Keeping reading alive: what can families do?

Reading is a communal activity, and children become readers with the help of the people who care for them.

Mem Fox, Reading Magic

Like many parents, I made reading to my children a priority. When they were small we read and reread endless picture books, some of which I remembered from my own childhood - like, Mog the Forgetful Cat¹ - and many published in their childhoods - like Charlie & Lola - and others, such as Julia Donaldson’s oeuvre that came out somewhere in between.

When my eldest went to school she brought home the Biff & Chip books which she was supposed to read to me. I knew nothing then about phonics or the science of reading and neither did her teachers. She struggled to master decoding and found the process of trying to read aloud almost as frustrating as I did. On one shameful occasion, after she failed to read ‘the’ for about the twelfth time, I snapped. “It’s thuh! It was thuh last time and the time before, and,” skimming through the book, “There are about ten more times. It will always be thuh!” Cue tears. I realise this does not reflect well on me.

I should, of course, have been more empathetic, particularly as I too struggled as a youngster. When I was about six or seven, my teacher told my parents that I would probably never learn to read. Apparently, the suspicion was that I might be ‘mentally subnormal.’ My mother wasn’t having any of that. Although she had no experience of teaching reading, she took me out of school, borrowed a set of the Janet and John reading scheme and set about teaching me to read.² We spent several hours a day ploughing through the mind numbingly tedious ‘adventures’ of the flaxen-haired tykes. God, howI hated them.

Janet and bloody John!

Some weeks later she took me back into school and told my startled teacher that I could now read.

Although I could read, I didn’t. Reading was just too much effort. But I loved being read to. My mum started reading Enid Blyton books as bedtime stories. She was a terrible reader. She’d get a few pages into a chapter and then just trail off. She’d just go silent for ages while I squirmed, desperate to find out what happened next. This would happen every night. Eventually, I got so frustrated I grabbed the book off her and read the damn thing myself!

It was only as an adult, reading to my own children, that I realised her cunning trick. It worked though; I quickly became a fluent reader and tore through the Five FInd-Outers and the Famous Five before graduating to CS Lewis, Tolkien and, under my father’s influence, I began devouring the works of Asimov, Heinlein and other classic sci-fi.

I have no idea why I struggled to learn to read and wasn’t really aware of any of this until many years later. Whatever the reason, clearly there was no cognitive or neurological reason for my difficulties. Or if there was, the combination of Janet and John and my mother’s steely determination somehow seemed to clear it up. Likewise, I have no idea why both my daughters struggled when they started school. (It may not be a coincidence that none of us were taught using the system now mandated in England: systematic synthetic phonics.³)

To return to my experience of reading to my daughters, I made a point of reading them all my favourites as well as new classics. Every evening it was my duty and privilege to introduce them to Wonderland, the 100 Acres Wood, Narnia, Middle Earth, Hogwarts and Lyra’s Oxford. I also read them books which had been too gendered for me to be interested in as a boy: Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Heidi, Mary Poppins, The Secret Garden and The Railway Children. One of their particular favourites - and one of mine - was the adventures of Tintin, the boy reporter. We’d all crowd together on an arm chair to follow the narrative while I put on my best Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus voices.