Studies overwhelmingly show that parents who read aloud to their children do them a valuable and lasting service. A parent who reads aloud with their kids enhances their vocabulary, stimulates their imagination, helps them perform better academically, fosters emotional closeness and increases their curiosity about the world itself. 

There are many benefits to the process of reading with your children.  Here are some that I have found important. 

Reading Aloud Fosters Emotional Closeness With Your Children

Our reading time is usually at the end of the day. After dinner and bath time, instead of turning on the TV or moving off to different areas of the house to plug in to various media sources, we gather on the couch close together as I read books. Sitting near one another and cuddling with blankets as I read to my kids, sometimes with a bowl of popcorn in their lap, is a tradition that we have found to be a bonding experience. 

As the kids have grown older, their nights are filled with sporting events, homework, or other activities, yet, even with my kids in their teen years, we usually set aside at least three nights a week to read together for thirty minutes or so. This might sound a tough to accomplish, but if you foster a love of reading and a love of reading together with good books, the results are almost impossible to not accomplish. As my kids grew, we graduated from picture books to classic stories and children’s tales, and then on to great biographies and popular research driven material and novels that absolutely captivated them and me. 

Reading Aloud Teaches Your Child About the Larger World

Just a short list of things my children and I have discovered together includes learning about life in American during the 1930’s and 1940’s though books on the great depression and World War II.  We have also learned about the research of Malcolm Gladwell and how we make decisions.  We learned together about the sport of horse racing. We learned about the factors involving the rise of Christianity in the years of the Roman empire. We laughed out loud regarding the exploits of a country veterinarian in England. We were enraptured in the storytelling of J.R.R. Tolkien and thought about our faith through C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape letters. We evaluated and reflected on the short stories of Tolstoy. 

In general, reading with your children allows them to access the larger world, but in the safety of your own home, with your guiding influence helping them to interpret and understand the larger picture of life, all through a Christian worldview, straight from you as the parent. You don’t have to be a theologian to make it happen either. You simply have to be able to read a good book out loud and be able to put the book on “pause” when you sense that there is an important issue to talk about.

Reading Aloud Increases Your Child’s Vocabulary

As you are reading aloud and you come across a word that your child doesn’t understand, you have two choices. You can simply continue reading and allow the context of the sentence and paragraph to help the child understand the word, or you can stop and define the word for them.  Each method is fine at times and each way helps the child grow in their understanding. As I mentioned earlier, we have a “pause” button where we put the book down and we talk about important issues raised by the book, or define a word that they don’t understand. You may be surprised to learn that reading aloud to your kids doesn’t just help them when they are little, but reading aloud even to your teenagers continues to increase their vocabulary and ability to interpret well what they hear from others.

Don’t be Afraid to Put Down a Bad Book

We have not finished all the books we started. Some books become uninteresting. Some books are more interesting to boys and some to girls. That’s ok. My girls have put up with a book that is more interesting to my son and my son has put up with the Little House on the Prairie series.  Whatever the case, do not feel badly if you need to stop reading one book and pick up another.  The main goal is to keep reading with your kids. The key is to keep reading together. Your kids will learn to love reading, love learning and love books if they see that reading is a priority for you. 

“Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books.  The organs of appreciation exist in them.” – C.S. Lewis “Lilies that Fester” in “The World’s Last Night and Other Essays.” 

Start Small and Work Your Way Up

I began reading cardboard picture books to my first daughter when she was less than a year old. She loved sitting on my lap and watching me turn the pages to see what picture came next, hearing my soothing voice as I read to her. We then graduated to larger picture books. Then came the books with a picture on every page but more text driven material. Then finally we graduated to books that did not have any pictures in them. By that time she had a few more siblings and we were reading two books each night, one for her and one for her younger brother and sister. Remember that if you get too far ahead of your child’s current learning level, they will become uninterested, which is not productive. You want to continue to captivate them and allow them to anticipate the time with you each night.

Get Into It!

