When we moved into our house, my mother-in-law and father-in-law drove their truck over and delivered boxes of old toys to us. They were tired of my WH’s toys cluttering up their life. It was time for the toys to become part of our cluttered life. For a couple of weeks, we’d paw through the boxes whenever we had the time. We’d laugh at the headless GI Joes and the Han Solo heads, wondering why on earth a bunch of toy figures missing arms, legs, torsos, and other body parts were all thrown in a plastic bag without any rhyme or reason. My in-laws (who are truly wonderful people) had saved Fisher-Price construction play sets and various other toys. When I was young, my father was in the military and we moved around a lot. Many of my childhood toys were who knows where, but through all the moves, my parents insisted on keeping my Dr. Seuss books and I insisted on keeping my Trixie Belden books. So I dug through my WH’ s boxes searching for all the books his parents must have kept for him. I found a couple of Disney books, a couple of Choose Your Own Adventure books, and some others, but nothing like my stash of treasured books that no matter where we went always came with me. And it dawned on me. Not everyone saved his or her childhood books.
When we moved from place to place, there were always books with new characters to read. Those were a constant for me. When I was pregnant with my first child, I dreamt of reading her the stories that fascinated me as a child. Lo and behold, I discovered my child had her own ideas of what fascinated her as far as stories (which is how it should be). While I was into romance novels, mysteries, and biographies, Kath has discovered her own favorite genres and authors. (Whatever you do, never get Kath started on John Green who is her very favorite author, and she will talk about how wonderful he and Hank are.) For a while, though, I was worried. Kath didn’t start reading on her own until she was six. Oh, I read to her. We’d go to the library. She’d pick out twenty books and I’d have to plop down and read until I was hoarse. She loved books. She just wasn’t reading on her own. Her kindergarten teacher listened to my worries and patted my hand. She was sweet as can be and assured me there wasn’t anything wrong with my daughter. We each develop at our own pace, and when reading clicked with her, her reading comprehension would zoom. The teacher was right.
Chunk, my youngest son, is the opposite. He taught himself to read when he was two and has been reading everything in sight since then. At preschool, I had a parent come to me and ask me, “How did I do it?” I assured her that I didn’t do anything other than read to him, but I added something that I thought was much more important. I don’t care what age my children start reading. I care and want them to continue reading all their lives. It’s more important to me that they don’t just read for one day. I want to encourage them to keep reading, keep exploring, keep finding new stories.
If you have children, how do you foster a love of books for them? If you don’t have children and you love to read, then who started you on your path of reading? Let me know.