The Importance of Encouraging Children to Read

From the time our children were tiny, bedtimes went like this: Story time, cuddle time and prayer time, and then we would tuck them in.  I can’t remember exactly at what point we were no longer required to read “Nighty-Night” and “Goodnight Moon” to them, suddenly they were reading chapter books and embarked on their own journey of discovery into the world of reading.

Now, their night time ritual of reading until the light goes out has overflowed to the waking hours.

“In the Silence of the morning, as pages turn, adventures play about in their young heads, as I listen to their adventure filled silences peppered with occasional giggles, I too am drawn to my own pages at dawn to discover my own adventures therein.” – Melony Teague.

In this current world we live in, the demise of the ability to concentrate longer than ten minutes worries me. The stats are all there, we are told that people read about three minutes or a few lines of a blog and then move on. Their attention is being pulled in so many different directions and the attention span of the average person in our harried lives is getting shorter and shorter.

But when I hear the pages turn quietly in the morning light, I hear the sounds of reading coming from my children’s bedrooms, I smile. They are in another world that the web cannot compare to. The world of imagination where their minds conjure up images to match the words on the page. They travel to distant lands, fight the “bad guys” and where “good guys” always win in the end. For my daughter, there are puppies and mysteries to solve as she accompanies Nancy Drew on her escapades.

I am so grateful for their love of reading. There is a wealth of knowledge and experience tied up in the bindings of a book, or within the screen of a kindle. Some say the art of publishing is dying. I disagree, as long as there are families who appreciate a good adventure, romance, novel, non-fiction book, biography,  and the list goes on, there will be room for more pages to be turned. As long as there are parents who encourage reading, the life of the book, fiction or not, is preserved for the future. When a child falls in love with the art of reading, oh the possibilities!

Why do I say this? Simply because I believe that the readers of today, are the authors of tomorrow.