If you are not excited about reading time with your kids, they never will be either. There are times as a dad that I come home from work exhausted, distracted or just plain tired. But even on most of those days, I try and spend fifteen to thirty minutes reading to my kids. It doesn’t hurt that over the years, reading with my kids has become a relaxing and enjoyable past-time for me too! It also helps if you get into character depending on the book. Change your voice for the different personalities in the book. If you can do a passable English accent, try it out. If you need to play an old woman in the book, raise your voice and make it crackly. The kids absolutely LOVE seeing and hearing their daddy get into the characters of the book. It becomes one of the most enjoyable times of the day for them.

A Little Time Each Day is OK

If you don’t have time for a full blown couch sitting book session each night, that is ok, even ten minutes while you are putting them to bed is great!  Lying next to them on their bed while you are reading a book to them can be an incredible time of bonding and learning.

Ok, I’m Convinced, But What Do I Read to Them?

As your children grow, so will their tastes in reading and as the parent you just have to stay one step ahead of them. You will find your own taste and interests together. If you don’t know where to begin, below is a list of just some of the books we have moved through in my family. Also remember, not all of these books reflect a distinctly Christian worldview. These reflect just some of our own choices as a family, but I was confident in my own ability to read through them with my children and help them understand where the author was coming from and evaluate it as they grew.  If you are unaware or unsure about whether to read a certain book to your kids, read it or skim it first and think it through. 

Toddlers and pre school

Illustrated Bible Storybooks

Picture Storybooks and fairytales

Dr. Suess Books

The Stories of Beatrix Potter

What Do You Do With an Idea? by Kobi Yamada

Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram

Younger Elementary

Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

Little House on the Prairie Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Book of Virtues by Bill Bennett

The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Book of Virtues by William Bennet

Aesops Fables

Older Elementary

The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling

All Creatures Great and Small by Alf Wright

Treasure Island Hans Christian Anderson

The Short Stories of Leo Tolstoy

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Toulane by Kate DiCamillo and Bagram Ibatoulline

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

Little Women by Luisa May Alcott

Jr High

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Singer Triology by Calvin Miller

Watership Down by Richard Adams

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

A Wrinkle in Time by Madelin L’Engle

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

High School

The Life and Narrative of an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

Any books by Malcolm Gladwell

Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

Unbroken by Laura Hilenbrand

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

Seabiscuit by Laura Hilenbrand (There is one section in one chapter about the prostitution industry in Mexico during the Great Depression which you should skip.) 

Where is God when it Hurts by Philip Yancey

Reading aloud to my children has literally been one of the greatest joys of my life. We have grown closer together, had many great conversations because of it, and learned to think about life and faith while reading together. Taking a little time each day can produce the same benefits for you. 

My father spent a considerable amount of time without a dad in his life. For a majority of his childhood, he was on his own since his mother needed to work full time to raise her two children. He went on to become a very successful business leader, husband and a remarkable father to my brother and I, despite not having a male presence in his life in his formative years.  He never put it into words, but as he raised me, I felt the power of an inner life decision he must have made during his childhood. I have tried to put words to his loving presence in my life with the following sentence: “For a child not to have a father is unacceptable.” He lived out that sentence as he raised me. Since I had a loving father around for literally everything I did, I felt as if I was a steward, called to carry the power of my father’s presence into the next generation. What was created in my father’s life through absence came to fruition in my life through presence.

My wife and I had three biological children together. Two girls and a boy. We were a happy family. We loved parenting. But since we starting having children early in our twenties, we began to consider the possibility that we would be empty nesters in our early forties. We thought about adoption.  We had always wanted to adopt but because I am in vocational ministry as a pastor, we thought it wasn’t financially feasible. Once we began to research adopting kids from the foster care system in California, we found out we were wrong. We could adopt without paying tens of thousands of dollars for it. Our hearts were for it, our checkbook seemed like it was plausible, so we began to pray about it. 

