By Lisa M. Belisle, MD, MPH 
Originally published November 2007, Parent & Family 

Last weekend my 11-year-old handed me Sand Dollar Summer by Kimberly Jones, saying, “You have to read this, Mom. It’s about a girl who lives in Maine for the summer. It’s so good—it even made my teacher cry.” To Abby’s credit, I did enjoy the well-written hardcover. What I enjoyed even more, however, was that I had gotten a literary recommendation from my child. This sweet interaction had been years in the making: beginning the first time I propped Abby in my lap to read her a Sandra Boynton board book. 

Parenting is very much about ‘reaping as we sow.’ Even as we are reading our children board books, we are living for the future. We’re making daily decisions based on where we hope our children will be in five, fifteen...twenty years. Yet all of this future living can keep us from doing something equally essential: enjoying the present. As Daniel Gilbert points out in Stumbling on Happiness, kids have no such issues: 

One particularly idiotic question we like to ask children is this: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Small children look appropriately puzzled... If they answer at all, they generally come up with things like, “the candy guy,” or “a tree climber.” We chuckle, because the odds that the child will ever become the candy guy or a tree climber are vanishingly small, and they are vanishingly small because these are not the sorts of things that most children will want to be once they are old enough to ask idiotic questions themselves. But notice that while these are the wrong answers to our question, they are the right answer to another question, namely, “What do you want to be now” 

We need our kids to ask us “What do you want to be now.” We need to live in the now—not the later. Kids prompt us to do this: to give thanks for our holiday feasts and to capture the first snowflakes of the winter season on our tongues. And they let us experience the joy of reading over and over (and over) again. In doing so, our children enable us discover anew the valuable lessons that come from books, such as: 

• doing our part to make the world a more beautiful place (from Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney), 
• how fortunate we are to live in an ocean-bound state (from One Morning in Maine by Robert McCloskey), 
• understanding that we need not travel far to find riches in our lives (from The Treasure by Uri Shulevitz), and 
• how inexplicably appealing silly rhymes can be (from My Very First Mother Goose by Iona Opie). 

Then one day, after years of learning and relearning the lessons afforded by reading books to our children, our 11-year-old hands us a hardcover to page through on our own, saying “You have to read this, Mom.” And our lessons begin again. 

Reading not only allows us to review our now-oriented lessons, it also gives our children tools to help them progress toward their own laters. With regard to literacy, these tools include: 

• Narrative ability — telling stories by looking at pictures. 
• Letter knowledge — familiarity with the alphabet. 
• Vocabulary — learning names of things that are encountered in daily living. 
• Phonological awareness — discriminating between different sounds. 
• Print motivation — becoming stimulated to enjoy books and other written materials. 
• Print awareness — understanding how to care for and use books appropriately. 

By reading a book such as the aforementioned My Very First Mother Goose, for example, children learn how to tell stories (narrative ability) by looking at the colorful illustrations and develop phonological awareness by listening to the rhymes. Plus, they experience print motivation, as evidenced by the many times they ask us to read this charming classic. 

In Maine, we have an organization that recognizes the value of classics such as My Very First Mother Goose. This is the statewide literacy program Raising Readers. Created by the Libra Foundation in 2000, Raising Readers has given out one million books to children from birth to age five—My Very First Mother Goose is one of them—through hospitals and medical offices from Kittery to Fort Kent. (See Celebrating Reading: A Million Times Over, below.) Raising Readers has made certain that no Maine child will lack literacy skills for lack of a good book with which to practice. 

Whether reading a good book is better for our nows or our children’s laters is impossible to say. It doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is that we cherish the joy that we receive from reading with our children, because “the candy guy” stage passes all too soon. Then (if we are lucky) we will be at the Sand Dollar Summer stage, and reading-wise, we’re on our own… 

___________________

CELEBRATING READING: A MILLION TIMES OVER

One million books in seven years is a major accomplishment. So Raising Readers has decided to celebrate—and wants you to join them! Their free “Family Literacy Night” celebration will take place the evening of Friday, November 2, 2007, at the Children’s Museum in Portland. For more information, visit www.raisingreaders.org, or see the MaineHealth Learning Resource Centers’ Fall 2007 Schedule, available at www.mainehealth.org.