little, once they began reading independently, I’d fallen out of the habit of reading aloud with them. Then, a tutoring client came to see me for the first time in a while. She’d been my main client during the COVID pandemic, when she was a sixth grader, and never enjoyed reading, despite being a good student. To get her to absorb literature, and inspired by how much my kids, 4 and 6 at the time, and I enjoyed our nightly read-alouds, I had read the entire Hunger Games series aloud. Now in 10th grade, she appeared with a YA book she’d been assigned and asked if we could spend our hour having me read aloud to her while she took notes. We paused to discuss as we went. This reminder of the effectiveness of reading aloud, even with older students, inspired me to figure out a way to reincorporate the practice with my own kids.
You’ve probably heard, like I have, that reading aloud to young children is the best way to promote early literacy. But what about the older kids? After all, we hear all the time about the A.I.-ification of education, the “decline by 9,” and the society-wide “literacy crisis.” I know that kids who can read to themselves often don’t want their parents tucking them in with a bedtime story, and surveys have found that many adults find reading to kids to be something of a chore. I’m here to tell you that you can, and should, find ways around these problems—even if you and your elementary-age child last sat and read together back in the toddler days.
Reading aloud to older students has many benefits supported by research. Remember a time when you thought a word was pronounced one way because you’d only read it, never heard it out loud? For kids who learned via the whole language method, who have dyslexia or other barriers to learning, or who don’t read at their level for any reason, hearing an adult read the words out loud correctly, with the flow of punctuation, can help them learn the proper way to understand the mechanics of language, which then increases comprehension.
Heather Clarke, an educational researcher and consultant at New York University, reads aloud to her two kids, ages 8 and 11, and has no plans to stop as they go into middle school. Besides the fact that it helps kids understand how language works as a whole, she told Slate in an interview, reading aloud and stopping to discuss as you go means “you can really get into deeper issues.” She said she reads about history with her older child and discusses why the events in history happened and how they relate to events today. Even listening to audiobooks, a related activity that requires less from a parent, isn’t as effective as reading aloud, because it doesn’t give you the opportunity to connect their life and world of today to the content, through pausing and reflecting as you go.
Implementing a successful reading-aloud routine might be challenging if you’ve fallen out of the practice in the years since your kids were little, but there are some commonalities among the parents who are able to keep up with reading aloud with kids once they leave elementary school. The best tool such parents reported using is choice—kids should choose, or at least have a say in, the reading material. As much as you might want to introduce your kids to your favorites, if they have no interest, the habit won’t stick.
“Just start with their special interest,” Clarke said, no matter the topic. “If they’re really into manga, read manga with them.” In our conversation, we went back and forth, listing topics our kids have been obsessed with, from video games to baseball to mythology to, in the case of my 8-year-old and to the dismay of New Yorker Clarke, rats. Even when her son’s teacher complained that her kid wanted to read only books about baseball, Clarke said she didn’t care—he was writing 10-page stories, all about baseball! That, to her, was a win.
Priscilla Bloom, a mom to an 11-year-old in Denver, said she never forces her kid to read anything in particular because “he’s going to get enough of that in school.” In the context of school assignments, she helps him make peace with working on material that he might not initially find interesting. But when it comes to picking reading material at home, she said, “sometimes I suggest things or introduce them, but ultimately he has final say on what we’re reading or just what he’s reading.” The parents I spoke to who have success with kids’ reading do not pooh-pooh graphic novels or certain subjects (unless they’re inappropriate). They let their kids take the lead.
Reading aloud can help your kid push the boundaries of what they’re currently able to read on their own. Shannon Brescher Shea, author of Growing Sustainable Together: Practical Resources for Raising Kind, Engaged, Resilient Children, and parent to a 9- and 11-year-old in the Washington suburbs, said reading aloud with her older kid “allowed us to read books that perhaps he wouldn’t be quite ready to read on his own thematically, and discuss them together.” Hard topics like war, interpersonal conflict, and relationships can be difficult for kids to interpret or analyze on their own, so having a discussion about potentially triggering topics within the scope of literature helps them learn about the world, increases their empathy, and encourages them to ask questions.
Shea also said, “If left to his own devices, my older kid would mainly read the same things over and over again, so reading together widens the scope of his reading.” Slowly connecting special interests to a wider breadth of subjects can allow kids to become more diverse in their reading. Shea mentions that reading Watership Down together when her son was 10 was a stretch at the time, but now it’s his favorite book.
Shea’s younger child is dyslexic, so, she said, “me reading to him opens up a lot of books he wouldn’t be able to read otherwise.” In this case, reading aloud engages kids in the story rather than their getting tangled up in the mechanics of reading. As a result, they can have deep discussions, build on current reading levels, and later have conversations with peers about the books they’re reading.
Including the whole family in reading aloud can be challenging but has big payoffs. Alexandra Rosas, of Milwaukee, has adult children who are out of college and still have a love of reading. She attributes this partially to the summer book clubs the family had in the kids’ late teens, while everyone was home during the pandemic. She said, “We shared a monthly book and read aloud our favorite parts,” which “resulted in me learning, through what they had chosen and what had struck them, who they were and where they were in their lives at that moment.” Teens, especially, can often be a closed book when it comes to their inner emotional lives, and having their siblings and parents also share passages and thoughts about books can facilitate whole-family communication.
Many parents of kids in later elementary and middle school spoke about the difficulty of getting “back” into the routine of reading aloud once their kids were able to read to themselves, and once the kids got busier with increased activities and homework in higher grades. However, several mentioned that summer is the perfect time to reset this habit.
Even though it can seem as if it would be nice to read whole, long books, Clarke said that, especially when starting out with a reluctant reader, “reading doesn’t have to be a book.” She pointed to short stories or even nonfiction articles about high-interest-level topics. Since many kids love mythology, she suggested finding myths from your culture or ancestry. These short stories often have lessons that can open up a discussion.
Reading uninterrupted for a long time may seem to be virtuous, but Clarke cited the expression “Keep it simple, stupid.” As millennial and Xennial parents, we’re constantly worried about what we’re doing wrong—or “hyper-parenting,” as Clarke puts it. Instead, she said, reading for even 10 or 15 minutes is better than nothing.
Many parents find that kids are more engaged in reading when the parent is animated and “acting out” the stories, doing the voices, etc. While some kids will prefer a full production, as they get older, they might roll their eyes at your attempts at a British accent or a big, emotional line reading. Again, Clarke said, it’s OK to keep it simple and follow the kids’ lead. “It doesn’t have to be this huge thing, this huge effort,” she said. “There are lots of things to be anxious about, but reading with your kids at night shouldn’t be one of those things.”