After some research and a dead end with our first agency regarding one type of adoption, we began to look into domestic adoption and settled on an agency we liked. We plowed through all the paperwork, and yes, there is a mountain of it. It’s about like buying a house, but then, there are human beings involved, so why shouldn’t there be a lot of paperwork? We were approved to begin “child searching” which is short hand for “looking through a book filled with the pictures and life stories of children made in the image of God who desperately need a family.” It is a gut wrenching process. One day, out of the blue, our agency called with news of two little girls that needed a home that week due to their original adoptive placement falling through. They would go back into the foster care system if another family did not step up and claim them. 

And that began our journey of enlarging our family through the world of adoption.  Within four days we were the guardians of two beautiful little girls, five and three years old. Two years later we adopted a little boy, two years old, also from the California foster care system. Now we have six children all together, three through biology and three through adoption.  To say that we have experienced ups and downs through this process would be real understatement. So many of us start out wanting to adopt because we want a happy family, or a happy larger family.  But that isn’t what adoption brings us. Adoption brings a chance to minister to children that have experienced such severe trauma that they were removed from their biological families forever by the state or governmental authorities. Think about that statement for a moment.

To be frank, if you were raised in an even semi-normal environment like I was, you have no clue how to deal with a child that has lived through trauma. A child born to parents in an environment of love and trust will react and respond completely differently than a child that has been born and raised in an environment of neglect and abuse. Our brain chemistry is wired and re-wired very early on and we are remarkably good learners as human beings. We need loving attachments and caregivers in our lives and when those aren’t present, we learn to do very protective things just to survive. 

That’s the paragraph where the reality of what adoption really is hits you. There is no way around it. Adoptive families reading that paragraph above know exactly what I am talking about. Whether you adopt a child internationally from an orphanage or domestically in the United States, adoptive children share some remarkable traits of having lived through war like trauma. They are different children. But they are also very remarkable, and resilient, and smart, and the living breathing presence of what God has done for us by calling us into his family through Jesus Christ through the miracle of adoption. We have been adopted into God’s family, even though we have experienced the trauma of sin all over our lives. God cleans us up and makes us right and brings us into his forever family. If I can spend my life living this principle out with the children that God has given me, then I will consider myself a very lucky man. Yes, there are trials. Yes, there are days of frustration. No, I don’t always understand why my adopted kids react the way they do, but they have become mine. They survived awful situations and have come into my family seeking love and affection. They are a part of a family. We are a family. 

The call to adoption changed my life and has allowed me to see parenting from a whole new perspective. As a pastor, I used to teach parenting classes before I adopted, so I wasn’t a slouch. But after adoption, my parenting looks a whole lot different than it used to. There is more grace in our family now. There is a better understanding of how our past affects our future. There is more communication in relationship. There is also more clinging to God, crying out for His wisdom and mercy upon us all. In short, my theological beliefs about grace and being God’s child are slowly catching up with my parenting, all because of adoption. We have good days and bad days, but we are all now very aware of our own weaknesses and dependence on God for every ounce of strength and patience and joy that He gives us. Adoption is not a word in my family but has become my family. I am what my children are. God’s plan is what I hope to dimly model to my children as they grow. 

When my biological children were growing up, I thought a lot about achievement and wholeness, about God centeredness, and about changing the world, the next generation, and about witness. While I am raising my adopted children, I am thinking more now about healing and reconciliation, about grace and forgiveness, still about God centeredness and wholeness, but mostly about adoption, what it means for them, and for me, and for all of us. I think about my dad as a eight year old boy walking alone to the local boys club after dinner. He went to play there until it closed at nine o’clock because his mom was working and he didn’t have a father.  And now I think about his new adopted grandchildren, who have survived through worse, and how they run to hug him when they see him. Jesus said in Revelation 21:5, “Behold, I am making all things new.”  Of course he is. Through adoption, we see the course of family history changed forever. God is changing us and bringing others into his forever family. What a wonderful story. 

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